The Times: The Great London Snowstorm (1ft in 7 hours)

[Weather-history]

According to Bonacina, 1ft of snow fell in 7 hours from a low that tracked across the very far south of England on the 6th of January 1886. Can you imagine the chaos in London, if this was to happen tomorrow?

The first few days of 1886 were not especially cold, so this wet snowstorm caught everyone on the hop. Unlike today, meterologists of the time were not pulled over the coals when the forecast goes horribly wrong

Here's from the 7th of January 1886 edition of the Times of this amazing snow event.

[cheeky_monkey]

i like the letter from the engineer stating all telephone and telegraph cables should be laid underground....something that has been ongoing for the last 20years now...soon over head cables will be a thing of the past..well in a cpl of decades...if only we had listened to him!

[Stratos Ferric]

i like the letter from the engineer stating all telephone and telegraph cables should be laid underground....something that has been ongoing for the last 20years now...soon over head cables will be a thing of the past..well in a cpl of decades...if only we had listened to him!

Not all overhead cables will be I'm afraid. In rural areas it doesn't make economic sense. I don't know what the ratios are now, but when I used to work in policy at BT years ago, it was something like 100 times more expensive to bury a cable than to run an aerial link.

The interesting thing about the Times' reports is the sparsity of infornation available back then. Where nowadays everyone has a broadband link and a mobile phone, so the world is dense with potential reportage real time, back then there were very few people putting pen to paper and feedback was painfully slow. Hence, yesterday's slight event gains a perspective that is larger than events merited, whilst events back in the 1880s will, by comparison, have been underemphasised.

[PersianPaladin]

1 foot? Is that all?

[0000]

fascinating thanks

[Weather-history]

Can you imagine the chaos in London, if this was to happen tomorrow?

Well I was just over a year out!

[❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️]

Well I was just over a year out!

:lol: