1889-07-24: ​​~TOUR STOPS~---images---audio---transcript---notes---links---site navigation
​This is a stop in TWO Tours.
This page is a stop in:  The stop BEFORE this is: The stop AFTER this is:
This page is a stop in:  The stop BEFORE this is:
  • (There is none.  This is the first stop in the tour.)
The stop AFTER this is:
TOP OF PAGE
PREVIOUS PAGE               NEXT PAGE
BOTTOM OF PAGE
1889-07-24: ​​tour stops---~IMAGES~---audio---transcript---notes---links---site navigation
Picture 
Scroll down for the audio reading
and for the transcript.
TOP OF PAGE
PREVIOUS PAGE               NEXT PAGE
BOTTOM OF PAGE
1889-07-24: tour stops---images---~AUDIO~---transcript---notes---links---site navigation
TOP OF PAGE
PREVIOUS PAGE               NEXT PAGE
BOTTOM OF PAGE
1889-07-24: ​​tour stops---images---audio---~TRANSCRIPT~---notes---links---site navigation
1,742,279 TONS OF WATER FELL IN TWO HOURS.

CANTON REPOSITORY

The heaviest rainfall that has visited Canton for many years fell Thursday evening between the hours of 6:45 and 9 P.M., and for two hours and a quarter the rain came down in heavy sheets of water.  The volume of the fall, according to Observer Stokey, from 6:45 to 8:45 P.M. was three and a half inches, the heaviest continuous fall since the establishment of the meteorological station here and no doubt the heaviest that has visited Canton in a quarter of a century or more.  The next heaviest fall of late was that of last Friday, when 1.87 inches and Sunday when 1.48 inches fell.  Four years ago next August there was a fall that approximated two inches, while during a freshet in the Spring of 1883, when the Ohio River valley suffered great disaster and destruction from the flood, the heaviest continual fall here was was about two and one half inches.  The time of the fall was much greater, however, than that of Thursday night, when an inch more water fell.  The statement that three and one-half inches of water fell means that the rain would cover the entire area inundated to a dept of three and a half inches.

Observer Stokey says 100th of an inch of rainfall makes 271.11 gallons per acre.  Hence the last night's fall was about 95,000 gallons, or 396 tons per acre.  The area of Canton is about 4,400 acres; hence about 417,509,000 gallons, or 1,742,279 tons of water fell in Canton last night in two hours.
TOP OF PAGE
PREVIOUS PAGE               NEXT PAGE
BOTTOM OF PAGE
1889-07-24: ​​​tour stops---images---audio---images---comment---transcript---~NOTES~---links---site navigation
Here's why I like this article, in four subsections:
​
  • 1. Arithmetic
  • 2. Childhood memories and more
  • 3. Flooding
  • 4. The newspaper

Subsection 1. Arithmetic (If this bores you, feel free to scroll down to the next section, about childhood memories.)
Observer Stokey says 100th of an inch of rainfall makes 271.11 gallons per acre.  Hence the last night's fall was about 95,000 gallons, or 396 tons per acre.

A.
How many 100ths of an inch fell?
3.5 inches of rain fell overall.  (That's from elsewhere in the article.)
There are one hundred 100ths in an inch.
3.5 inches of rain TIMES 100 EQUALS 350 hundredths of an inch of rain.
​
B.
How many gallons of rain fell per acre?
350 100ths of an inch fell.  That is from equation A.
One 100th of an inch makes 271.11 gallons per acre.
350 hundredths of an inch TIMES 271.11 gallons per acre EQUALS 94,888.5 gallons per acre for 3.5 inches.
That's close enough to Papa Charles's 95,000 gallons per acre.

C.
How many pounds did the water weigh per acre?
We got 95,000 gallons per acre in equation B.
Google says a gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds.
95,000 gallons per acre TIMES 8.34 pounds per gallon EQUALS 792,300 pounds per acre.

D.
How many tons did the water weigh per acre?
One ton EQUALS 2,000 pounds.
We got 792,300 pounds per acre in equation C.
Now we convert it from pounds per acre to tons per acre.
792,300 pounds per acre DIVIDED BY 2,000 pounds per ton EQUALS 396.15 tons per acre.
That's close enough to Papa Charles's 396 tons per acre.

E.
What was the total gallons of water that fell in the Canton area?
Papa Charles said:
The area of Canton is about 4,400 acres; hence about 417,509,000 gallons, or 1,742,279 tons of water fell in Canton last night in two hours.
We use the 95,000 gallons per acre that we got in the equation B.
4,400 acres TIMES 95,000 gallons per acre EQUALS 418,000,000 gallons.
That's reasonably close to Papa Charles's 417,509,000 gallons, but there was an alternate answer to equation B:
4,400 acres TIMES 94,888.5 gallons EQUALS 417,509,400 gallons.
So Papa Charles was using the more correct 94,888.5 gallons for his calculation.

F.
How much was the total weight in pounds of the water that fell in the Canton area?
We got the total number of gallons in equation E: 417,509,000.  (More or less.)
For equation C, we learned from Google that water weighs 8.34 pounds per gallon.
417,509,000 gallons TIMES 8.34 pounds per gallon EQUALS 3,482,025,060 pounds.

G.
How much was the total weight in tons of the water that fell in the Canton area?
In equation F we got that the total weight in pounds was 3,482,025,060.
For equation D, we noted that one ton EQUALS 2,000 pounds.
Now we convert the pounds to tons.
3,482,025,060 pounds DIVIDED BY 2,000 pounds per ton EQUALS 1,741,012.53 tons.
That's close enough to Papa Charles's 1,742,279 tons of water.


Subsection 2. Childhood memories and more
As I was doing the arithmetic, I was reminded of a 1903 letter from Will, #1 of the Five Stokey Siblings, to Alma, the #2 sibling: ​Will was writing while travelling on a train, and he said to Alma:
If this is badly written don’t be surprised as we are going 73 miles an hour.  I just timed it by the click of the rails.  The rule is that the number of rails passed over in 20 5/11 seconds is the number of miles per hour.  Rails are 30 feet long so you can prove that if you feel so inclined.  This road has 30 telegraph poles to the mile.  The rule for telegraph poles is: The number of poles passed in two minutes is the number of miles per hour.

At the bottom of that letter there were Alma's handwritten calculations.  It looks as though Will and Alma were used to working through math problems with their father.  Equations like A, B, C, D, E, F, and G in the section above would have been happy childhood memories.

And then I read a 1936 letter from from Will's younger son Roger to Alma: The heat is doubly felt because of the lack of rain.  To the best of my knowledge we have not had a total of 1/5 of an inch of rain.  Merely an occasional 1/100 of an inch.
...and speculated that, for the Five Stokey Siblings, the weather wasn't merely a polite conversational subject, but something that also took them back to their childhood.

And then I read a couple of other article that mentioned Papa Charles's enjoyment of arithmetic:
Subsection 3. Flooding
I googled to see if there was anything about flooding in Ohio in 1889, and all Google wanted to talk about was the Johnstown Flood, which had happened just a couple of months before, on May 31, 1889.  Johnstown is about 150 miles east of Canton, so people may have been feeling skittish about flooding.


Subsection 4. The Newspaper
This article was originally published in The Canton Repository.  The Summit County Beacon in Akron picked it up from The Repository.  Akron is about 25 miles from Canton.  Newspapers.com has The Summit County Beacon but not The Repository.  Therefore, as previously noted, I have included this item in the Tour about The Canton Repository:
TOP OF PAGE
PREVIOUS PAGE               NEXT PAGE
BOTTOM OF PAGE
1889-07-24: ​​tour stops---images---audio---transcript---notes---~LINKS~---site navigation
DOCUMENT LISTS FOR PEOPLE:​
OTHER DOCUMENT LISTS:​
​OTHER RELATED DOCUMENTS/PAGES:
TOP OF PAGE
PREVIOUS PAGE               NEXT PAGE
BOTTOM OF PAGE
1889-07-24: ​​tour stops---images---audio---transcript---notes---links---~SITE NAVIGATION~
WHERE AM I?
​WHAT ARE THE PREVIOUS PAGE AND THE NEXT PAGE?
TOP OF PAGE
PREVIOUS PAGE               NEXT PAGE
BOTTOM OF PAGE