Littell's Living Age/Volume 127/Issue 1639/Miscellany

The night of July 7-8, 1875, will be long remembered in Switzerland for the thunder-storms, several of them of almost unexampled severity, which occurred in Val de Travers, Liestal, Lucerne, Argovie, Zurich, and St. Gall (Rapperswyl), Langenthal, Grisons, Valais, Fribourg, and Geneva. Of these, the thunderstorm which broke over Geneva was unprecedentedly severe and disastrous. A detailed account of the phenomenon has been sent us under the title "L'Orage du 7 au 8 Juillet, 1875. Extrait du Journal de Genève, du 9 au 12 Juillet." It appears to have originated to westward in the department of Ain, and took an easterly course up the valley of the Rhone to Geneva, on reaching which it spread over a wider area, and thence directed its course over Savoy. As midnight came on, though the heat was suffocating and not a breath of wind stirred below on the streets, light objects on the roofs of the houses began to be whirled about and carried off as by a tempest of wind. At the same time a dull rumbling sound, resembling neither that of wind nor that of thunder, announced the approach of the thunderstorm, and at twelve midnight exactly it burst over Geneva in all its fury. An avalanche of enormous hailstones with no trace of rain was precipitated from the sky, and shot against opposing objects by a tempest of wind from the south-west. In a moment the street lamps were extinguished, and in a brief interval incredible damage was inflicted, the glass and tiles of houses smashed to powder, trees stripped of their bark on the side facing the west, and crops of every sort were in many places all but destroyed. The smallest of the hailstones were the size of hazel-nuts, many were as large as walnuts and chestnuts, and some even as large as a hen's egg. Some of the hailstones measured four inches in diameter, and six hours after they fell weighed upwards of 300 grammes. For the most part the hailstones were of a flattish or lenticular form, with a central nucleus of 0·16 to 0·40 inch diameter, enveloped in several concentric layers of ice, generally from six to eight, alternately transparent and opaque. An interesting map accompanies the description, showing the districts where the storm was felt as well as the degree of its intensity in each locality. The electrical phenomena were very remarkable; the flashes of lightning succeeded each with so great rapidity from midnight till a few minutes after 1 o'clock in the morning, that a mean of from two to three were counted each second, or from 8,000 to 10,000 per hour. Electrical phosphorescence was remarkably intense before and during the hail. The ground, animals, prominent objects, as well as the hailstones, were strongly phosphorescent. Immediately after the hail, ozone was greatly developed, the smell being so pronounced as to be compared by nearly all observers to garlic. The incessant electrical discharges passed from cloud to cloud over a central point from which the hail fell, but thunder was very rarely heard.

Nature.