Umbrella day
<p>In 1756, the London merchant and philanthropist Jonas Hanway began walking the streets of the capital holding an umbrella over his head, and was mocked for it. Cab drivers in particular resented him, since rain was good for their trade, and a respectable gentleman who could keep himself dry on foot was money out of their pockets. Hanway persisted for thirty years, and by the time he died in 1786 the umbrella had become an ordinary sight in London. Umbrella Day, observed each 10 February, salutes the object he helped rescue from ridicule, a device that began life not as protection from rain at all but as a portable piece of shade.</p>
<h2 id="a-word-that-means-shadow">A word that means shadow</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>The clue to the umbrella’s first purpose is in its name. “Umbrella” comes from the Latin <em>umbra</em>, meaning shade or shadow, and the diminutive <em>umbella</em>, a little sunshade. For most of its history the device was a parasol, raised against the fierce sun rather than the rain. Ancient Egypt, China, India, Assyria and Greece all used such canopies, and in many of them the right to have one held over you was strictly a matter of rank. In Egyptian and Mesopotamian carvings the parasol shades a king; the shadow it cast was understood almost as an extension of royal authority, a portable patch of cool reserved for the powerful.</p>
<p>It was in China that the sunshade learned to handle rain. Chinese makers waterproofed the canopy of oiled paper or silk with wax and lacquer, turning a shade into a shelter, and collapsible paper umbrellas of this kind are documented well over a thousand years ago. Along trade routes the object travelled west, but in much of Europe it remained, from the Renaissance until Hanway’s own day in the 1750s, an exotic and largely feminine accessory, which is exactly the prejudice Hanway ran into.</p>
<h2 id="the-men-who-made-it-modern">The men who made it modern</h2>
<p>Hanway popularised the umbrella socially; others made it work mechanically. For a long time the frames were heavy, built from whalebone or cane, and a wet umbrella was an unwieldy, sodden thing. The decisive engineering change came in 1852, when the English manufacturer Samuel Fox, of Stocksbridge near Sheffield, patented the “Paragon” frame using lightweight steel ribs with a U-shaped cross-section. Fox’s steel ribs were far stronger and lighter than whalebone, and the story that he developed them partly to find a use for surplus steel stock from corset-stay manufacture is part of umbrella folklore. Whatever the exact motive, the steel-ribbed umbrella is essentially the one still carried today.</p>
<p>After Hanway’s example took hold, the English so thoroughly adopted the umbrella that to carry a tightly furled black one became, for a time, a badge of the city gentleman, and “to carry a Hanway” was once a slang phrase for owning an umbrella at all.</p>
<p>The collapsible umbrella that fits in a bag arrived much later. The compact, telescopic folding umbrella as it is now known was developed in the twentieth century, with a German firm, Knirps, becoming so closely associated with the pocket-sized design in the 1920s and after that its name became a generic word for a folding umbrella in German. That innovation completed the object’s long journey from a ceremonial canopy requiring a servant to hold it, through the heavy walking-stick umbrella of the Victorian gentleman, to something that disappears into a coat pocket and is forgotten until needed. Each stage made the umbrella smaller, lighter and more personal, and each widened the circle of people who could simply own one.</p>
<h2 id="why-a-humble-object-earns-a-day">Why a humble object earns a day</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>An umbrella is the kind of thing nobody thinks about until the sky opens, and that is rather the point of marking it. It does real work: it keeps rain and snow off, and a parasol shading against the sun blocks ultraviolet light, the same radiation that ages and damages skin, which is why the device’s oldest function, sun protection, has quietly become medically respectable again.</p>
<p>There is also something worth noticing in its democratic history. For most of recorded time, shade-on-demand was a privilege of pharaohs and emperors, carried by servants over the heads of rulers. The cheap nylon umbrella bought at a train station for the price of a sandwich is the same idea, the personal patch of shelter, made available to absolutely everyone. An object that once signified that you were a king now signifies only that you checked the forecast.</p>
<p>The umbrella’s persistence is also a small lesson in good design. It has been refined for thousands of years, yet its fundamental form, a fabric canopy stretched over hinged ribs around a central shaft, has barely changed since Samuel Fox’s day. Countless inventors have tried to improve on it, with inverted designs, windproof double canopies, handle-mounted lights and clever drip-catching sleeves, and a few of these have found a niche. But the basic article remains so close to optimal for its job that most “innovations” are tweaks rather than replacements. Few everyday objects can claim to have been essentially solved more than a century and a half ago and to still be in daily, near-universal use in almost exactly that form.</p>
<h2 id="self-expression-on-a-grey-day">Self-expression on a grey day</h2>
<p>Once the umbrella was no longer a marker of status, it became a canvas. A black city umbrella says one thing; a clear domed one, a child’s umbrella printed with frogs, or a vast striped golf umbrella says quite another. Because it is held up and seen, the umbrella is one of the few weatherproof items people choose partly for how it looks to others, a small act of cheerfulness raised against a flat grey sky.</p>
<p>Popular culture has reinforced the umbrella’s place in the imagination so thoroughly that certain images are now inseparable from it. Gene Kelly swinging from a lamp-post in <em>Singin’ in the Rain</em> in 1952 made the umbrella a prop of pure joy; the nanny Mary Poppins descends from the clouds beneath a parrot-handled one; and the bowler-and-umbrella silhouette of the English gentleman became a national caricature exported worldwide. The umbrella has even served as a quiet emblem of resistance and identity, most visibly in Hong Kong in 2014, when protesters using umbrellas to shield themselves from pepper spray gave their movement its enduring name. An object invented to manage weather has proved remarkably willing to carry meaning.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>Umbrella Day is, fittingly, an unhurried sort of observance. People mark it by carrying a favourite umbrella whatever the forecast says, by photographing colourful ones, or simply by feeling smug about a dry coat on a wet commute. It is also a practical prompt: a good day to check the spokes still work, to retire the broken one collapsing in the hall cupboard, and to tuck a spare somewhere for the next person caught out. As a winter date in the northern hemisphere, 10 February also tends to fall in genuinely umbrella-worthy weather, which gives the day a useful realism that some calendar observances lack, sitting in the same gentle, faintly absurd company as occasions like <a href="/specialdate/us-national-spumoni-day/">Spumoni Day</a> and <a href="/specialdate/us-national-pots-de-creme-day/">Pots de Crème Day</a>. There is a small irony in the timing, too: an object whose name means “shade” gets its day in the depths of winter, when shade is the last thing anyone needs and the canopy is held overhead for an entirely different reason than the one it was first invented for.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The word “umbrella” comes from the Latin <em>umbra</em>, “shadow”, because the device was invented as a sunshade, not a rain shield.</li>
<li>Jonas Hanway endured roughly three decades of mockery, including hostility from cab drivers whose trade depended on rain, before the umbrella became respectable in London.</li>
<li>The lightweight steel-ribbed frame still used today was patented by Samuel Fox in 1852; folklore links his steel ribs to surplus stock from corset-stay manufacture.</li>
<li>In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, having a parasol held over you was a royal privilege, the carried shadow standing in for the ruler’s authority.</li>
<li>The superstition that opening an umbrella indoors brings bad luck is often traced to Victorian London, where the heavy spring-loaded mechanisms of early steel umbrellas could genuinely injure someone or smash things in a cramped room.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>It is a strange fate for an object: invented to flatter kings, mocked when an ordinary man tried to use it, then engineered into something so cheap and common that we lose three a year without noticing. The umbrella’s real story is the slow democratisation of comfort, the way a privilege carried by servants over a pharaoh’s head ended up forgotten on the back of a train. Hanway was jeered for the radical notion that a person of no particular importance might simply decline to get wet; that the idea now seems too obvious to argue about is, in its small way, a measure of how far the small comforts of life have spread. There is a quiet lesson in carrying one on 10 February, which is that the things we take most completely for granted are usually the ones somebody once had to be brave to use.</p>
Advertisement
Related Content
Advertisement
