Manchester, England, has the reputation of being one of the rainiest places in a rainy country. This is an injustice: its average annual rainfall of 32.3 ins (819mm) is only a shade more than Venice, with 30.3 ins (770mm) and less than Rome, with 36.0ins (915mm)

Manchester will never lose its rainy reputation judging from this anonymous poem from 1821:

Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, asked his shoemaker to modify the style of a Hessian boot. However it was not until Charles Goodyear invented vulcanised rubber in 1852 that wellies were actually made from rubber.

And despite being christened "wellingtons" after Wellesley, rubber boots were in use by Amazonian Indians before the Spanish and Portuguese christened South America. They collected the sap of latex producing trees and treated it with smoke to create various rubber items - including boots.

On June 10, 1752, Benjamin Franklin is believed to have narrowly missed electrocution while flying a kite with a key attached to it in a thunderstorm. His experiment demonstrated that lightning is a form of electricity and paved the way for Franklin's invention of the lightning rod.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 was partly caused by the drought of an unseasonably hot summer, and London had practically no rain for over a year. The wooden buildings in the city were tinder dry when the fire started on 2nd September, and thus spread easily, raging out of control for three days and three nights.

This list of weather records details some of the most extreme occurrences of weather phenomena for various categories. It is important to remember that each of these is understood to be the record for recent history, as these records may have been exceeded before modern weather instrumentation was invented.
Heat