Like many things in the natural world, thunder had a mythological and spiritual significance for some early peoples, who endowed their gods with the power of many natural forces. The Greeks attributed the might of storms to Zeus, the king of the gods. When angry, he would smite the world below with his thunderbolts. In early Scandinavian mythology, the god Thor had some of the same attributes, being the god of the sky and controller of storms, lightning, rain and thunder. Farmers prayed to Thor for good harvests and fine weather.
Early Theories
Early man probably considered lightning to be the ultimate weapon or a weapon of their gods. The Navajo Native Americans believed the Thunderbird, a mythical bird, flapped its wings and created the sound of thunder and the source of lightning was reflected sunlight from its eyes. It was the Norse god Thor, the Greek god Zeus, and the Roman god Jupiter who wielded the mighty bolt of lightning to keep man in his place. There continues today a phrase about lightning coming from a supernatural or divine power. The phrase goes something like: “Let lightning strike me if I’m ______.” The word ‘bolt’, often used to describe lightning, has no meaning in meteorology and is an inappropriately used term.
Some of the earliest theories about thunder originated during the Greek and Roman Empires and from the Viking (Scandinavian) people. Beliefs about thunder included that it occurred before lightning, it was a burning wind, it was caused by the collision of clouds, the sound was produced by resonance between high and low clouds, and by high clouds descending and colliding onto low clouds. By the mid-19th century, the accepted theory was the vacuum theory, whereby lightning produced a vacuum along its path (channel), and thunder was due to the subsequent motion of air rushing into the vacuum. The second half of the 19th century saw the steam explosion theory, created when water along the lightning channel was heated and exploded by lightning’s heat. Another theory was the chemical explosion theory that suggested gaseous materials were created by lightning and then exploded.
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