"Every cloud has a silver lining"

It is often said that every cloud has a silver lining, regardless of the fact that you can never see one, not even up close in an airplane. Science and Googles have now been chartulated to investigate this claim.



As you can see, in the mid to late 1600's there were many clouds (represented here by the blue line), which is why this period of history was called The Dark Ages, as in, "It's been dark for ages".

During this period a small proportion of clouds had linings (represented by the red line). Little is now known about these linings except that they were probably quite primitive in construction, due to widespread ignorance.

Happily from 1675-1720 there were far fewer clouds, and things brightened up a bit. But then came the Industrious Resolution, with millions of factories pumping out Steam and Pollutions from giant Smokestacks and filling the skies with clouds again.

This situation reached a peak around 1890, but by 1900 cloud production had already begun to decline. This was due to an improvement in the quality of cloud linings, which as can be seen rose steadily from 1800 onwards.

At this stage we are now ready to observe the number of silver linings (represented by the green line) throughout the entire period of history covered by this chart. And shockingly, as you can see, there have been none. Not a single one!

In conclusion then: no, not every cloud has a silver lining, and in fact it turns out that none of them do. Which makes perfect sense if you think about it because of how heavy silver is, and I have to say, I never really believed this one to start with.