The paper is a retrospective analysis of trends in quantitative empirical and theoretical studies of urban surface runoff from the mid-19th century to the early 90s of the 20th century, when the largest Soviet scientific school for such studies in the city of Kharkov was dissolved. As shown in the paper, the calculation methods for estimating peak discharges of urban surface runoff can be traced back to a pioneering work by T.J. Mulvaney (1850), which laid the foundation for the “rational method”. Later this method was developed in the works by E.Kuichling (1889) and D.E.Lloyd-Davies (1906
