The book that Russell based his flood theory (and his wacky creation ideas) was written by Isaac Vail. The book was published in 1912. Isaac Vail was a "catastrophist"
For your reading pleasure (downloads as a pdf):
Waters Above the Firmament: The Earth's Annular System
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_geology#Vapor.2Fwater_canopy :
Isaac Vail (1840–1912), a Quaker schoolteacher, in his 1912 work The Earth's Annular System, extrapolated from the nebular hypothesis what he called the annular system of earth history, with the earth being originally surrounded by rings resembling those of Saturn, or "canopies" of water vapor. Vail hypothesised that, one by one, these canopies collapsed on the Earth, resulting in fossils being buried in a "succession of stupendous cataclysms, separated by unknown periods of time". The Genesis flood was thought to have been caused by "the last remnant" of this vapor. Although this final flood was geologically significant, it was not held to account for as much of the fossil record as George McCready Price had asserted.[101] Vail's ideas about geology appeared in Charles Taze Russell's The Photo-Drama of Creation and subsequently in Joseph Franklin Rutherford's Creation of 1927 and later publications.They interpreted the creative days of Genesis as six periods each lasting 7,000 years, with Adam and Eve at the start of the most recent 6,000 years, so that the Earth was around 48,000 years old.[101][102] Jehovah's Witnesses maintain this belief, but their literature is now less specific about the purported length of each creative 'day'.[103] The Seventh-day Adventist physicist Robert W. Woods also proposed a vapor canopy,[104] before The Genesis Flood gave it prominent and repeated mention in 1961.[105]
