THUNDERSTORMS

Northern Advocate, 24 October 1936, Page 14 (Supplement)

THUNDERSTORMS

FLASH of lightning:—and £2OO worth of electricity has gone to waste. That is the estimate of a German scientist, while another experimenter reckons- that there would be enough power in the average flash to drive an express train for a hundred miles — if only the power could be harnessed. At £2OO a flash, Nature must have wasted a lot of energy over Great Britain recently, for they had storms for 12 days in succession. We cannot harness that energy yet —it is a big enough problem to see that the flashes do no harm. \ Safe if Frames are Steel. Big buildings are safe enough, if they have steel frames. A New York skyscraper has been struck by lightning 12 times in a quarter of an hour, without coming to harm, the framework taking the charges to earth. If you were to stand under the 706 ft. masts of the 8.8. C. Droitwich station on a sultry summer evening, you would see an almost continuous stream of sparks jumping a special “safety gap” and going to earth —static electricity collected by the aerial system.

Even the big trans-Atlantic cables sometimes become heavily charged in this way, though they are beneath the sea. When conditions are very bad the cables have to be “earthed” and traffic suspended. This does not happen often.