SCIENTIST MAKES LIGHTNING

Southland Times, Issue 23646, 22 October 1938, Page 21

SCIENTIST MAKES LIGHTNING

LABORATORY “STORMS” INTERESTING DISCOVERIES IN NEW YORK NEW YORK, September 28. In a high-tension laboratory, Dr Bellaschi, research engineer, played with artificial lightning strokes of 3,000,000 volts. , , He split poles, as if with some invisible, gigantic axe. The laboratory was established to discover what happens when natural lightning strikes any part of a central power station system. Watching lightning from afar, science did a .good deal, of guessing. Eventually, engineers decided to make their own lightning, and. control the conditions under which it manifested itself.. Dr Bellaschi has been doing this for the past five years—making and loosening artificial lightning strokes. The total number of ‘hits’ in that time exceeds those made by real lightning on all the power systems of the United States. If these strokes were concentrated in a single “shot,” there would be enough energy to light momentarily 333,000,000 ordinary 60-watt house lamps, or more than all the household lamps in operation at any one time in the world. . , , , , In Dr Bellaschi s three-story laboratory are 36 banks of condensers, each charged with 100,000 volts of direct current, with a combined output of 3.600,000 volts, comparable to the high applied voltage rise of a lightning stroke after- it has hit a power line or a tree. Eight additional banks, of eight condensers each, represent so many cubic feet of a thunder cloud. -■ When all the condensers act together they produce 150,000 ampers of current for 200-iqillionths of a second, which is unusually long for a flash of lightning. It is a dramatic moment before the man-made strokes begin to fall and split beams as thick as telegraph poles. _ , , Orders are shouted and lights are dimmed, the better to see the coming flash. There is something ominous in the atmosphere. It is purely psychological, and has nothing in common with the sultry quiet that precedes a real storm. Still, there is the same expectancy, the same sense of an impending manifestation.

PROCESS MUCH LIKE NATURE’S “It takes half a minute to charge the condenser,” Dr Bellaschi explains. “The storm is brewing. The process is much like nature’s, but much more rapid. By continually bombarding electrical apparatus and equipment, with the man-made lightning strokes, it has been discovered that the average stroke consists of a core about the size of a man’s finger, which, upon completion of the discharge, explodes into a column of sponge-like fire, about four inches in diameter. “It is this explosion that gives rise to the thunder. In this core, pressures nre developed up to 20,0001 b to, the square inch, when the discharge is confined. This explains why trees are split and killed. The core has a temperature of about 14,000 degrees, centigradehot enough to vapourize everything on earth if it were sustained.” When the first test was made with lightning at the laboratory five years ago, the odds were 99 to 1 that a direct lightning hit on a distribution transformer would blow it up and loose the current into the ground, causing an interruption of service. It was a common occurrence, in those days,, for large areas of a city to be thrown into darkness momentarily in the course of a thunderstorm. Today, the odds are practically inverted. All but the rarest and most severe lightning bolt is detoured into the ground by protective devices.