When scientists invented the lightning rod and tested it (at the cost of several physicists), the euphoria of the apparent victory over the forces of Nature was so great that lavish receptions and solemn balls were held in honor of the winners. Many Parisian women of fashion immediately included in their outfit or woven in the hair of the most real metal rods lightning rods, and enlightened people, professors and intellectuals began to wear steel wire in the pockets of jackets or replaced their traditional wooden canes with iron.
Then among literate people, the belief in lightning was higher than that of sorcerers, faith in the power of talismans and amulets. Half a century or a century will pass, steel rods will be dug into the ground not only in the centers of university towns, but also in factories, factories, along roads and even on god-forgotten farms and farms. In some countries, for example in Singapore, where 200 lightning days a year, portable lightning rods in the form of tripods (manufactured in Australia) are even used in the army.
Was there a complete victory ?! Over the last century, the number of victims of lightning has a steady tendency to increase. For example, only in France, where about a million lightning strikes annually, dozens of people die and about 10,000 cows die. [5] 1 ... In the US, an average of 80 people per year die from lightning, up to 160 in Zimbabwe (there one day in a month 89 people died) ...
In 1966, in the Vologda region, on the bank of the river, lightning struck a flock of sheep who had lost their fear in one large pile, and killed all-only 101 sheep. On December 23, 1975, lightning set its own record, killing 21 people at once, after a direct hit in a hut in Chinamasa-Krael, near Matari in Zimbabwe.
By the way, with such accuracy of hitting a person (about 10 thousand strokes are spent on one killed), lightning can be compared to bullets (which, for example, spend one killed enemy from 1 to 100 thousand during the position wars). It would be as if our whole earth is one big shooting gallery or a front-line strip shot through right through.
Probably, without lightning rods, the number of victims would be even greater, but they could not fully protect us. More precisely, they perfectly protect us from "electrical breakdowns from the clouds," that is, from what they believed lightning after the discovery of electricity. "Lightning is a discharge of current up to 3 billion Joules, moving from the cloud downward at speeds of 160-1600 km / s (and 140,000 km / s - with half the speed of light sometimes moving back from earth to clouds) through an ionized air channel with a plasma temperature up to 30,000 degrees (5 times higher than on the Sun), with a channel diameter of 1.27 cm, surrounded by a 3-6-meter crown, a length of 90 to 32 km and accompanied by a sonic shock wave (thunder), sometimes audible distance up to 29 km ... "- such statistical information has accumulated about lightning all-knowing science.
Yes, lightning obeys most of the laws of the distribution of electrical discharges, but ... not everyone and not always! Yes, lightning consists of electric charge, but ... either we do not really know what electricity is, or lightning includes not only electricity! Yes, weather forecasters in most cases predict the onset of thunderstorm days, but ... the behavior of lightning in many cases can not be predicted and understood! As for fireballs, yes, they appear in thunderstorm hours, but also appear on absolutely clear days!
There are many strange lightning stories, one case is more surprising than another: lightning burns clothes, leaving the top dress. Or shaves off all the hair to the last. He tears metal objects from his hands, throwing them away for a long distance and without causing harm to the one holding it. Lightning fuses in a common ingot all the coins that were in the purse, or silver gold and gilds silver, without burning paper money lying with them. Lightning completely destroys the necklace on the chain, leaving a memory of a girl robbed by her, an imprint of a chain and a medallion that has not come off the skin for several years.
And what are your stories about lightning? ..
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