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Lightning striking the lightning rod of the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada. A lightning rod or lightning conductor (British English) is a metal rod mounted on a structure and intended to protect the structure from a lightning strike. If lightning hits the structure, it is most likely to strike the rod and be conducted to ground through a wire ...
Franklin's friend Kinnersley traveled throughout the eastern United States in the 1750s demonstrating man-made "lightning" on model thunder houses to show a how an iron rod placed into the ground would protect a wooden structure. He explained that lightning followed the same principles as the sparks from Franklin's electrostatic machine.
Franklin bells (also known as lightning bells) are an early demonstration of electric charge designed to work with a Leyden jar or a lightning rod. Franklin bells are only a qualitative indicator of electric charge and were used for simple demonstrations rather than research. The bells are an adaptation to the first device that converted ...
Powerline worker performs maintenance of a lightning arrester on an electrical transmission tower in New Brunswick, Canada. A lightning arrester (alternative spelling lightning arrestor) (also called lightning isolator) is a device, essentially an air gap between an electric wire and ground, used on electric power transmission and telecommunication systems to protect the insulation and ...
Einstein's thought experiments. A hallmark of Albert Einstein 's career was his use of visualized thought experiments (German: Gedankenexperiment[1]) as a fundamental tool for understanding physical issues and for elucidating his concepts to others. Einstein's thought experiments took diverse forms. In his youth, he mentally chased beams of light.
12" Quadruple Sector-less Wimshurst Machine (Bonetti Machine) An electrostatic generator, or electrostatic machine, is an electrical generator that produces static electricity, or electricity at high voltage and low continuous current. The knowledge of static electricity dates back to the earliest civilizations, but for millennia it remained ...
Lightning is a natural phenomenon formed by electrostatic discharges through the atmosphere between two electrically charged regions, either both in the atmosphere or one in the atmosphere and one on the ground, temporarily neutralizing these in a near-instantaneous release of an average of between 200 megajoules and 7 gigajoules of energy ...
Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, an artistic rendition of Franklin's kite experiment painted by Benjamin West, c. 1816. The kite experiment is a scientific experiment in which a kite with a pointed conductive wire attached to its apex is flown near thunder clouds to collect static electricity from the air and conduct it down the wet kite string to the ground.