Thunder and Lightning

When lightning strikes the earth, it makes straight for metals. Their perfect conducting powers place them in the first rank of conductors, and the innumerable cases of lightnin...

The destructive work of lightning in every form is immense. A formidable and invisible world skirts the earth--an enchanted world, more wonderful than any Eastern legend--an unk...

In this last chapter I would like to group together a series of instances of pictures made by lightning, some of them very curious and attributed, it would seem, to flashes of a...

Nearly two thousand years ago, Pliny wrote, "As regards products of the earth, lightning never strikes the bay tree." And this is why the Roman emperors, in fear always of the f...

Among all the electrical phenomena to be observed in the atmosphere, there is nothing stranger than those fireballs of which we have already spoken, and which in form and size r...

The Romans attributed a mysterious influence to each manifestation of electricity. They divided lightning into individual and family lightning, lightning of advice, monitory, ex...

Animals, even more than mankind, attract the fire of heaven. Lightning has a certain regard for human beings, which it seems to lose entirely when it is a case of the humble and...

It would be an interesting thing to make a careful study once a year, towards the end of the summer, of the habits and customs of thunder and lightning. Perhaps in this way we s...

With such strange facts before us--facts the strangeness and diversity of which baffle all hypotheses and forbid all definite conclusions--we can but keep adding to our observat...

Until comparatively recent times, as we have seen, all that was known about thunderstorms was that they occurred pretty well all over the world, and generally in either spring o...