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The lightning rod invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1752 suggested a way of avoiding the common problem of lightning causing damage to the wooden sailing ships of the period. In Britain, the Royal Navy chose a protection system with a chain draped into the sea from the top of the mast as a lightning conductor. This system proved unsatisfactory ...
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, rather than passing through the structure, where it could start a fire or ...
James Bowman Lindsay was born in Cotton of West Hills, Carmyllie near Arbroath in Angus, Scotland, son of John Lindsay, farm worker, and Elizabeth Bowman.During his childhood he was trained as a handloom weaver.
French physicist Alfred Kastler invented the MASER. 1951: First nuclear power plant in the US 1952: Japanese engineer Jun-ichi Nishizawa invented the avalanche photodiode [20] 1953: First fully transistorized computer in the U.S. 1958: American engineer Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit (IC). 1960: American engineer Theodore Maiman ...
The steam turbine invented by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884 is still used to convert the thermal energy of steam into a rotary motion that can be used by electro-mechanical generators. Such generators bear no resemblance to Faraday's homopolar disc generator of 1831, but they still rely on his electromagnetic principle that a conductor linking a ...
The famous kite experiment enabled the Philadelphia group to established what had been surmised by others, that lightning was identical to the mild charge of electricity produced by the friction of the electrostatic machine. Franklin invented the lightning rod, which goes down in history as the first practical electrical invention.
If the lightning strikes were independent events, the probability of being hit seven times would be (1:10000) 7 = 1:10 28 or 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 in 10 octillion). These numbers do not quite apply to Sullivan, however, who by the nature of his work and his physical location was exposed to more storms than the average ...
Franklin's electrical experiments led to his invention of the lightning rod. He said that conductors with a sharp [181] rather than a smooth point could discharge silently and at a far greater distance. He surmised that this could help protect buildings from lightning by attaching "upright Rods of Iron, made sharp as a Needle and gilt to ...