The Stark County Democrat

Miscellaneous.

THE FEAR OF LIGHTNING.

Valuable Hints to Those Whose Fear of Lightning are Now Uncontrollable.

To the Editor of the Sun:

SIR—The painful story in Monday's papers (July 14th), of two happy children, killed while seated under a tree by a flash of lightning, will deepen the fear of those who suffer from fear of lightning. The most agonizing of all death fears is that of lightning, and a count of those whose lives are really embittered by this dread would number scores of thousands, a great many of them persons who know no other fear.

Twenty years ago the writer remembers turning with a smile to others who shrank and cried at the peals of a terrible storm in a country house. The glare of a bolt coming down in the centre of a room caught the eye at that very instant; the next was an explosion that shook the house, and insensibility followed. Two men in the same room were burned by the bolt, though no lives were lost; but I have never been able to smile at lightning again. To give any idea of the terror left on a nervous organization by the shock would involve extravagance of terms.

But, unfortunately, so far from being an exception, there are too many who suffer the same harassments with me. Nor are women alone subject to this nervousness. I knew a school superintendent and canal contractor, a man over 50, with a large family, who would hide in a closet during a storm, and had been known to rush from his bed with fright at lightning. Many will remember the Professor at Bowdoin College, who always retreated to the cellar in a thunder storm, although his house was bristling with lightning rods. The strongest man I ever knew, who could throw another across the street, and work a hand-press in a printing office as if he were part of the machine, was discharged as a reporter because his desk was vacant every time there was a thunder storm. The mother of Washington was afraid of lightning, and never failed to retreat to her room at the first flash of a storm, and remain there till the storm died away.

The physical effects of this storm are most depressing. One woman knows when a storm is coming, hours before, by a prostration of strength and spirits. One of the most dauntless young women I know was sick in bed for hours after the great storm at Springfield, Mass., last month. She had received a shock of lightning years before, and never fails to be ill in a thunder storm since.

Reason and study of the laws of lightning have done much to lessen the fear of it. It is true we live between two magazines of electricity—one in the air and the other in the earth—and a cloud charged with electricity passing over a point or body in a negative condition will discharge its surplus by the quickest and most congenial medium which it finds, in the human body, a tree or house indifferently. But it is also true that, provide the lightning with a convenient and easy conductor, in the shape of a stout iron rod higher than any point of a house, and reaching well into the earth where electricity may scatter harmlessly in the damp ground, it will prefer that conducting rod to anything in its vicinity, and people who stay indoors in a well protected house are safer from lightning than any bomb-proof from bursting shells. Every accident from this cause I ever knew of came from careless exposure in situations known to be unsafe.

The first I noticed after my own accident was that of a missionary's daughter killed while passing an open window, just as a woman was on Long Island last summer, while sitting at her sewing machine. A young man in Malden, I think, was killed while sitting on a porch with his head tipped back against the knob of the door bell, making an excellent connection with the bell wire. Many men have been struck while riding into a barn on a load of hay. Many will remember the frightful calamity at Scranton, Pa., where a party of women, out picking berries on one of the high hills, crowded into a deserted log hut in a sudden thunder storm, and seven were killed by one bolt. Steep hills with mineral veins cropping out are not places for any one to live on who wishes to escape lightning, and unprotected houses there are doubly dangerous.

It is never too soon to go in the house when a storm is rising. When the clouds are fully charged with electricity they are most dangerous, and this fluid obeys subtle attractions, which act at great distances and in all directions. A woman told me of a bolt which came down her mother's chimney from a rising cloud when the sun was shining overhead. N. P. Willis writes of a young girl killed while passing under a telegraph wire on the brow of a hill, while she was hurrying home before a storm. People should not be foolhardy about sitting on porches or by open windows, whether the storm is hard or not. Mild showers often carry a single charge which falls with deadly effect. It may or may not be fatal to stay out; it is safe to be in the house with the windows down and doors shut.

The dry air in a house is a readier conductor of lightning than the damp air outside, and any draught of air invites it. A hot fire in a chimney attracts it, so to speak, and it is prudent for those who would be safe to use kerosene or gas stoves in summer, and avoid heating the chimneys in summer. People are very ignorant or reckless about lightning. I have seen a girl of 18 crying with fear of lightning, and running every other moment to the window to see whether the storm was not abating, unconscious that she was putting herself in danger. If every one would hurry to shelter as soon as a storm cloud was half way up the sky, when certain it was coming nearer, if they would shut the doors and windows, and keep away from them afterward, and from bell wires and stovepipes, mantles, chimney breasts, heaters and mirrors, with their silvered backs, which carry electricity, and keep away from lightning rods and their vicinity, and from metal water spouts, with good rods on their houses, they might dismiss the fear of lightning from their minds, so far as it is a thing of reason and not of impression.

A good lightning rod is one that is thick enough to carry a heavy charge of electricity, not less than three-quarters of an inch in diameter, which has a point above each chimney or pinnacle of the roof, joining the main rod by curves not angles, and running into the ground down to permanently damp ground. It should be held by glass insulators fixed in blocks of wood, held to the house by wooden pegs, not spiked to the wall, to give no possible connection with the interior. Any blacksmith can put up a rod which will be a perfect protection, and should not cost over $12 for a house forty feet square and two stories high. When accidents happen to a house with lightning rods, it is because the rod is too small or not rightly attached, or the ground connection is not good. The ignorance and carelessness habitual to the American on all points not immediately connected with his amusement or money making, are fatal to such exact conditions as insure safety from lightning. It was exemplified in the case of a friend, who, afraid of lightning, slept half the summer in a newly rented house with a stout rod, till one day, happening to look at the ground connection, he found it rusted in two just above the sod, and a hundred times more dangerous than no rod at all.

So far from lightning being a danger most difficult to avoid, it has very simple laws, and may be almost entirely guarded against by proper conductors. Witness the British navy, which met five hundred disasters a year by lightning, till the ships were provided with conductors, by which the fatalities were reduced to 50, among ships in the tropics, exposed to violent storms, and these may be fairly charged to carelessness in regard to the conductors.