Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 May 1895 — May Use Lightning. [ARTICLE]

May Use Lightning.

It Is just possible that one of these days instead of making electricity for ourselves, we shall learn to tap the immense store of the electric fluid that pervades the higher ntmosphere; that, in fact, we shall be able to “harness the lightning.” Prof. Trowbridge shows that a discharge keeps In the same path for the three hundred thousandth part of a second, uud he believes that a “step-down” transformer—a device by which the voltage of the discharge would be reduced—might render it lit for the use of man. An average thunder cloud is estimated to contain about three hundred horse power of electrical energy. A flash of lightning a quarter of a mile long practically means an electromotive force of millions of volts. Reckoning on the basis that a flash occurs when the electrical strain on the air is one and thirty-seven hundredths pounds per square foot, the total electric energy in the cubic mile of the strained air just on the point of flashing is about seventy million foot-tous, or, in other words, the energy required to raise a ton seventy million feet high. Electricians are now trying to think out how this enormous power can be brought to earth and utilized, and they talk of employing some modification of Franklin’s kite, at all events, for experimental work. If they should succeed, tire corralling of lightning flushes may come to be a profitable occupation.