Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 293, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 December 1913 — When Lightning Strikes a Tree. [ARTICLE]

When Lightning Strikes a Tree.

* Professor Atkinson, an expert in electricity, is authority for the theory that it is not so much the mechanical force exerted by a lightning stroke that tears a tree to atoms, as the explosive force caused by the sudden conversion of the fluids in the tree to gases. The heat of the lightning vaporizes the fluids, and the expansion is do violent, that the tree to rent into fragments.