Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 August 1895 — Proof Against Lightning. [ARTICLE]

Proof Against Lightning.

Each day adds some new virtues to the long list of those already credited to the pneumatic. The latest of those is that the wheels of<a bicycle being oncircled by a band of India rubber and dry air—which is a perfect insulator—the rider is completely insulated from the earth, and, consequently, is impervious to flic attacks of the electric fluid. Thus, day by day, it becomes more and more a fact that life without a pneumatic tire is neither safe nor worth having. Any one who suffers from nervousness during a thunder sliower has now only to go into a barn or the cellar and seat himself upon the saddle of a pneumatic-tired bicycle to be perfectly safe from lightning stroke. As the chances of a man on a bicycle being struck by lightning have been carefully calculated to be about one in a billion, the W’lieel adds, there will of course be some pessimists who will deny that this newly discovered virtue of the pneumatic as a lightning insulator amounts to very much.—Scientific American.