PROTECTION AGAINST LIGHTNING. 813 



ference nothing whatever is said of the influence of length in reducing 

 the efficacy of a conductor. This is the more strange, because, in 

 speaking of the care required for the formation of joints in the " final 

 decision of the conference on controverted points," the report categori- 

 cally remarks that bad joints have the same effect as " leyigthening a 

 conductor^"* and a reference is incidentally made to one instance, in 

 which a bad joint was found to have had the same effect on a dis- 

 charge of electricity that the lengthening of a conductor to nineteen 

 hundred miles would have had. This nevertheless was a point that 

 was perfectly understood by the French investigators, and it is obvi- 

 ously one in which the London code is behind its predecessors. In the 

 first French instructions, issued in 1823, there is a paragraph which 

 says : 



Among the conducting bodies there are none, however, which do not op- 

 pose some resistance to the passage of the electric force ; this resistance to the 

 passage, leing repeated in exery portion of the conductor^ increases with its lengthy 

 and may exceed that which would be offered by a worse but shorter conductor. 

 Conductors of small diameter also conduct worse than those of larger diameter. 



It follows, as a matter of absolute certainty from this increase of 

 resistance with augmented length, that a conductor which was of am- 

 ple dimensions for the protection of a building eighty feet high would 

 not be of the same efficacy for a building four hundred feet high. It 

 is for this reason that M. Melsens employed eight main conductors for 

 the Hotel de Ville at Brussels, and it is for this reason that eight half- 

 inch copper ropes have been carried down from the lantern and cupola 

 in St. Paul's. To use eight main conductors of a given size is obvi- 

 ously, in an electrical sense, the same thing as to use one conductor 

 only of eight times the size.* The practice of the French engineers 

 has hitherto been to double the sectional capacity of the rod for each 

 additional eighty feet of the length that is to be protected by its in- 

 strumentality. This practice is a sound one, and certainly chould be 

 observed. 



There is one other particular in reference to the conference report 

 to which it seems desirable to draw attention on account of the erro- 

 neous doctrine to which it may possibly give a sanction. Among the 

 appendices which have been added to the report there is a table, 

 obviously prepared at the cost of some labor, which professes to give 

 the sizes of lightning-conductors recommended by various authori- 

 ties. In order to facilitate the comparison of the several sizes, all have 

 been reduced to what has been termed the equivalent dimensions of 

 copper. But the oversight has been made, in preparing this table, of 

 treating all cases of galvanized iron as if the zinc in the combination had 

 no other function than the protection of the iron from rust. In reality, 



* The solid copper tape which is chiefly used by Mr. Anderson is, to meet the circum- 

 stances here alluded to, manufactured of four different sizes, the smallest being f inch 

 wide and -^2 i^^ch thick, and the largest 1^ inch wide and ^ inch thick. 



