822 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



the side of this street which is opposite to the cathedral stands the 

 Dolphin, the principal hotel of the city. About an hour after the 

 accident, and while the inmates of the hotel who had been startled 

 by the lightning and thunder were still awake, and in some alarm, a 

 smell of fire was perceived to be pervading the house. The landlord 

 at once rose and proceeded to investigate the cause, and was led by 

 the odor of burning wood to one of the cellars in the basement, where 

 he found the small gas-pipe fixed to furnish it with light melted for 

 several inches, a large flame issuing from the improvised gap, and a 

 beam of wood a little above the blaze already on fire. A thorough 

 and exhaustive examination of the place at the time, and afterward, 

 revealed no trace anywhere else of the passage of the lightning. A 

 water-pipe running in from the outside main, however, transversely 

 crossed, and almost touched, the gas-pipe as this descended from the 

 ceiling to the bracket, and just where the gap had been made. The 

 popular notion among the servants of the hotel was that the lightning 

 had come in through some open cracks in the cellar-door from the 

 pavement of the street, that it had run along the water-pipe, and that 

 it had cut through the gas-pipe as it passed across. The more scientific 

 explanation of the insidious invasion by fire, in the dead of the night, 

 no doubt is that, when the discharge of lightning issued from the cloud 

 to the earth, it had scattered itself in various directions, using such 

 stepping-stones by the way as offered in its path. One part of the 

 discharge, then, first seizing upon the gas-pipes connected with the 

 street lamps, took a course through them to reach the earth, but, com- 

 ing opportunely by the way across the water-pipe in the cellar of the 

 hotel, transferred itself to that pipe on account of the greater facili- 

 ties that were offered by it for making an easy and good earth contact 

 through the largely expanded subterranean mains, but " sparked " as it 

 passed from pipe to pipe, and in doing so opened a breach in the small 

 fusible metal wire, and lit the gas as it began to escape. The flame then 

 enlarged the breach by melting a considerable portion of the pipe, and 

 was making good progress toward burning down the house, when its 

 mischievous proceedings were happily discovered, and arrested in the 

 manner which has been described. 



The telegraph-wire which, according to the opinion of Mr. Preece, 

 may be sufiicient for the protection of any house, is also, it must be 

 remembered, capable of acting as a source of very considerable danger 

 in circumstances that are by no means unfrequently encountered in 

 the arrangements of every-day life. At the time of thunder-storms, 

 portions of the electrical discharge are apt to be conveyed into the 

 interior of buildings by telegraph and telephone wires that are dis- 

 tributed to them for the service of signaling-instruments, and may possi- 

 bly set fire to badly conducting and inflammable substances that chance 

 to be in connection with them. Instances of this form of accident 

 are now often met with, especially in situations where telegraph-wires 



