610 EEPORT — 1888. 



country, but, asM. de Fonvielle had said, in France ; they had it in Germany ; they 

 had it in Austria and in the United States on an enormous scale ; and tens of 

 thousands were erected and millions sterling had heen invested in the subject, 

 and he must say that it was with considerable hesitation that he would hear it go 

 forth from that room that simply on the strength of some laboratory experiments 

 all that had been done was to be regarded as almost worse than useless. The dis- 

 cussion bad already gone on so long that he should be sorry to enter into many of 

 the points upon which he had made some notes ; but there were two or three upon 

 which he should certainly like just very briefly indeed to say two or three words. 



He had forgotteu who it was ; but one of the speakers made, he thought, very 

 justifiable allusion to Arago's remarks about the ball of lightning rubbing against 

 his trousers ; but as to the existence of ball lightning, or some phenomenon of slow 

 lio-htning, he had heard of it from so many hundreds of persons in all parts of the 

 country and in all countries of the globe, irrespective of having on one or two 

 occasions seen it himself, that he could Jiot dispute its existence. As for under- 

 standing it, he did not. He remembered quite well the experiments that were 

 made — he was not electrician enough to say whether they were correct or not — -but 

 experiments were made at one of the meetings of the Society of Telegraph Engi- 

 neers by Mr. Varley in which he produced something closely analogous to the 

 phenomenon of ball lightning. How far that was or was not the exact thing it 

 was not for him to say. 



Then with respect to iron conductors. First of all there was, as Sir James 

 Douglass said, the question of oxidation. He should be told, ' Oh, it can be gal- 

 vanised.' But he knew enough of galvanised iron to know that galvanised iron was 

 not an everlasting material by any means. And then another thing was, as had 

 been well pointed out, that the gases coming out from many of our factories were 

 seriously injurious. With respect to the area of protection, he knew that there was 

 a little bit of chafi' about that diagram, but he did know also that he was within 

 the mark in saying that hundreds of cases had been investigated and that there was 

 not, as regards the area of protection laid down in the report of the Lightning- 

 rod Conference, in the whole world more than two instances, and those were a 

 little bit doubtful, in which anything had been struck within that area of protection. 

 The attacks all round wei'e alarming. One would be afraid to go to church in a 

 thunder storm because the conductor on the top of the church would not protect 

 you. Up to the present time there was not a single case of a chureli having been 

 struck which was protected with a good and efficient cond uctor. Churches were struck 

 every year. AVhat happened ? Sometimes, as one of their friends said, the 

 bottom of the conductor was let into a paving stone. Away in South Wales, 

 at the Cathedral of St. Asaph, they had a conductor laid into a picMe bottle. 

 Of course if people went into that they would see that it was stupidity 

 to allow a country blacksmith to put them up. There was such a thing as 

 a properly made lightning-conductor. His friend Mr. Preece, in spite of all 

 his attention (and he did work thoroughly hard upon that report) had not 

 thoroughly mastered the report itself. The report suggested that what was called 

 the upper terminal — that was the extreme top — should consist of a blunt point sur- 

 rounded at about six inches below the top by a small ring from which very sharp 

 needle-points should project. The idea of the Conference in designing that npper 

 terminal was (he was afraid he did not use proper electrical language because, as he 

 said before, he was not an electrician) that the acute points, the very sharp needle- 

 points down below, were to disperse the electricity and act as a preventive ; but if 

 a disruptive discharge occurred, if the cloud came up so rapidly that the points 

 could not get the potential down fast enough, and a disruptive discharge came upon 

 the conductor, the absolute top of the conductor was nearly round. And the object 

 of that was this, that if a disrtiptive discharge fell upon a sharp point it invariably 

 melted it. Just going back to one point with respect to the small wires he felt 

 quite aghast for this reason, that he had been in a dozen of houses which had been 

 struck by lightning, and almost the first thing: that was found was that the bells went 

 wrong, and the fact was this, that the lightning as a rule got into the bell-wires ; it 

 dispersed them in dust, as a brown mark all round the walls of the room and every 



