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Lightning rods are called lightning rods but they are not actually designed to take a strike head on. They are actually designed to remove charge from the clou
by accountofme 4y ago
Lightning rods are called lightning rods but they are not actually designed to take a strike head on.
They are actually designed to remove charge from the clouds above where the rod is installed.
Static electrons loves to congregate in small places, I.e. the tip of a needle or the edge or fold in a piece of metal (can help the paint job add extra paint to those places it is needed most, bonus!)
Anyway a lightning rod is probably the best protection but yeah the copper would vapourise if it.was actually hit, causing a fire.
- ahahahahah 4y agoThis is false.
- accountofme 4y agoPlease elaborate on why.
- ahahahahah 4y agoI'm entirely unsurprised by hn's voting on the verbose completely wrong comment and the short completely correct comment. Neither of them provided any support for their claims, but one was wrong and wasted a lot of people's time. And even worse, some of those people are now likely to go off and share that exact same wrong information just as confidently somewhere else.
- OrderlyTiamat 4y agoAccording to wikipedia [0], such a device was actually proposed by a priest in 1754. The theory was more or less as you describe. But there is debate on whether it counts as a lightning rod, and apparently most lightning protection systems work exactly the way you said they don't: to provide a very low impedence path for the current to go safely to ground, which is called a Franklin design. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod#Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod#Europe