Camille Flammarion

“ Whether the exchange of electricity is produced on a vast stretch between two rows of clouds, or whether it is manifested by a long thin spark launched like an arrow and veiled by the curtain of clouds, all that can be seen is a strange light, vague, diaphanous, instantaneous, which sometimes spreads itself like a sheet of fire all over the horizon.
It is diffused lightning which gives us the finest storm effects on those heavy summer evenings when the air is breathless and saturated with electricity. ”

“ Flowers and foliage and soil, refreshed by the rain, give out sweet perfumes. An immense joy takes the place of the sense of melancholy and oppression. It is good to see the sun again! Alas, though, there are grim realities to be faced presently. The hailstones have destroyed the crops and begotten famine—the lightning has sown death and plunged whole families into mourning. It is with these misfortunes before us that we make up our minds to do what in us lies to diminish the destructiveness of this terrible force.
How are storm-clouds to be detected? ”

“ When lightning strikes the earth, it makes straight for metals. Their perfect conducting powers place them in the first rank of conductors, and the innumerable cases of lightning with which they are associated have gained them a certain celebrity in the annals of thunder.
We know, indeed, the preference of the spark for metals; we know it nurses a veritable passion for nails, wire, bell-pulls, that it dotes on rain-spouts, leaden pipes, and telegraph wires, that it is very feminine in its adoration of jewels, which it sublimates sometimes with a truly fantastic dexterity. ”

“ At the moment of the explosion an enormous column of vapour arose, like smoke coming out of a chimney when fresh coal has been put on the fire. The lightning flashed in all directions, great branches gave way, and when the vapour cleared off, there stood the pear tree, its trunk a dazzling white: the lightning had taken the bark completely off. Sometimes the bark is only partially stripped off one side, or left on, in more or less regular bands, either on the trunk or on the branches. ”

“ The imprudence of human beings is truly incorrigible!
Everybody, however feeble his instinct of self-preservation, should flee the vicinity of trees during [162] a thunderstorm, and allow himself to be drenched on the road, rather than offer his life as a too generous burnt-offering to the lightning, for the oak's robust trunk, or that of the poplar, elegantly plumed with its graceful foliage, may be the altar on which the sacrifices in honour of Jupiter are made. ”

“ What a mysterious world is that of atmospheric electricity! It is truly the New World for the scientific mind—a mine, fruitful in unknown and even unsuspected marvels, which is perpetually disclosing its riches for our admiration.
One of our most valued collaborators in our researches on the nature of lightning is photography. Faithfully and unhesitatingly it registers an indestructible document of the fugitive lightning, which imprints itself on the sensitized plate, and the astronomer can afterwards examine the smallest details of the sudden apparition comfortably and at his leisure. ”

“ Diffused lightning is the commonest of all. You can count hundreds of flashes on a stormy night. Occasionally they succeed one another with such rapidity that the sky is momentarily entirely illumined with a fantastic brightness. At these times great sombre clouds can be seen surging from the darkness of the night, to shine suddenly with an ephemeral brightness of a diffused red, blue, or violet tinge. Their irregular shapes, with their jagged edges of light, are visible against the dark background of the heavens, and the thunder growls monotonously. ”

“ Lightning has no respect for old memories. It demolished with a single flash a superb giant whose long branches, laden with perfumed leaves, had given shade to many generations. The splendid tree, which had survived the severity of several centuries, fell beneath the arrow of the pernicious fluid. Such was the fate of an oak near l'Etoile du Grand-Veneur. Struck on the top, its upper branches were violently torn off.... A spiral furrow beginning at the top ended within a metre of the ground. ”

“ It is true that it is incomparably more vicious, and that it has a great many more victims.
In its natural state, if we might explain it thus—left to itself—it comes directly to us from the high regions of the atmosphere, and is the most terrible of aerial messengers—a subtle messenger, malicious and violent, it is the terror of the human race. But ruled by the genius of man, it becomes a powerful agent towards modern civilization, and we cannot sufficiently admire its many advantages.
If we could tame lightning and guide it safely, its services would probably become innumerable. ”

“ The eight reapers who were killed under an oak, quoted by Cardan in our first example, were quite black.
That the subtle fluid accumulated in great masses in the clouds should kill a man, deprive him of movement, annihilate his faculties, or slightly wound him—this ought not to astonish us when we contemplate the marvellous results and the prodigies of strength accomplished by the much more feeble electricity of our laboratories.
But the extraordinary point about lightning is its variety of action. Why does it not invariably kill those it strikes? and why does it sometimes not even wound them? ”

“ In June, 1823, at Moisselles, lightning fell upon a great elm, and striking against an enormous knob, rebounded on to a neighbouring elm half its own height, pierced it through and through, shivering it to tatters; the trunk was burst open to the roots, it looked as if it had been bored through from one end to the other by a red-hot bullet that blackened and charred it.
Does it not seem as if the lightning plays with the lives of the trees as with man? ”

“ The luminous rocket which flings itself precipitately from a cloud saturated with electricity, spreads itself like a trail of flames in the atmosphere where an infinity of invisible molecules are floating; these it repels. The passage of this whirlwind of fire in a centre which is greatly compressed produces a momentary void into which the surrounding air at once rushes, and it is the same all the way along the route followed by lightning. ”

“ Indeed, the links were dragged downwards by the weight of the lower part, and meeting, became soldered in such a way that, after the stroke of lightning, the chain was a veritable bar of iron.
How, one asks, can this truly formidable fusion take place during the swift passage of the electric spark, which disappears, it may well be said, "with lightning speed."
What magic force gives the fiery bolt from the sky the power to transform the atmosphere into a veritable forge, in which kilos of metal are melted in the thousandth part of a second! ”

“ Can we, then, marvel much that lightning should rival our feeble electric resources? No! What a number of services might it not render if it were not for its mad independence! What an amount of lost power there is in the gleam of lightning!
As a matter of fact, we owe no gratitude to lightning. There are too many miseries for a few happy results. The balance is really too unequal.
Some lightning strokes have proved veritable disasters, on account of the number of the victims and the havoc which has been caused. ”

“ They adapted it to every taste and circumstance, but modern science has come to put order into this Capharnaum.
When a cloud is superabundantly charged with electricity, this electricity, which is compressed in the cloudy envelope, tries to escape in order to join the electricity accumulated either in another cloud or on the ground. An electric deflagration ensues, and a long ignited dart precipitates itself into space, showing us on a large scale what our experience of physics has taught us in a small way in our laboratories. This luminous and often dazzling trail constitutes lightning. ”

“ Lightning struck one of the highest trees in the park at Juvisy, a magnificent ash, stripping off and destroying the bark where the electric fluid curved round and round down the full length of the trunk, which was shattered by the meteor a few metres above the roots. Enormous fragments lay all round the trunk, some hurled to such a distance that it was obvious the explosive force of the phenomenon must have been of extraordinary violence. ”

“ The longest verified duration of a single discharge is 45 seconds. That is tremendous if we think of the instantaneousness of the lightning, and reflect that the flash and the sound are produced in reality at the same moment, that they are dependent the one on the other, and that in their various manifestations there is only the difference of motion.
Sound moves like a tortoise behind the swift lightning, whose vibrations spread in the air with inconceivable rapidity. ”

“ At first there was no spark and no sign of electricity. Presently some filaments of the string began to move, as though they had been pushed out, and a slight rustling could be heard. Franklin now touched the end of the string with his finger, and instantly a spark was given out, followed quickly by others. Thus for the first time the genius of man may be said to have come to grips with lightning, and begun to learn the secret of its existence. ”

“ In vain the monster Tiberius, and the infamous Caligula, sought a subterranean refuge from lightning. Their impure consciences, laden with crimes, dreaded the chastisement of heaven. By fleeing from the lightning flash, they believed themselves saved from death. Lightning dogs our footsteps, and works even when the criminals believe themselves in safety. It is conceivable that the ancients should have dreaded it as an instrument of celestial justice. ”

“ We can understand that a vast space of liquid would be a good refuge for lightning, when, after having made several victims on earth, and fearing the vengeance of the conductors, it hurls itself into the water. ”

“ Sometimes, also, the clap of thunder, when striking [140] men and animals, proves more murderous for the latter than the former, who, however, have sometimes succumbed.
A diligence was slowly mounting an incline, when suddenly a stroke of lightning interrupted its ascent. An electric ball burst over the heads of the horses, and threw the whole five down, stone dead. The postillion was struck, but not one other person was touched, though the carriage was full of women and children. ”

“ When one thinks of the instantaneousness of these flashes, one marvels at their incomparable agility, and we can only be lost in admiration of the magic force of the heavenly sling, which is capable of hurling these whole rivers of fire to roll in their sinuous course right through space, and in a space of time almost inappreciable to our senses. ”

“ In the month of July, 1885, on the day following a violent thunderstorm which had struck the telegraph-office in the station of Savigny-sur-Orge, I myself picked up a little black powder off the telegraph poles, which had been left by the lightning, and which had a sulphurous smell.
The production of this ponderable matter has often been attributed to bolides, but direct observation proves beyond a doubt that the electricity carries various solid substances found on earth after a storm.
Lightning is truly the most venerable of glass-makers. ”

“ It has been proved by a great number of observations that the man who has been struck by lightning so as to lose consciousness immediately falls without having seen, heard, or felt anything. This is easy to believe, since electricity is animated by a movement much quicker than that of light, and still more so than that of sound. The eye and ear are paralyzed before the lightning and the thunder could have made an impression on them; so much so that the victims, when they recover themselves, are unable to explain what has happened to them. ”

“ The cleavage of beams is amongst the most extraordinary injuries to be observed on woodwork. Lightning works with wrought wood just as it does when the tree is in full sap: it reduces it to rags, and follows the direction of the fibres.
With what crimes lightning is charged! When it is a question of robbing a house, it spares nothing in its way.
The window-panes fly in pieces, and sometimes are thrown a long way off. Often they are melted and disappear totally. ”

“ The green leaves you see rustling in the wind are often being traversed by electrical currents, luckily harmless, of precisely the same nature as those of the deadly lightning. On the other hand, the earth itself emits a certain quantity of electricity, and it is from the attraction exerted by these two fluids upon each other that thunder comes into existence. To put it in another way, thunder is a sudden striking of a balance between two different masses of electricity. ”

“ But this objection errs in its basis, because, as regards velocity, a cannon-ball is as a tortoise as compared with the arrow of lightning, and as regards size, who can compare a few grammes of powder to the torrents of fire launched into space by the prodigious force of electricity?
The lightning discharge produces a violent concussion in the cloud, and very often a shower of rain immediately follows it. The electric conditions of the different clouds which make a storm being separately liable the one to the other, the discharge of one must lead to that of several others more or less distant. ”

“ Lightning as man's right hand! Why not? Was it not the auxiliary of the gods in the dark ages? To-day, is it not regarded by astronomers as one of the most important forces of nature? Why should it not be the collaborator of man's intelligence to-morrow? ”

“ One day thunder fell on a grange full of hay and straw, and covered with thatch, without setting it on fire. Then it went to the sheepfold and killed seven black sheep, and left the white alone.
This choice is categorical, and people who fear lightning might follow this example by wearing long white garments in a storm. Unfortunately, lightning is so eccentric and uncertain, that we must not defy it; it is not to be trusted.
Who can explain why it sometimes glides into a stable full of cows without injuring one? ”

“ Not only are fishermen and sailors unanimous in attesting to the ravages wrought by lightning, but the history of electricity has preserved the recollection of memorable disasters, of veritable hecatombs of fish, which they attribute to the fire of heaven. ”

“ Indeed, the electricity which pervades the earth, silently and invisibly, is identical with that which moves in the heights of the enveloping atmosphere, and, whether it be positive or negative, its essential unity remains the same, these qualities serving only to indicate a point, more or less in common, between the different charges. The heights of the atmosphere are more powerfully electrified than the surface of the globe, and the degree of electricity increases in the atmosphere with the distance from the earth. ”

“ At about 3.30 there was a clap of thunder, and lightning struck the electric wires. In the stand twenty-eight men, riflemen, scorers, and spectators, are thrown to the ground in every direction and in every position. Some are quite inert, apparently dead; others, looking as though they were asphyxiated, give out a painful rattling noise from their throats. At the bar, to the side of the stand, no one felt anything—it was not even noticed that there had been a violent stroke of lightning. ”

“ After the first excitement a profound stupefaction seized hold of the persons present; they were all transformed into niggers. The lightning had swept the chimney, and cast the soot into the ball-room, powdering all the faces and toilettes. ”