Lighterman

“ It is recorded by Benjamin Franklin, that when, during a thunderstorm, he conducted some of the lightning into a phial, and made the grand discovery that lightning was the same as electricity, and thus that a flash of lightning consists of the same subtle fluid as the electric spark, such a thrill of happiness passed through his mind that he felt as if he could have died. ”

“ There was an American citizen who, in the year 1770, or thereabout, indicated to this country, to Great Britain, and to the world, the use of the lightning for the purposes of communication of intelligence, and that was Dr. Franklin. I am sure that there is not only no member of the Senate, but no American citizen, however humble, who would be willing to have struck out from the achievements of American invention this great discovery of the lightning as an agent for the uses of human society. ”

“ But does man halt in so fine a path? No. Hardly has he conquered this hostile power, than he undertakes to domesticate it. Lightning, snatched from old Jupiter's hands by Franklin, becomes an instrument of progress. We employ it to transmit our thoughts, to reproduce our works of art, to gild our utensils, and we shall soon make it perform a thousand other services. Before the lapse of half a century we shall see electricity rendered more and more docile, furnishing us with movement, light, and heat, at pleasure. ”

“ With him went the magical bottle and his interesting son William.
The power of metallic points to draw off lightning now filled his mind. "Could the lightning be controlled?" he began to ask. "Could the power of the thunderbolt be disarmed?"
Every element can be made to obey its own laws. Water will bear up iron if the iron be hollow. But deeply and more deeply must the thoughts engage the mind of the philosopher. "Is lightning electricity? Does electricity fill all space?" ”

“ Thus the electric fluid, in the form of lightning, serves also in the hand of heaven as the red rod to restrain the vicious. Does the benevolent governor of the world seek to impress a salutary awe on the gambler, the drunkard, and such immoral characters, whose lives are in constant opposition to their own and the happiness of others? He but speaks to his ready ministers, the lightnings. Quickly, from the sultry cloud, coming up with muttering thunder, black and terrible as nature's approaching pall, the frightening flash bursts forth, rending the trees and houses over their heads ”

“ I glanced at Joyce, and she at me, then both of us at Pending.
"But, Pat," I exclaimed, "that's ridiculous! Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod two hundred years ago."
"I said lightening," retorted my redheaded friend, "not lightning. My invention doesn't conduct electricity to the ground, but from it." He brandished a slim baton which until then I had assumed to be an ordinary walking-stick. "With this," he claimed, "I can make things weigh as much or as little as I please!"
The eyes of Sandy Thomas needed only jet propulsion to become flying saucers. ”

“ Similarly the Maidu Indians of California believe that a Great Man created the world and all its inhabitants, and that lightning is nothing but the Great Man himself descending swiftly out of heaven and rending the trees with his flaming arms.
It is a plausible theory that the reverence which the ancient peoples of Europe paid to the oak, and the connexion which they traced between the tree and their sky-god, were derived from the much greater frequency with which the oak appears to be struck by lightning than any other tree of our European forests. ”

“ It would seem that the morning had struck him on the forehead and thus made it white, for which reason he took his revenge by wading into the entrails of the morning, and thus whitening his legs. He paces slowly, yet one of his names is Lightning; he wears a veil, having his face covered with white, as if to conceal it, and yet beauty itself would be his only rival. Had the sun and the moon a portion only of his ardour, it would be impossible to withstand their heat. The eye cannot follow his movements, unless you rein him in and restrain his impetuosity. ”

“ An American, a being of an inferior order, make discoveries! Impossible. It was said, that the Abbé Nollet, in 1748, had suggested the idea of the similarity of lightning and electricity, in his Leçons de Physique. It is true, that the Abbe mentions the idea, but he throws it out as a bare conjecture, and proposes no mode of ascertaining the truth of it. He himself acknowledges, that Franklin first entertained the bold thought of bringing lightning from the heavens, by means of pointed rods fixed in the air. ”

“ It is only the sixth chapter of electricity, but it holds the patterns of human history. It is the most remarkable of all the elements that unite to make a human body.
To conceive of some bodily actions as electric is not difficult. When you lose your temper and hit a man, the very crack of the bones sounds like a crack of lightning. When you discharge a kiss that you never meant to discharge, it seems natural to blame your battery. But what divine fingers could shape the lightning into a steady brain and quiet glands?
Yet for a while this miracle was happening in Marvin. ”

“ To conclude from the presence of electric tensions in the earth's atmosphere as an accompaniment of lightning, in the way first observed by Franklin, that lightning itself is an electrical process, is to be under the same kind of illusion that led men to attribute electrical characteristics to the human soul because its activity in the body was found to be accompanied by electrical processes in the latter. The identification of lightning with the electric spark is a case of a confusion between the upper and lower boundaries of nature, characteristic of the onlooker-consciousness. ”

“ That is what we have said a hundred times, Lightning. He has been shot all over, but never mortally. One thing, his looks are enough to scare a man. Somehow he don't look altogether arthly with that white hair of his—and it has been the same colour ever since I have known him—floating back from his face. He goes in general bareheaded when he sets out to shoot, and the hair somehow seems to stand out; not a bit like it does other times. I heard a chap who had been a doctor afore he took to gold-digging say his hair looked as if it had been electrified. ”

“ And once they were in the hall and she was sitting with the serene worlds of Michael and Densley and the Taylors close to her, the urgency of all the Lycurgans stood for grew immediately less. This world of clear ideas summoning mankind to follow like an army, seemed again, as when she had first met it, to contain a trick, to be too clear, too hard, too logical to embrace the rich fabric of life. ”

“ The centuries to come can only reveal what will be the end of Franklin's discovery that lightning might be controlled to become the protector and the servant of man. Even his imagination could hardly have forecast the achievements which the imp of the magical bottle would one day accomplish in this blind world. It is not that lightning is electricity, but that electricity is subject to laws, that has made the fiery substance the wonder-worker of the age. ”

“ Whether the lightning bewildered me and made me take a false turn, I cannot tell; for the hardest thing to understand, in intellectual as well as moral mistakes, is—how we came to go wrong. But after wandering for some time, plunged in meditation, and with no warning whatever of the presence of inimical powers, a brilliant lightning-flash showed me that at least I was not near home. The light was prolonged for a second or two by a slight electric pulsation; and by that I distinguished a wide space of blackness on the ground in front of me. ”

“ Hence perhaps we may explain some of the many superstitious beliefs concerning trees that have been struck by lightning. When the Thompson Indians of British Columbia wished to set fire to the houses of their enemies, they shot at them arrows which were either made from a tree that had been struck by lightning or had splinters of such wood attached to them. Wendish peasants of Saxony refuse to burn in their stoves the wood of trees that have been struck by lightning; they say that with such fuel the house would be burnt down. ”

“ Introduction of Lightning Rods into England.—The progress of lightning conductors was more slow in England and on the Continent of Europe, owing to a fear, not unnatural, that they might, in some cases, draw down the lightning where it would not otherwise have fallen. People preferred to take their chance of escaping as they had escaped before, rather than invite, as it were, the lightning to descend on their houses, in the hope that an iron rod would convey it harmless to the earth. ”

“ The lightning, that fierce spirit of the storm, that darted down on its mission of destruction from the black cloud floating in the sky, became a thing of interest to the mechanical world, and the question was asked, 'Why cannot the lightning be harnessed into the service of man, and be made utilitarian?' Philosophy sneered at the wild delusion, but see how that same subtle and mysterious agency has been conquered? ”

“ This is one of those cases in which a man hesitates to refer his safety to his prudence, as the putting up of a lightning-rod. There is no lightning-rod by which the sinner can avert the avenging Nemesis. ”

“ But the thunder drew ever nearer, and so great was the tumult that the air trembled about them, while the lightning flew around the temple in a continuous circle. The farmers were greatly frightened, and thought that there must be a sinner among them, whom the lightning would strike. ”

“ Not seeking the slightest reward for himself, nor even mentioning his name, he only sought to benefit others by instructing them how to get protection against the dangers of lightning. ‘It has pleased God,’ ran the advertisement in the almanac, ‘in His goodness to mankind, at length to discover to them the means of securing their habitations and other buildings from mischief by thunder and lightning. ”

“ The identity of the electric force and lightning, vaguely surmised by previous inquirers, and expressed at times in hints, was not only firmly asserted by Benjamin Franklin, but at a comparatively early part of his investigations proved by him in experiments. His broad practical way of looking at facts succeeded in grasping a truth which all the learned men before him, who had busied themselves with electrical experiments, had not been able to lay hold of, simply because they lost themselves in philosophical abstractions. ”

“ Again a brilliant flash of lightning pierced the black mass of clouds, and Heinz, shuddering, pointed to the crowd and asked, "Do you suppose the lightning killed the man whom they are carrying yonder?" ”

“ Still, according to your own account, a man or woman runs no danger from the lightning."
"I beg your pardon there, Willis; the electric fluid does not go out of its way to attack a human being, but if one should-happen to be in its way, it does not take time to request that individual to stand aside, it simply passes through him, and leaves him or her, as the case may be, a coagulated mass of inanimate tissues." ”

“ And as the company of brave men gallop to the southward on their errand of mercy, each man a hero, and all with set teeth and an unalterable determination in their hearts to do all that mortal man could do to save the despairing little band that had sent its wail of anguish across the prairie, we will improve the occasion by glancing at the remarkable man who acted as their leader.
Lightning Jo had gained his appellation from the wonderful quickness of his movements, and his almost miraculous skill as a scout. ”

“ They soon cleared the thicket, and a few minutes brought them once more to the banks of the stream, and the increased roar of the cataract. No earthly scene perhaps could surpass the appalling sublimity of that which they beheld;—every instant the lightning, which became more and more frequent, converting the black waters into billows of living fire, or wreathing itself in lurid spires around the huge crag that now rose in sight ”

“ Thus Benjamin Franklin, in the midst of a busy life, became deeply interested in the phenomena of lightning, and by a very simple experiment proved that this wonder of the air was due to electrical action such as we may arouse by rubbing a stick of sealing-wax or a piece of amber with a cloth. All discoveries, in a word, have had their necessary beginnings in an interest in the facts which daily experience discloses. ”

“ It is much to be regretted that not only professors and amateurs studying the manifestations of the electric force, but even learned societies, such as the French ‘Académie des Sciences,’ should have spread so many imaginative theories about this ‘reception rod.’ At the bottom of all was the fancy, not often declared, but still visible in its expression, of the metallic conductor possessing some occult power of attracting lightning. ”

“ Ther’s only one way for Lightning when it comes to fixing things. If he’s after Andy McFardell he means to kill him. He will kill him. And it won’t be to head off the Police from this valley either. Oh, it’s all crazy. It’s terrible. It’ll be murder, and—and Lightning’s done it. He’s a reckless, crazy-headed savage. He’s the whitest, loyalest friend. And they’ll take him, and hang him, for—murder. I know,” she went on, in a surge of emotion. “None of you know, or can ever get the things lying back of Lightning’s head. He cares nothing for himself. ”

“ Had any thing more been necessary to convince the world of the value of lightning rods to buildings, it was abundantly furnished by several very terrible instances of destruction which took place about this time in several parts of America, for no other reason upon earth, as every one must admit who reads the account, but the want of lightning rods. ”