Parker M. Willard Jr. likes to joke that Mother Nature does a better job of selling lightning rods than he does at Boston Lightning Rod Co. Inc. When lightning strikes a home, creating an electrical ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. There’s a reason lightning rods haven’t changed much since ...

Brazilian researchers captured on camera the brief moment when lightning rods on buildings released an upward discharge to attract incoming lightning. By Nicholas Bakalar Benjamin Franklin invented ...

Lightning rods have been used to safely guide strikes into the ground since Benjamin Franklin's day, but their short range (roughly the same radius as the height) and fixed-in-place design makes them ...

Like a high-tech hammer of Thor, a powerful laser can grab hold of a lightning bolt and reroute its path through the sky. In a mountaintop experiment, such a laser bent lightning toward a lightning ...

I had been noticing a whole series of lightning rods mounted on roof peaks at a nearby shopping mall. They all looked like this: Figure 1 Lightning rod mounted on roof peak. I wondered what purpose ...