Do lightning rods really work?
Dear Cecil: Everyone learns about lightning rods in grade school. There is the heavy-duty kind on skyscrapers that takes the brunt of bolts and conducts them safely to ground, and the delicate, sharply pointed ones that protect residences by bleeding off electric charge and preventing strikes. Having been well schooled in skepticism by our beloved Cecil, I tried to find a scientific study showing that rods actually ward off lightning, before plunking down dollars. No luck, except for manufacturers’ marketing propaganda. I’ve seen a scale-model village successfully protected by tiny lightning rods from a “lightning” machine. But models don’t always scale up to the real world. Do houses with lightning rods actually get hit less often than houses without? — John Glenn, N.T.A. (Not The Astronaut), San Francisco You’re thinking: What a stupid question. Everybody knows lightning rods work. People wouldn’t have put them on buildings for more than 250 years (lightning rods were initially propo
