ACTION OF LIGHTNING.

Patea Mail, 6 March 1882, Page 3

ACTION OF LIGHTNING.

Of phenomena, the action of electricity perhaps excites more general interest than any. other from the difficulty that exists in explaining some of its manifestations. It may be remembered that in August last a brief notice appeared in the papers of a cottage at Hawera which had been struck by lightning. The following particulars, attested to by

one who lives within eighty yards of the cottage in question, and whose evidence is thoroughly reliable, are so strange as to be worthy of record. The building was occupied by a man and his wife and one child. A hailstorm having broken the bedroom windows during the day, the family retired to rest in the kitchen : the father and mother on a mattress on the floor, the child on a sofa near them.

About 10 p.m. a very severe thunderstorm broke over the town, during which there was one particularly vivid flash of lightning accompanied by a tremendous peal of thunder. At this instant the cottage was struck, the electric current apparently entering at the roof of the bedroom, tearing away about four square feet of the shingles, ripping open the end and front of the house and completely destroying the windows; then, tearing down the partition between the bedroom and kitchen, the current passed along the mattress on which the occupants rested, riddling the very blankets which covered them with innumerable holes such as might be made by the passage of shot. It then tore out several bricks from the side of the fire-place, just above the head of the sofa on which the child was sleeping, making a considerable hole. Here it appears to have passed out. Garments hanging on the bedroom walls were riddled in the same way that the blankets were. A box of clothes was lifted from the floor to the bed, and the contents scorched •, and articles from the kitchen were hurled into the bedroom and some into the back yard. Although the current seems to have darted in every direction within the house, rending all the things that obstructed it, and dashing the chimney bricks about the room, yet the occupants were perfectly uninjured. Clerk Maxwell, one of the highest authorities of the day on electricity, laid before the British Association at one of its meetings a year or two ago, some valuable and eminently practical suggestions, founded on late research, for protecting buildings and their contents from the effects of electrical discharges, in which he does not advise the use of lightning rods. The subject is one to which scarcely sufficent attention has been given in this part of the world.