The British Navy Resisted a Decent Lightning Rod for Decades(spectrum.ieee.org)
57 pointsby sohkamyung5 days ago5 comments
  • maxglute2 days ago
    >Not to be defeated, Harris turned to statistics, compiling a list of 235 British naval vessels damaged by lightning, from the Abercromby (26 October 1811, topmast shivered into splinters 14 feet down) to the Zebra (27 March 1838, main-topgallant and topmast shivered; fell on the deck; main-cap split; the jib and sails on mainmast scorched). Additionally, he cataloged the deaths of nearly 100 seamen and serious injury of about 250 others. During one particularly bad period of five or six years, Harris learned, lightning destroyed 40 ships of the line, 20 frigates, and 10 sloops, disabling about one-eighth of the British navy.

    This is wild.

    • relistan2 days ago
      That was what stood out to me, too. 1/8 of the entire navy destroyed by lightning in a five year period.
      • potato37328422 days ago
        The "destroyed" framing isn't appropriate. Rigging and steering gear was routinely damaged in inclement weather. Rigging including masts is consumable on wooden ships. Ships carried spares and drilled replacing them. The top half of a mast being turned into confetti was something that would have had a ship down for hours, not days.

        These ships were routinely completely de-masted and swiss cheesed above the water line in combat and the slightly less swiss cheesed and de-masted winner would wind up towing (until rigging could be refitted and it could sail itself) the loser away as a captured prize to be refitted and recommissioned in one's own navy.

    • mmoossa day ago
      > During one particularly bad period of five or six years, Harris learned, lightning destroyed 40 ships of the line, 20 frigates, and 10 sloops, disabling about one-eighth of the British navy.

      I wonder if Harris reported literally those numbers, or if the OP is exaggerating them. If Harris reported them then I'm not too surprised Barrow thought Harris was a charlatan. True or not, they sound like an obvious, absurd exaggeration.

      • maxglutea day ago
        Napkin math works out to a ship being struck by lightening every 40 days, while British fleet was 200-300 ships. Maybe it's a maintenance/attrition level British ship building during her maritime power period can keep up with.
  • frereubu2 days ago
    > "The main-top mast, from head to heel, was shivered into a thousand splinters..."

    I hadn't realised the origin (presumably) of the stereotypical naval saying "shiver me timbers" was from lightning striking masts.

    • gerdesj2 days ago
      I've never heard the verb shivered used in that sort of context! I doubt anyone has deployed the phrase "shiver me timbers" outside of Holywood or perhaps Moby Dick.

      A large wooden sailing vessel does make some odd noises in a big sea. When it crests a wave and the bow (pointy end) smacks down and the next 20+' wave looks rather large and you wish you were a better person ....

      I could go on but you don't need lightning to shiver your timbers 8)

      • defrost2 days ago
        From the O.E.D. Second (digital) Edition

          shivered, ppl. a.

  (ˈʃɪvəd) 

  [f. shiver v.1 + -ed1.] 

  Broken, shattered. 

    1542 Wyatt Poems, ‘The furious gun’, The furyous gonne‥cracketh in sonder: and in the ayer doeth rore the shevered peces.

    1621 G. Sandys Ovid's Met. v. (1626) 90 And through his flesh the shiuered bones arise.

    1764 Gray Welsh Fragm., Conan 8 As the thunder's fiery stroke, Glancing on the shiver'd oak.

    1815 Scott Ld. of Isles iii. xii, Where Coolin stoops him to the west, They saw upon his shiver'd crest The sun's arising gleam.

    1897 F. Thompson New Poems 221 Like shivered moonlight on long waters.
        The 1621 quote is pretty gory and visceral, someone injured so badly their bones are internally shattered into shards and knives, now sticking out through the flesh.
        • gerdesj13 hours ago
          "The furyous gonne‥cracketh in sonder: and in the ayer doeth rore the shevered peces."

          That's quite hard to translate into modern English despite all the words being fairly obvious. I'm not too sure about "in sonder" but I'll go for "like thunder".

          "The furious gun cracked like thunder: and in the ear it roared across the shattered peace"

          However, I prefer the sound of the original.

          • defrost13 hours ago
            As a note of interest "Gonne" has been in use in recent times in the Discworld series:

              With almost supernatural power, the Gonne can possess the mind of the man who uses it. It shows him the power he has in his hands, and erases all scruples by telling him what could be achieved with this power.
            ~ https://wiki.lspace.org/Gonne
          • kwk17 hours ago
            "in sonder" is just "in sunder". "The furious gun cracked in sunder and in the air did roar the shivered pieces"
        • flir2 days ago
          I thought it was just a synonym for "shattered", but it does seem to be more than that - there's a lot of "oak tree + lightning" in there, and not much "oops, I dropped a milk jug". Maybe it's closer to our modern "exploded"?

          Here's two from 1797, both describing the same storm: "the old poor houſe was tremendously ſtruck by the lightning; the roof was entirely torn off and demoliſhed, the window frames driven in and ſhivered to pieces" and "The ship Elizabeth, retaken by the Alcmene, had her fore-top-mast shivered; as was an oak, a foot in diameter, in Yatton Church-yard."

          (Do you have access to the OED via a fairly cheap route? That's something I'd really like to have).

          • shakna2 days ago
            One of the synonyms we still sometimes use is "sundered".
            • gerdesj13 hours ago
              Sundered has a lot of other connotations too.

              For example: a person might be sundered. That is not quite the same as shivered or shattered. However I will grant that: alliteratively, they all fall within the same vein.

              Words like these is why poetry are possible or even viable. (Soz).

        • foldr2 days ago
          I guess this is where the noun “shiv” comes from. I don’t think I’d ever heard it before playing The Last of Us.
  • duxup5 days ago
    > But the ultimate reason for the navy’s resistance, argued Bernstein and Reynolds, was political. In 1830, when Harris seemed on the verge of success, the Whigs gained control of Parliament. In the course of a few months, many of Harris’s government supporters found themselves powerless or outright fired. It wasn’t until late 1841, when the Tories regained power, that Harris’s fortunes reversed

    Some things never change.

    • HPsquared2 days ago
      Adversarial systems have their drawbacks. (Oh no they don't!)
    • avidiax2 days ago
      To be fair, it does sound like Harris was selling this system. It would explain why he did so much legwork around cataloging ships damaged by lightning and persevered for so long.

      It's not clear to me why his system would cost 20x a simple chain or cable.

      • lazide2 days ago
        Lightning protection systems are very sensitive to resistance in the chain, as any localized bit of it will cause a huge amount of heat there, and non-localized will cause current to branch out to other paths, also causing damage/heat. A typical lightning strike can be from 10,000-30,000 amps at millions of volts.

        The damage from lightning doesn’t happen due to the current (as a first approximation), but rather resistance to the current causing heating/damage where the current ends up going - very rapidly, in a way the heat doesn’t have time to dissipate.

        Having a working low resistance path to ground means heating (and hence damage!) is reduced or even eliminated.

        For an example, see the steam explosion inside the tree here [https://youtu.be/3U8aoiEtVSg], compared to striking a grounded tower 6 times (no damage) [https://youtu.be/ScNzI76ZsiY]

        The towers lights didn’t even flicker!

        Unless carefully specified and properly maintained, the odds that a random cable or chain (especially when exposed to seawater) will maintain a low impedance path to ground is not good.

        • dnel2 days ago
          I wonder if anyone has tried feeding a skyscraper's lighting rod into a sand battery and let it charge up from lightning alone, so much potential for free energy there.
          • withinboredom2 days ago
            It would never strike the lightning rod. The entire reason lightning strikes is due to a circuit between the clouds and ground. If you were to put a "battery" like this somewhere, then the resistance would cause the lightning to go where you don't want it.
          • dmitrygr2 days ago
            I am aware of no energy storage system capable of absorbing 250000 Wh in under a second
            • murderfs2 days ago
              You just need to use a sufficiently large storage system. One of the proposals of Project Plowshare was to use underground detonation of thermonuclear weapons as a geothermal energy sources.
              • lazidea day ago
                There is a huge difference between electrical energy trying to find its way to ground the easiest way possible (lightning), and a nuke.

                For one, lighting can almost certainly find an easier path than into the battery.

                For a nuke, the easiest path (once triggered) is to explode.

      • relistan2 days ago
        The ship is wood and his system required large amounts of copper, including sheeting covering what I understand to be a fairly large part of the hull. I imagine the fitting process was also not inexpensive given that.
        • peteri2 days ago
          Copper was already on the bottom of the ships by then to stop ship worm (terodo Navalis), it also had the advantage of stopping weed growth.

          A quick browse through Wikipedia suggests that entire Royal Navy had copper by the late 1790s.

        • consp2 days ago
          > including sheeting covering what I understand to be a fairly large part of the hull

          This was done anyway as it was the primary way of getting rid of barnicles, shipworm and other attaching seacreatures. I don't see why this is an additional cost.

          • selimthegrim2 days ago
            Hence the terms copper-bottomed and copper-fastened.
  • draven2 days ago
    The “experimental illustrations” in his pamphlet are fantastic.
  • consumer4512 days ago
    The solution to Scurvy was known for ~50 years prior to the Royal Navy implementing finally implementing the solution.

    > The tragic tale of Scurvy: how beliefs trumped science.

    https://www.barkeuropa.com/en/logbook/tragic-tale-scurvy-how...