The Balls of King George III

[peristaltor]

tacit has branched out once again from the LJ to a little side project, a lightning blog. This particular little factoid struck my fancy:

And speaking of lightning rods, most people know that the lightning rod was invented by Benjamin Franklin, but what’s less well-known is that it quickly became a matter of political dispute between King George III and the Republic during the Revolutionary War.



Franklin’s original lightning rod design, an example of which is shown here, called for a sharpened iron rod, mounted to the top of a building and connected by a copper cable to the ground. . . .

King George III favored designs with rounded balls on the top. . . . In 1776, a powder magazine in London was struck by lightning and burned; the Franklin lightning rod protecting it was quickly blamed, and lightning rods with rounded ends were soon mandated by law in England.

As it turns out, ol’ King George was actually right, and modern lightning rods in the US have a rounded top. Lightning doesn’t work the way most people think it does.

I just love the fact that the more efficacious design was mandated not because of rigorous testing, trial and error, all the scientific tests one can apply to new technology. Nope. The real reason rounded balls topped most of the British lightning rods can be found in the sentence I deleted in the second ellipsis: "King George III favored designs with rounded balls on the top, in part because Franklin was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence."

Boys, boys, boys.