Science: Man Made Lightning

Lightning is a serious menace to electrical apparatus. Temperamentally it is unsuited to laboratory experimentation. One cannot lasso the lightning and cage it in a condenser for study at leisure. But the General Electric Company can now make it to order. Last week Physicist Frank William Peek Jr. announced in his address to the regional convention of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers that artificial lightning of 3,600,000 volts had been produced by a new generator in the high voltage engineering laboratory at Pittsfield, Mass.

Just as the positive and negative electric charges are separated and stored in the thunder cloud until the electric potential reaches the breaking point and the lightning is released, so this new generator stores electricity until ready to discharge it in one blinding flash.

The flash lasts a few millionths of a second but years have been spent in building up its strength. Seven years ago the Pittsfield laboratory announced 1,000,000 volts, four years later this figure was doubled. Still the work goes on. The present power, 3,600,000 volts, is the highest ever obtained by man; about 17 times greater than the highest voltage transmission line in this country; and far beyond any voltage produced by natural lightning on transmission lines.

Despite its brevity, the life line of the lightning flash has been accurately measured by the cathode ray oscillograph. This is an instrument developed by the General Electric Company at Schenectady and makes use of a beam of electrons which, acting as a pointer, measures- the rise & fall, or wave shape of the voltages. When a wave of lightning encounters an obstruction it builds up to twice its power, just as a wave of water breaking on a wall will splash about twice its height. Therefore a direct voltage of 3,000,000 traveling along a line will suddenly jump to over 5,000,000 volts in & for the brief instant that it strikes the end of the line.

Chained lightning will be the means of studying electricity with the hope of protecting life and property against natural lightning; of building transmission lines, transformers, and other electrical apparatus to resist lightning voltages.