The news of the untoward event soon reached the ears of the Premonstratensian's superiors at Kloster-Bruck; and, as they very wisely considered that the duty of a country priest is primarily to attend to the spiritual welfare of his people, rather than to invent machines for their protection against the bolts of heaven, they advised him to yield to the prejudice of his people and not reconstruct the objectionable apparatus.
Father Divisch accepted the friendly advice of his superiors and obeyed like a good Premonstratensian monk. The remains of the shattered "meteorological machine" were sent to the abbey at Bruck, where they could be seen for many years afterward. As a consequence of this act of vandalism, Divisch gave up experimenting with lightning-rods and with electricity itself. The villagers were satisfied, but the world at large lost the benefit that might accrue from the researches on atmospheric electricity which Divisch would have carried on during the remaining nineteen years of his life.
In giving up electricity, the disappointed priest turned his attention, first, to acoustics and then, practical man as he was, to the construction of musical instruments. It was not long before his genius brought out an orchestrion of wind and stringed instruments which was played like an organ with hands and feet, and which was capable of 130 different combinations. Prince Henry of Prussia offered a considerable sum of money for the invention, but Divisch died while the preliminaries of sale were arranging, and negotiations were broken off. The instrument remained for many years in the abbey at Bruck, where it was in daily use for the canonical office.
It is a curious coincidence that Franklin was also interested in musical instruments. He is credited with having devised an improved form of glass harmonica, one of which he presented to Queen Marie Antoinette.
Despite the bitter experience of Divisch, the introduction of lightning conductors into Italy was warmly advocated some years later by Padre Toaldo (1719-1797), an admirer and correspondent of Franklin. It was through his influence and personal activity that the magnificent thirteenth-century Cathedral of Siena was protected with lightning conductors after having been repeatedly struck during the centuries and seriously damaged. Toaldo published in 1774 his celebrated work on the protection of public edifices and private buildings against lightning; it contributed greatly to reassure public opinion on the value of "Franklinian rods," as the conductors were commonly called.
It is a matter of regret that Franklin used the words "the electric fluid is attracted by the points" in the passage quoted above, inasmuch as in the popular mind such "attraction" courts rather than averts danger. As already said, the rod no more "attracts" lightning than a rain-pipe attracts a downpour. Franklin knew very well the twofold function of his rods, the preventive, by which they tend to ward off the stroke by gradually and silently neutralizing the excessive energy of the cloud; and the other, the preservative, by which they convey the discharge safely to earth when struck. He even complains of people who concentrate their attention on the preventive function, forgetting the other entirely, adding that, "Wherever my opinion is examined in Europe, nothing is considered but the probability of these rods preventing a stroke, which is only a part of the use which I proposed for them; and the other part, their conducting a stroke which they may happen not to prevent, seems to be totally forgotten, though of equal importance and advantage." (1755.)
At a time, it was customary to make the rods rise to a considerable height above the building, in the belief that the diameter of the circle of protection was four times the height of the rod. Such a rule was an arbitrary one which facts soon showed to be unreliable and unsafe. It is now recognized that there is no such thing as a definite area of protection.
Were this a literary chapter, we would point out that either of the expressions "electric" storm or "lightning" storm is preferable to thunder-storm, because electricity or lightning is the active agent or principal feature of the impressive phenomenon. No one thinks of calling a hailstorm by the descriptive term of patter-storm; yet that would be just as logical and appropriate an appellative in one case as thunder-storm is in the other.
Thunder-tube is certainly a startling misnomer applied to the long, narrow, glazed tubes formed in siliceous materials by the fervid heat of the flash, but not in any way by the sound-waves produced by the crash. Thunder-bolt does not mean, despite the common opinion, a white-hot mass that accompanies the discharge; it is purely and simply the flash itself. A glowing mass that happens to come down in the track of the discharge is a meteorite, a body of cosmic not terrestrial origin, a visitor from space that chose the rarefied path of the flash for its descent to earth.
Again, there are no thunder-clouds in nature, only electric clouds or lightning clouds; nor is there ever thunder in the air save when the lightning breaks from cloud to cloud, or leaps from cloud to earth, or strikes from earth to cloud. But though thunder is only occasionally in the air, electricity always is. We have a normal electrical field in all seasons, times and places.