On November 5, 1755, lightning fell near Rouen on the Maromme powder magazine, and split one of the beams of the roof. Two barrels of powder were reduced to atoms without exploding. The magazine contained eight hundred of these barrels.
Can it be that man's thunder can repulse that of Jupiter?
Not always, as numerous examples prove the contrary. The following observations are extracted from a collection of similar facts:—
Lightning struck the tower of St. Nazaire, Brecia, on August 18, 1769. It stood above an underground magazine containing a million kilogrammes of powder belonging to the Republic of Venice. The whole edifice was blown up, the stones falling in showers. Part of the town was thrown down; three thousand people perishing.
At four o'clock in the afternoon of October 6, 1856, lightning penetrated the vaults of the church of St Jean, at Rhodes, setting fire to an enormous quantity of powder. Four or five thousand people lost their lives in the catastrophe.
The power of lightning is immeasurable. Well, it sometimes enjoys itself after the following manner:—
In 1899 it lit a candle which had just been put out. The person who held it was not struck, but the shock sent him to sleep for four days; then he awoke, only to go mad, and then slept for seven consecutive days.
At Harbourg it put out all the lights at a ball; the room was plunged in darkness, and filled with thick and fetid vapour.
Many a time, too, has a fire, burning brightly in a grate, been suddenly extinguished by lightning; and the same thing has happened with pottery and tile-making furnaces. As a rule, it is extremely difficult to re-light candles or fires thus extinguished. In some instances it takes on itself to light the gas.
On August 3, 1876, near the Observatory in Paris, Rue Leclerc, towards the corner of the Boulevard Saint Jacques, a gas jet was lit by lightning. The latter was twenty centimetres from a long gutter, and was in the gap, so to speak, of an electric circuit formed by it and the damp wall communicating with the ground. A violent explosion took place at the moment the gas caught alight, the gas meter, on the wall two metres above it, was dislodged, when a second explosion was heard. The thunderclap was truly terrific, and immediately followed the lightning flash. The chronometer in the meteorological bureau in the Observatory was stopped suddenly. The keeper of the square of the Luxembourg saw a ball of red fire explode with great violence, and scatter in all directions. The plate belonging to the Pères was, according to M. de Fonvielle, broken to a thousand pieces, and the outer part of an iron bar was volatilized. There were no deaths or injuries to record, although several people were thrown down by the shock.