In the month of June, 1873, the electric fluid penetrated into a butcher's shop, quite calmly followed the iron bars from which the quarters of meat were hanging. From one of the hooks a whole ox was suspended. All at once the skinned carcase was galvanized by the electric current, and during several instants it was seen convulsed by the most frightful contortions.
Again, on June 28, 1879, a concierge in the Avenue de Clichy was sweeping his courtyard when the lightning broke at one metre above his head. The poor man escaped with the fright. The fluid ran up the leaden pipes and entered a room, where it broke the mirrors and a clock, injured the ceiling, and got off by breaking the panes in the window. On the upper storey it got into a lodging occupied by two old women, where it caused the following damage: one of the women was holding a bowl of milk, the bottom of the bowl was cracked and the milk spilled on the floor; some money which was in a wooden bowl disappeared and could not be found. The clock was stopped at half-past six, the pendulum unhooked; and a hole made in a glass globe the size of a five-shilling piece. Finally, a woman in bed on the same landing saw the bed split in two by the lightning, which disappeared in the wall. None of these persons were injured.
As a general rule, indeed, when lightning breaks into houses, although it often does a great deal of harm, it almost always spares the people who may be there. One is safer there than anywhere else.
Sometimes the walls are pierced or merely hollowed. This perforation of the walls is one of the most common effects of the meteor on buildings.
The thickness of the perforated walls is very variable.
At the Castle of Clermont, in Beauvaisis, there was a formidable old wall, built in the time of the Romans, so tradition has it, which was ten feet thick, and the cement was as hard as stone, so that it was almost impossible to break it. "One day," says Nollet, "a flash of lightning struck it, and instantly a hole, two feet deep and equally wide, was made in it, the débris being thrown more than fifty feet away."
On June 17, 1883, at Louvemont (Haute-Marne), the wall of a bakehouse, fifty-five centimetres wide, was broken in by lightning.
The church at Lugdivan was struck by lightning in 1761. Two furrows like those made by a plough were to be seen on the wall.
One of the most dreadful acts of which lightning is capable is that of hurling considerable masses of stone and rock, broken or intact, to great distances. We have numerous examples of this terrible phenomenon. Here are a few:—
On August 23, 1853, thunder burst over the belfry of Maison-Ponthieu. The explosion scattered the slates and beams of the roof, and shot a stone, measuring thirty-five centimetres, to a distance of twenty metres. Rough stones, weighing more than forty pounds, were torn up and thrown almost horizontally as far as an opposite wall thirty feet away.