WARNING the unbelievable part of Ben's experiment is that he didn't end up killing himself! Don't try it yourself!

Old Ben didn't try it and neither should you. B)

With a kite THAT big the lightning probly wouldn't have got him, the fall sure would!....................:rolleyes:

Tell you what though, if an anvil of mine ever gets struck, I'mma find a piece of wrought iron and forge it into a lightning bolt just so I can make some sort of joke about Hephaestus/Vulcan.

had a car when i was a kid that got struck. We were in it at the time. Scarred us all half to death. My mom was afraid to get out because the car was insulated by the tires. My dad drove the car to a steel pole in a parking lot and ran the bumper up to it. left a scratch on the bumper from the contact but we buffed out the spot in the paint a few days later. none the worst. Again, planes get struck all the time, so do light poles. ground wires sometimes get fried down the pole but stay intact so assume an anvil will just site there fat dumb and happy.

I saw a large backhoe sitting at a job sight on the very top of a mountain, the boom was the highest thing there. Someone had attached a Lightening Rod to the top and grounded it when they left for the weekend. They must have had a history to had bothered doing that.

My brother had his house hit a few years ago, it hit an unused TV antenna (remember them) followed a guy wire down blew a hole in the roof, hit the light in the bathroom ceiling blew down the ceiling, followed the elect. wires through the house burning the wallpaper all the way and jumped onto a phone, it followed the phone lines down the hill for over a mile and half blowing apart every splice and connector. It took the Phone Company a week with 3 repair crews to get them up again. Everyone inspected the damage. local fire and state, phone co. and insurance people, they all came to the same collusion, "Must have been a bad ground somewhere". No Kidding! The insurance adjuster even gave him a new TV antenna and he didn't own a TV at the time.

My 93 year old dad has been stuck by lightning twice, shot down by the Nazi's, spent time in a POW camp, and had a 6" (150mm) pecan limb fall on his head.  I'm sure the anvil would be all right. 

There was a barbed wire, at my father in law's farm, strung between two trees. One of the trees was was struck by lightning. The wire disappeared. I picked up barbs every 6 inches off the ground. No wire to be found. 

That's it!

I propose a test.

Don't forget to take a few snap shots

Ben Franklin didn't die, if he actually tried it, but one or two others did trying to recreate it.

 

So....buy a cheap Vulcan. Set it on the roof, add a grounding wire, and let us know after the next few thunderstorms? If it doesn't you know, accidentally burn down the house. I'm staying out of this one, I've had two close calls with lightning. One struck a tree 7 or 8 feet away about 6 feet off the ground. I was peppered in the back by the bark blowing off the tree and thought for a minute I'd been shot. (and then ran screaming girlishly for the house.......)

My faithful assistant, Igor (the one with the hump,limp and lithp), had a pithy saying "I thuggetht we thtrap it to the table and feed a bolt of lightning through it Marthter, thatth what we uthed to do in the old dayth"