Ornamental Lightning Rods

Abstract

Two years ago, one of us noted in Technology and Culture the existence of lightning rods in the form of grounded metal spears and tridents that were masked as part of sculptures erected on cornices and pediments (Leonid N. Kryzhanovsky, Lightning Rod in 18th-Century St. 31, no. 4 [October 1990]: 813-17). In a sense, these were part of a tradition of with built-in lightning protection. While in Paris in 1767, Benjamin Franklin noted that buildings that have their roofs covered with lead, or other metal, and spouts of metal continued from the roof into the ground to carry off water, are never hurt by lightning, as whenever it falls on such a building, it passes in the metals and not in the (Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity, ed. I. Bernard Cohen [Cambridge, Mass., 1941], p. 390). In the same period, a peculiar kind of decoration and lightning conductor is described by a Swiss preacher, Johann Baptista Cattaneo, in his book Reise durch Deutschland und Russland (Ulm, 1788, pp. 8182). During his travels in the mid-1780s, Cattaneo saw in the city of Novgorod (northwestern Russia) many chapels topped with crosses from which metal chains hung down to the ground. According to Cattaneo, these chains served as lightning conductors and had been in use long before Franklin's invention. The temple erected by Solomon at Jerusalem a millennium before the Christian era had the roof and walls coated with heavily gilded wood. On the roof there were metal spears intended to discourage birds, and under the parvis were cisterns into which rainwater flowed off the roof through metal pipes. Because of all this, the temple was never damaged by lightning in more than a thousand years, according to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (Paratonnerre, in Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX' siecle [Paris, n.d.], 12:202). This was, as it were, an accident. By contrast, in late19th-century St. Petersburg, architects and builders were explicitly interested in lightning protection, but they wanted to give the rods the appearance of ornamentation. Some wealthy homeowners even had these gilded with noble metals. Numerous extant examples of ornamental lightning rods in St. Petersburg are the work of a smith named Karl Winkler (18601911). At the 1882 Moscow Exhibition of Industry and Arts, Winkler was awarded a gold medal for his artistry in wrought iron. Other St. Petersburg practitioners of the craft were Fedor Dobritsov and Fabian Yuriev, both more or less contemporary with Winkler.