Franklin's lightning rod was a laudable scientific advance of its time. This invention prevented millions of fires and electrical shocks from lightning strikes.
Today, it's been 270 years since Franklin's lightning rod was invented and used. Maybe it's time to upgrade or improve the capabilities of this technology.
That's what Dr Aurélien Houard of ENSTA Paris and co-authors propose in their recent paper. Houard and his team showed that laser pulses can change the direction of lightning strikes.
The study team previously demonstrated the capacity of a laser to ionize air in the laboratory which could cause a 2 million volt spark to jump along a low-density conduit.
To take their idea to a bigger stage, they placed a car-sized laser machine near a tower on Mount Säntis, Switzerland. This tower was chosen because it goes against the saying that lightning never strikes twice in the same place.
Quoted from IFL Science, this tower is struck by lightning about 100 times a year. During the storm that lasted six hours, laser voltages controlled the four directions of the four lightning discharges
One of the explosions occurred under relatively clear skies, recorded using two high-speed cameras. This indicates that it followed the path of the laser beam for at least 50 meters. All accompanied by increased bursts of X-rays .
"Although this area of research has been highly active for more than 20 years, this is the first field test result to experimentally demonstrate laser-guided lightning," the authors wrote.
Two previous attempts to achieve a similar goal failed. The study authors later attributed their success to using a much faster laser voltage, repeated at a scale of a thousand times per second.
As cool as it looks, one might ask whether this technique is practical. Lasers like these would probably be too expensive to build and operate. In addition, buildings such as telecommunications towers have stood firm for years thanks to the well-performing Franklin lightning rods.
Lightning controllers using these lasers took three years to build the engines and their power was within the maintainable range. That's not a very short time and equals all of Europe's electricity consumption. So, does the lightning rod need to be upgraded?