Photo courtesy of Accuweather photo archives
Yesterday the weather in Chicago was raging. What began as a pretty calm and clear evening quickly turned into a violent, howling summer storm with gale force winds. (Winds of 94 miles per hour were recorded 3 miles off the shore of Lake Michigan) The weather report stated that there was something around 200 bolts of lightning in one hour from the storm. It hit fast and was ferocious, trapping me at the climbing gym with my younger brother and his friends for hours when the streets around the building got quickly flooded. I practiced tying knots and worked out my forearms and fingers on the rock wall - it was kind of a pleasant way to take refuge actually. The gymnastics team huddled downstairs with us until the sirens stopped. I peeked out the front window and watched the lightning rip with mad flashes all across the sky, making it look like the synapses of Frankenstein's brain. The sky was full of that unrelenting, merciless energy all night. We got home during a brief lull in the rain, but it got its momentum going once again and the windows were rattling scarily by the time I went to sleep. Mother Nature: more furious than anything anyone has seen.
I stared at the lightning and was mesmerized by the force with which it cracked the atmosphere. It was a thrill to see so much electricity in the air, there was an almost palpable charge. It made me think of the significant moments when I've stopped to watch lightning storms at critical times in my life- high above the ocean in a rainless electrical storm, across the Colorado sky high in the mountains. One lightning bolt contains 3 billion kilowatts of power, said to be enough energy to run a major industrialized city for months.
Looking at the way the ground absorbed the crackling bolts thrown at it through the ionosphere, with enough thunderous force to send vibrations through my body miles away - all those billions of kilowatts disappeared on contact- my thoughts turned to Nicolai Tesla, a discoverer of some of the most significant observations in the field of electrical engineering such as the fact that the earth is a conductor of electricity. He was also known as the "sorceror of lightning".
Said to have been born during an electrical storm, he went on to school the world (alongside Thomas Edison) on the principles of electricity. He devised a transformer which generates artificial lightning by increasing the voltage of a current which gets transferred between oscillating circuits. With this discovery we are able to harness the energy of lightning; now we can even make lightning ourselves. (!)
Tesla is ranked amongst my favorite mad scientists: I have a fondness for eccentric geniuses who advance humanity profoundly and exponentially with the work of their lifetime, yet die unrecognized and in poverty. It is heroic to my romantic nature; he was driven by a curiousity more true, sincere and primal than that which motivates the normal person. A curiousity which in itself drove the industrial revolution and allowed us all to better understand certain awe-inspiring forces of nature, at least the tangible mysteries of the physical world we live in.
Shouts!
I stared at the lightning and was mesmerized by the force with which it cracked the atmosphere. It was a thrill to see so much electricity in the air, there was an almost palpable charge. It made me think of the significant moments when I've stopped to watch lightning storms at critical times in my life- high above the ocean in a rainless electrical storm, across the Colorado sky high in the mountains. One lightning bolt contains 3 billion kilowatts of power, said to be enough energy to run a major industrialized city for months.
Looking at the way the ground absorbed the crackling bolts thrown at it through the ionosphere, with enough thunderous force to send vibrations through my body miles away - all those billions of kilowatts disappeared on contact- my thoughts turned to Nicolai Tesla, a discoverer of some of the most significant observations in the field of electrical engineering such as the fact that the earth is a conductor of electricity. He was also known as the "sorceror of lightning".
Said to have been born during an electrical storm, he went on to school the world (alongside Thomas Edison) on the principles of electricity. He devised a transformer which generates artificial lightning by increasing the voltage of a current which gets transferred between oscillating circuits. With this discovery we are able to harness the energy of lightning; now we can even make lightning ourselves. (!)
Tesla is ranked amongst my favorite mad scientists: I have a fondness for eccentric geniuses who advance humanity profoundly and exponentially with the work of their lifetime, yet die unrecognized and in poverty. It is heroic to my romantic nature; he was driven by a curiousity more true, sincere and primal than that which motivates the normal person. A curiousity which in itself drove the industrial revolution and allowed us all to better understand certain awe-inspiring forces of nature, at least the tangible mysteries of the physical world we live in.
Shouts!
1 comment:
Did you film that?
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