Speaker 1: I have lately made an experiment in electricity that I
Speaker 1: desire never to repeat. Two nights ago, being about to
Speaker 1: kill a turkey by the shock from two large glass
Speaker 1: jars containing as much electrical fire as forty common files,
Speaker 1: I inadvertently took the hole through my own arms and body.
Speaker 1: The company present say the flash was very great, and
Speaker 1: the crack as loud as a pistol, Yet my senses
Speaker 1: being instantly gone, I neither saw the one, nor heard
Speaker 1: the other, nor did I feel the stroke on my hand,
Speaker 1: though afterward I found that it raised a round swelling
Speaker 1: where the fire entered as big as half a pistol bullet,
Speaker 1: by which you may judge the quickness of the electrical fire,
Speaker 1: which by this instance seems to be greater than the sound, light,
Speaker 1: or animal sensation. What I can remember of the matter
Speaker 1: is that I was about to try whether the bottles
Speaker 1: were fully charged by the strength and length of the
Speaker 1: stream issuing to my hand, as I commonly used to do,
Speaker 1: and which I might safely enough had done if I
Speaker 1: had not held the chain in the other hand. I
Speaker 1: then felt what I know not how to describe, a
Speaker 1: universal blow through my whole body, from my head to
Speaker 1: my foot, which seemed within as well as without, after
Speaker 1: which the first thing I took notice of was a violent,
Speaker 1: quick shaking of my body, which gradually my sense as
Speaker 1: gradually returned, And I then thought the bottles must be discharged,
Speaker 1: but could not conceive how till at last I perceived
Speaker 1: the chain in my hand and recollected what I had
Speaker 1: been about to do. That part of my hand and
Speaker 1: fingers which held the chain was left white, as though
Speaker 1: the blood had been driven out, and remained so eight
Speaker 1: to ten minutes after, feeling like dead flesh, and I
Speaker 1: had a numbness in my arms and the back of
Speaker 1: my neck, which continued till the next morning, but wore off.
Speaker 1: Nothing remains now of this shock but a soreness in
Speaker 1: my breastbone, which feels as if I had been bruised.
Speaker 1: I did not fall, but suppose I should have been
Speaker 1: knocked down if I had received the stroke in my head.
Speaker 1: The whole was over in less than a minute.
Speaker 2: I had a lot of fun reading that one.
Speaker 3: So I am really glad that you read that, because
Speaker 3: you always do such a job. And I'm also glad
Speaker 3: because it means that I get to tell you then
Speaker 3: who that quote was.
Speaker 2: From please because I don't know anything about it.
Speaker 3: Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 2: Yes, oh that was my second guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So Benjamin Franklin, as we all know, was a
Speaker 3: huge lover of turkeys, but he was like most fond
Speaker 3: of eating them.
Speaker 2: I absolutely did not know that about him.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, but one of his like preferred methods of
Speaker 3: killing a turkey before he ate it was electrocution until
Speaker 3: this incident in which he was like, wow, that was
Speaker 3: really bad. I could have died, and so he went
Speaker 3: back to like normal killing a turkey. But one of
Speaker 3: my favorite things about this passage is that I think
Speaker 3: this was like in a letter to a friend or something,
Speaker 3: because then he followed it up with Okay, you can
Speaker 3: tell this person, but don't spread it more widely because
Speaker 3: I'm really embarrassed.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodnes nice.
Speaker 1: I also like, don't understand how he was about to
Speaker 1: electrocute this turkey.
Speaker 3: I don't either, because I still feel like I don't
Speaker 3: fully understand electricity.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, but same.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I think that you know, over the course
Speaker 3: of this episode and then the next week's bonus episode,
Speaker 3: will have a greater understanding of how he did that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so too.
Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh.
Speaker 2: And I'm Aaron Allman Updyke.
Speaker 3: And this is this podcast will Kill You.
Speaker 1: And today we're talking about uh, lightning, electricity either both,
Speaker 1: I mean a little bit of both.
Speaker 3: Yeah, electricity and the impact that it has on biological systems,
Speaker 3: especially unexpected electricity. Not like how do our nerve impulses?
Speaker 2: Wait? Yeah, yeah, okay, cool?
Speaker 3: Is it quarantin any time?
Speaker 2: It's quarantin any time. Let's get to it. Let's get
Speaker 2: to it.
Speaker 3: What are we do drinking this week?
Speaker 2: Thunderstruck? Is that what we decided on?
Speaker 3: That is what we decided on. But I want everyone
Speaker 3: to know that I think the discussions for the quarantine
Speaker 3: name for this episode went longer than any other one has,
Speaker 3: at least in recent memory of the past couple of years.
Speaker 3: So I wrote down a few of my favorites. Oh,
Speaker 3: I love it, the power sour m that's a good one,
Speaker 3: Lightning in a jar, Current affairs.
Speaker 1: I really loved all of the current ones because when
Speaker 1: you kept suggesting those, I was like.
Speaker 2: I don't get it. Oh, electric current, okay.
Speaker 3: Super juice, super juice, plug and chug and I think
Speaker 3: finally the least creative, but the one that we were
Speaker 3: both maybe second most tempted by, was energy drink.
Speaker 2: I actually love energy drink, but.
Speaker 3: We went with Thunderstruck. So, Aaron, what is in Thunderstruck.
Speaker 2: Is lemonade, vodka and blue currosou.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's based on a real drink whose name I
Speaker 3: can't remember now, maybe blue Lagoon. It's delicious. Yeah, And
Speaker 3: we'll post the full recipe for our quarantine as well
Speaker 3: as our non alcoholic plasyberrita on our website. This podcast
Speaker 3: will kill you dot com.
Speaker 2: On our website.
Speaker 1: This podcast will kill you dot com. We have everything
Speaker 1: that you could ever want to find on a website.
Speaker 1: We've got merch We've got lists of all of the
Speaker 1: sources from all of our episodes. We have a Goodreads list,
Speaker 1: we have a bookshop dot org affiliate account. You can
Speaker 1: find links to Bloodmobile, our music. You can find our
Speaker 1: Patreon account. You can find That's.
Speaker 3: All of it, right, I think it's close enough.
Speaker 2: It's pretty close. Transcripts.
Speaker 3: There we go. I have one more piece of business, please.
Speaker 3: So a lot of people have asked us how we
Speaker 3: find our first hand accounts, and it's a mix of things, really,
Speaker 3: but one of the ways is that listeners will often
Speaker 3: reach out to us and be like, oh, if you're
Speaker 3: recovering this in the future, I am willing to share
Speaker 3: my story, etc. And so if you have a first
Speaker 3: hand account that you might like to share on the
Speaker 3: podcast or want to at least learn more about it,
Speaker 3: the best way to get in touch is either through
Speaker 3: the contact us form on our website or by emailing
Speaker 3: us at this podcast will Kill You at gmail dot com. Yea,
Speaker 3: and I want to just take this opportunity to say
Speaker 3: a big thank you to everyone who has ever reached
Speaker 3: out to us over the years with their experiences, and
Speaker 3: also for everyone who has ever shared their first hand account. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: should we take a quick break and then get into it.
Speaker 1: Let's okay, So today we're talking about mostly lightning.
Speaker 2: Like when we first were talking about this episode, it
Speaker 2: was a.
Speaker 1: Lightning episode, but then we realize that to talk about lightning,
Speaker 1: we have to also talk about electricity, of course, So
Speaker 1: I want to just say up front, I don't understand electricity.
Speaker 2: It still feels like magic to me.
Speaker 1: Lightning seems to genuinely be magic.
Speaker 2: So that's the end of the episode. Just kidding.
Speaker 1: We're going to do our best as always, But what
Speaker 1: I want to focus on, like you said, Aaron, is
Speaker 1: our bodies responses to electricity, and especially the difference in
Speaker 1: how we react or how electricity reacts with us when
Speaker 1: it comes from say your household outlet versus lightning, because
Speaker 1: they are very different, as it turns out. So electricity, really,
Speaker 1: basically electric current is simply the flow or the movement
Speaker 1: of positively and negatively charged ions. Right, electrons and protons
Speaker 1: moving around.
Speaker 2: That's electricity.
Speaker 1: All of the things around us have charge, either positive
Speaker 1: or negative or neutral charges. Our earth, our atmosphere, our bodies,
Speaker 1: our couches, our cat's hair that we rub, right, We're
Speaker 1: all made up of atoms that have protons and electrons
Speaker 1: and thus carried charges or have the potential to carry charges.
Speaker 1: So electricity is all around us. Lightning, in a very
Speaker 1: very simplified sense, is one massive electric discharge. Essentially, here's
Speaker 1: how it happens. Kind of lightning is created when there
Speaker 1: are temperature differences between air mass. So what happens is
Speaker 1: like the warm air down close to the Earth moves up.
Speaker 1: Since warm air rises, it condenses to form clouds. The
Speaker 1: water droplets freeze to become like ice crystals. Or whatever,
Speaker 1: and they're continually being pushed around by all of the
Speaker 1: air movement, and all of this movement between the ice
Speaker 1: crystals creates this friction that causes electrons and protons to
Speaker 1: be transferred between these water molecules, and they're continually moving
Speaker 1: around in this giant storm, right and the storm is
Speaker 1: moving along the ground. And so what happens is these ions,
Speaker 1: the positive and negative ions, redistribute into these layers, and
Speaker 1: generally the positive ones hang out on the top of
Speaker 1: the cloud. The negative ions accumulate at the bottom, and
Speaker 1: the earth, which usually is kind of negatively charged compared
Speaker 1: to the atmosphere, now has this positive charge because of
Speaker 1: how strong the negative charge at the bottom of.
Speaker 2: This cloud is.
Speaker 1: So these positive charges are accumulating, they're running along the ground,
Speaker 1: they're running up the trees, along buildings, trying to move
Speaker 1: upward towards this cloud to close this gap. And when
Speaker 1: it just gets to be too much, when the potential
Speaker 1: difference between the charges at the top of this cloud
Speaker 1: and the bottom of this cloud and the earth get
Speaker 1: to be just too strong, boom, lightning strike and then thunder,
Speaker 1: which is a really important part of lightning because it
Speaker 1: shows you The power of what's happening thunder is the
Speaker 1: shock waves from this explosive expansion of air that becomes
Speaker 1: superheated and ionized by this massive.
Speaker 2: Bolt of electricity that just shot through it.
Speaker 1: Now, on a really, really, really tiny scale, we are
Speaker 1: all very familiar with phenomenon because it's the same phenomenon
Speaker 1: that creates the static electricity that we're familiar with. Right,
Speaker 1: you pet your cat too hard and then you shock
Speaker 1: their nose by accident.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Like that, that's your example.
Speaker 2: It happens so often.
Speaker 3: I'm like the socks on carpet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna say that too, but I don't
Speaker 1: wear socks as much lately.
Speaker 2: And I don't have a lot of carpet.
Speaker 1: But or like you rub a balloon on your hair, right,
Speaker 1: those actions cause the same kind of ion transfer and
Speaker 1: lighting up of those positive and negative charges, and then
Speaker 1: eventually a little teeny tiny bolt.
Speaker 2: Of lightning happens between you and the floor or your
Speaker 2: cat's nose.
Speaker 1: So that is lightning. And like some real basics about
Speaker 1: how it happens. Now, when it comes to lightning, there
Speaker 1: are a few different ways that it can end up
Speaker 1: traveling from that cloud to your human body. And they vary,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't find good statistics on how often you
Speaker 1: have one versus the other. And really, as we'll see
Speaker 1: when it comes to like lightning strike statistics in general,
Speaker 1: we just don't have good stats.
Speaker 2: But all of these are.
Speaker 1: Possible types of like the way that you would come
Speaker 1: into contact with lightning. First of all, you can have
Speaker 1: a direct strike. If that lightning from that cloud hits
Speaker 1: a person directly, that's.
Speaker 2: A direct strike.
Speaker 1: It's probably less common, but again stats are not great,
Speaker 1: and some papers will say a direct strike is absolutely
Speaker 1: the most deadly, but I think because our stats are
Speaker 1: so poor, it's actually probably hard to get a handle
Speaker 1: on whether or not that's true. But you can imagine
Speaker 1: you're taking a greater amount of that lightning strike if
Speaker 1: it hits you directly versus in some of the other
Speaker 1: ways i'll talk about. So the next way is you
Speaker 1: can have a contact injury, and that happens if you
Speaker 1: are touched an object that's part of the path of
Speaker 1: that current. Like let's say you're touching a fawcet in
Speaker 1: your house and your house pipes get hit by lightning,
Speaker 1: and then it goes through that faucet and into you
Speaker 1: or you're touching a tree at the moment that that
Speaker 1: tree gets hit, that's a contact and tree. Then there's
Speaker 1: something that I think is so fascinating that's called a
Speaker 1: side flash or a splash, and that's when the lightning
Speaker 1: hits that's somewhere nearby to you and then jumps it
Speaker 1: crosses an air gap and then jumps to you as
Speaker 1: a nearby person. So you're just like splashed with some
Speaker 1: of the force of the lightning as it makes its
Speaker 1: way towards the ground.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's really fascinating. Yeah, So the numbers that we
Speaker 3: have are not great, like you said, and so I'm
Speaker 3: guessing that I already know the answer to this question,
Speaker 3: which is like how much do we know about the
Speaker 3: strength or variability of those different types of contact with lightning.
Speaker 1: That's a great question. I don't fully know it, definitely,
Speaker 1: like the less direct the contact is the less total
Speaker 1: amount of electricity or energy that you're being exposed to.
Speaker 1: But in all cases, the duration of contact is unbelievably
Speaker 1: short in all of these cases. And then there is
Speaker 1: also ground current, and that is if the lightning hits
Speaker 1: the ground near you and then spreads out like radially,
Speaker 1: and then comes up and hits you from the ground up.
Speaker 1: Those are the main types. There's also and I think
Speaker 1: this is just oh my goodness, there has been reports
Speaker 1: of something that's called an upward streamer. So you know
Speaker 1: how I said that all those positive charges are running
Speaker 1: along the ground and up to try and get to
Speaker 1: the cloud as that energy from the cloud is coming down.
Speaker 1: So there has been reports of people being struck from
Speaker 1: the energy just from those upward streamers of energy, even
Speaker 1: without them making contact with the actual lightning strike, which
Speaker 1: is like what.
Speaker 3: Well, it's also interesting, like because how do you determine
Speaker 3: what it was?
Speaker 2: I will post the paper where they did this.
Speaker 1: It was a really interesting like forensic analysis paper where
Speaker 1: they showed like they determined, you know, it wasn't all
Speaker 1: of these other types and it couldn't have been from
Speaker 1: the electric lines they were working on because of the
Speaker 1: patterns of injury, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, that was like what they were left with.
Speaker 1: And I think it had been like a theoretical concept
Speaker 1: prior to that, but this was one of the first
Speaker 1: like documented look, this is what caused this injury?
Speaker 3: Oh man?
Speaker 2: Yeah, wow, So that is.
Speaker 1: How you can be struck by lightning. What happens when
Speaker 1: you get hit?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot.
Speaker 1: Oh, Aaron, There's just so much and so much of
Speaker 1: What it comes down to that I think is so
Speaker 1: interesting is that a we do not understand lightning. We
Speaker 1: do not understand the effects that it has on the body.
Speaker 1: And two, the rules that apply to electricity and electric
Speaker 1: shocks and the body don't seem to apply to lightning.
Speaker 2: Why let's let me get into it.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the papers that describe both lightning
Speaker 1: and electricity injuries talk a lot about the characteristics of
Speaker 1: electricity that determine how much of the electric current actually
Speaker 1: flows through someone's body. Right, So these papers tend to
Speaker 1: focus on six main things. Six component of electricity. They
Speaker 1: talk about the type of current, which is whether it's
Speaker 1: an alternating current or a direct current. They talk about
Speaker 1: the voltage, the voltage being the pressure that causes that
Speaker 1: current to flow. They talk about the amperage, which is
Speaker 1: like the volume of electrons that are flowing. It's a
Speaker 1: measure of the rate of flow. And then they talk
Speaker 1: about the resistance, which is an intrinsic property of an object,
Speaker 1: and different body tissues have different resistances. It's like the
Speaker 1: ease or the difficulty with which the electric current can
Speaker 1: actually travel. And then they talk about the pathway that
Speaker 1: the current takes, which I kind of talked with lightning.
Speaker 1: The different ways that you can come into contact. And
Speaker 1: if you're thinking of household electronics, you can grab it
Speaker 1: with your hand by accident. Little kids might put electric
Speaker 1: cords in their mouth, right, So that will determine literally
Speaker 1: like where in your body is this current going to flow?
Speaker 1: And then the duration of contact. Now, when it comes
Speaker 1: to lightning, the voltage and the amperage that we're talking
Speaker 1: about unbelievably high, like ten or more million volts and
Speaker 1: forty or more thousand amps.
Speaker 3: I don't really I don't have like a frame of
Speaker 3: reference for that, but that sounds.
Speaker 2: Like a lot.
Speaker 1: So your household electric outlet is like one hundred and
Speaker 1: ten volts and like fifteen or twenty amps.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yeah, okay, So it's a lot.
Speaker 2: It's a lot.
Speaker 1: But lightning does a few things that regular electricity doesn't do.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's a very different type of current.
Speaker 1: So your household electric outlet is alternating current, a battery
Speaker 1: is direct current, but lightning some papers that I read
Speaker 1: said that lightning is like a direct current. But the
Speaker 1: paper that I liked the best described it as quote
Speaker 1: a unidirectional massive current impulse.
Speaker 3: Right, it's a strike, it's not a current, and that
Speaker 3: there's not a continuous flow for exactly the time exactly.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing that makes it so massively different
Speaker 1: from any other source of electricity is that the duration
Speaker 1: of contact is instantaneous. It's fractions of milliseconds, whereas, especially
Speaker 1: if you come into contact with a household electric source
Speaker 1: or something that's like putting out alternating current, your body
Speaker 1: reacts to that alternating current by having repetitive contractions, so
Speaker 1: it can you to actually grab and continue to hold
Speaker 1: on to that source, prolonging the duration of contact and
Speaker 1: therefore prolonging the damage. But this is the literal opposite,
Speaker 1: because it's such an instantaneous thing that it actually causes
Speaker 1: an effect that I still don't fully understand.
Speaker 2: That's called flashover. Let's talk about flashover.
Speaker 1: So if you think of your body as an empty
Speaker 1: can bear with me. When you come into contact with
Speaker 1: like our home electricity, an ac current. It flows in
Speaker 1: and out of that can, in and out, in and out,
Speaker 1: and every time that it flows in and out and
Speaker 1: that current reverses. It's doing damage the whole time, over
Speaker 1: seconds and seconds, or even just a fraction of a second,
Speaker 1: but a long fraction, like almost a whole second. That
Speaker 1: creates a lot of thermal energy, right because that electrical
Speaker 1: energy gets transferred into thermal energy. That results in a
Speaker 1: lot of burning superficial as well as deep burns as
Speaker 1: it penetrates through our tissues or burns through the can
Speaker 1: or whatever with lightning. The amount of current and the
Speaker 1: rate at which it travels is so massive that that
Speaker 1: can gets filled up instantaneously and the rest of that
Speaker 1: current flows out and over the can. It spills all
Speaker 1: around it, rather than staying contained within and causing damage
Speaker 1: that is flash over, and so as it flows over
Speaker 1: it can cause other damage that like normal electricity wouldn't
Speaker 1: cause because it's flowing out over your body rather than through.
Speaker 2: It, even though it's going through it.
Speaker 1: Also, Yeah, but again it happens so quickly that we're
Speaker 1: exposed to all of that current for a matter of
Speaker 1: fractions of milliseconds, So it can definitely cause super fit damage.
Speaker 1: It can melt our clothes to our skin, It can
Speaker 1: rip apart clothes from steam vapor explosion of the steam
Speaker 1: within our clothes. It can singe your hair, it can
Speaker 1: heat up metal buckles.
Speaker 2: And melt them.
Speaker 1: But it's a very different pattern, especially of burns, than
Speaker 1: we see in typical electric burns. It's like very very different.
Speaker 1: Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 3: It's really interesting, and I think it's like very I mean, honestly,
Speaker 3: it's kind of terrifying. It enormous power.
Speaker 1: I think one of the ways that I started to
Speaker 1: think about this was that lightning strikes, the damage tends
Speaker 1: to be a lot less physical, so you might not
Speaker 1: see very much damage even if you look with like
Speaker 1: an MRI or with imaging. It's almost like it just
Speaker 1: does electrical damage in our bodies and we can't see
Speaker 1: what that ends up doing. Whereas electricity, if you're exposed
Speaker 1: to it from a household source, because that duration of
Speaker 1: exposure is longer, that electrical energy gets transferred into heat energy.
Speaker 1: So you have a lot more typical burns, you have
Speaker 1: a lot more visual and physical damage that we're able
Speaker 1: to see, and these type of injuries that your brain
Speaker 1: probably associates with electricity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense, and I think that that seems
Speaker 3: to be what makes it so difficult to characterize and
Speaker 3: to like categorize and to understand because we still it
Speaker 3: seems like we still don't know so much about like
Speaker 3: how our brain delivers signals and blah blah blah blah blah,
Speaker 3: and so when something goes wrong, we don't know. We
Speaker 3: know that something went wrong, but we don't know how
Speaker 3: went wrong.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But so let's talk about what kinds of damage
Speaker 1: this lightning is actually inflicting.
Speaker 2: Shall we.
Speaker 1: Let's hear it, because it's not to say that lightning
Speaker 1: doesn't cause physical damage. It certainly does. It's just quite
Speaker 1: different than the damage that we see with other types
Speaker 1: of electricity. So the most instantaneously deadly injury that happens
Speaker 1: with lightning strikes is damage to our heart. Our heart
Speaker 1: has its own little electrical system, so especially if current
Speaker 1: of any type, not just lightning, is passing vertically through
Speaker 1: our bodies, it has a pretty good chance of passing
Speaker 1: over our heart, which sits kind of right in the center,
Speaker 1: and that current can then disrupt our heart's internal electric
Speaker 1: system and lead to arrhythmias. It can lead to acistily
Speaker 1: essentially stopping the heart entirely, or it can lead to
Speaker 1: what's called ventricular fibrillation, which is when the bottom of
Speaker 1: your heart, the part that's supposed to pump the blood
Speaker 1: out of your heart to the rest of your body,
Speaker 1: stops contracting and really instead goes like and fibrillates. Not
Speaker 1: a good Sorry, you can't see my hands, but.
Speaker 3: It was a good I think it was an adequate
Speaker 3: sound effecting.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: So what lightning can do is it can cause one
Speaker 1: single instantaneous depolarization of the entire heart, one massive contraction
Speaker 1: that just then.
Speaker 2: Stops the heart. And that's what it does.
Speaker 1: Often, because your heart has its own little electrical system,
Speaker 1: it will start again on its own. But if the
Speaker 1: respiratory centers of your brain, which control our respiratory drive,
Speaker 1: also get affected by this current, then you can have
Speaker 1: respiratory arrest as well.
Speaker 2: So you stop breathing.
Speaker 1: If you stop breathing, your heart stops beating. That then
Speaker 1: can prolong the cardiac arrest. So lightning strike can cause death.
Speaker 1: I read anywhere from five to thirty percent of the time.
Speaker 1: Most sources said ten to thirty percent, and a few
Speaker 1: papers said five to ten percent of the time, And
Speaker 1: usually it's immediate death because of that cardiac arrest either
Speaker 1: without the heart ever returning to normal function, or if
Speaker 1: you have both a cardiac and a respiratory arrest without resuscitation,
Speaker 1: then you have death because of that. And one thing
Speaker 1: that's really interesting about lightning strikes specifically is that it's
Speaker 1: actually far more likely to have successful resuscitation in the
Speaker 1: case of a cardiopulmonary arrest from lightning than from a
Speaker 1: lot of other reasons for cardiac arrest. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different hypotheses as to like why. Part of
Speaker 1: it might be that because it happens, so I just
Speaker 1: keep saying this like it feels repetitive, but it is
Speaker 1: so instantaneous, this complete stop, that there's a thought that
Speaker 1: maybe you have more time before the tissue damage starts
Speaker 1: to occur, right whereas with a heart attack or something
Speaker 1: that blockage starts to cause cell damage over a period
Speaker 1: of seconds or minutes, so you've already lost time. But
Speaker 1: many times people who are struck by lightning are otherwise
Speaker 1: young and quite healthy, so it might just be that
Speaker 1: they have more reserves, so to speak. We don't really know,
Speaker 1: but it's really interesting because it changes the paradox of
Speaker 1: for example, in an emergency situation who should be the
Speaker 1: first person that you like go to to try and save,
Speaker 1: and likeag is like opposite exactly with lightning, it's the
Speaker 1: person who looks dead that's the person you go to first,
Speaker 1: because their heart probably stopped, they might have stopped breathing,
Speaker 1: but you'll probably get them back, Whereas if someone is breathing,
Speaker 1: is moaning, is making any kind of movement or noise,
Speaker 1: they're going to be okay, most likely in the immediate
Speaker 1: emergent period. But so that's kind of the most extreme
Speaker 1: thing that happens. But lightning can also cause a lot
Speaker 1: of skin damage. It can cause linear burns from water
Speaker 1: on the skin being vaporized. It can cause these fascinating
Speaker 1: feathery snowflake lightning strike patterns that actually aren't burns at all,
Speaker 1: and we don't even really understand what causes them, but
Speaker 1: they tend to disappear in a matter of hours. It
Speaker 1: can cause these small round burns that can be deep,
Speaker 1: but they're really small in diameter or in area. So
Speaker 1: in general, the skin and burn injuries that we see
Speaker 1: from lightning tend to be much less severe, first of all,
Speaker 1: than you would expect from such a huge amount of electricity.
Speaker 1: But also less severe than what we see from a
Speaker 1: lot of other electric sources. Lightning, though, can cause a
Speaker 1: lot more trauma damage than some other electric sources, except
Speaker 1: for perhaps high tension wires. But because of the shock
Speaker 1: wave that's generated by lightning, that shock wave itself can
Speaker 1: actually cause barrow trauma, which can cause injury to our
Speaker 1: internal organs. It can cause a concussion, it can rupture
Speaker 1: the ear drums, that is, it's terrifying. It's also thought
Speaker 1: that during flash over the current can actually re enter
Speaker 1: our body through our eyes and our nose, which can
Speaker 1: then cause ocular damage like cataracts. And then of course
Speaker 1: you can have trauma from falls, from being blasted away,
Speaker 1: or from shrapnel from a tree, etc. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different ways that lightning can harm you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course there's the neurologic damage, and the neurologic effects
Speaker 1: can also be pretty wide ranging. They can be transient
Speaker 1: where they go away really quickly, and it's actually pretty
Speaker 1: common to have something called karunoparalysis, which is pretty specific
Speaker 1: to lightning strikes. It's a total paralysis, especially of the
Speaker 1: lower extremities, but it's transient and it goes away within
Speaker 1: a matter of hours. Not fully understood, lightning strikes can
Speaker 1: cause a lot of autonomic instability, which means like your
Speaker 1: autonomic nervous system is the part of your body that
Speaker 1: controls all of our involuntary actions, your heart rate, your temperature,
Speaker 1: control your blood vessel, your digestion. Right, so this can
Speaker 1: manifest as temperature instability, as a fast heart rate for
Speaker 1: seemingly no reason, as blood pressure problems. But again, these
Speaker 1: type of findings tend to improve reallygelatively quickly. There can
Speaker 1: also be immediate effects from a lightning strike neurologically that
Speaker 1: don't recover as quickly, that are more prolonged, and that
Speaker 1: can happen either from direct damage from electric current or
Speaker 1: from things like a schemic injury from like a hemorrhage
Speaker 1: or a stroke. If you have damage to blood vessels,
Speaker 1: et cetera, gotcha. And then there are a lot of
Speaker 1: delayed onset of symptoms that can be anything from movement
Speaker 1: disorders like if there's motor neuron damage. But then of
Speaker 1: course there are neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric findings that in many
Speaker 1: cases can be profound and can be completely life changing,
Speaker 1: and we do not understand the mechanism or the extent.
Speaker 3: It's so I feel like lightning is portrayed as like, oh,
Speaker 3: it's this deadly thing, which it absolutely is, and if
Speaker 3: you survive it, then you have special powers afterwards where
Speaker 3: you can suddenly play the guitar or speak nine different
Speaker 3: languages that you didn't know before. And like, first of
Speaker 3: all those stories, I looked into a couple of them,
Speaker 3: and they're not They're not true. They're obviously not true. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but I think also what's glossed over is that, yes,
Speaker 3: you can survive lightning, but it can be hugely disruptive
Speaker 3: for the rest of your life or at least for
Speaker 3: like way longer afterwards. I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: No, I absolutely did not either. So the neuropsychiatric effects,
Speaker 1: they can be very wide ranging. They can be anything
Speaker 1: from like photophobia so difficulty with light, hyperacousis so like
Speaker 1: really sensitive to sounds. It can cause emotional liability, mood
Speaker 1: swings that go in a second from like really really
Speaker 1: overjoyed to like everything is terrible but something that you
Speaker 1: have absolutely no control over, sleep disturbances. It can cause
Speaker 1: assnxiety or hypervigilance. It can result in a lot of
Speaker 1: memory deficits, especially in working memory, or difficulty with word
Speaker 1: finding or auditory memory. There's been studies that have shown
Speaker 1: that it can affect your processing speed. Post traumatic stress
Speaker 1: disorder happens in about thirty percent of people after a
Speaker 1: lightning injury. It's so wide ranging, and I think what's
Speaker 1: so important about this type of neuropsychiatric findings is the
Speaker 1: downstream effect that these can have on somebody's life, because
Speaker 1: they not only can affect the way that somebody interacts
Speaker 1: with the world, but they then can go on to
Speaker 1: affect a person's relationships, marriages, friendships, things that make a
Speaker 1: person who they are, which is terrifying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it also seems, I think, probably very frustrating
Speaker 3: that we know so little about this, which means that
Speaker 3: we know so little.
Speaker 2: About how to treat or help provide.
Speaker 3: Any sort of symptom management in terms of those sorts
Speaker 3: of things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it comes down to we know
Speaker 1: so little about how the brain works.
Speaker 2: Yeah that how do we.
Speaker 1: Know how this you know, instantaneous massive force of electricity,
Speaker 1: How has that affected the wiring of your brain? It
Speaker 1: affects it, right, we know, but we don't understand how.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Aaron, that's a very long winded and probably
Speaker 1: not detailed enough.
Speaker 2: Lightning.
Speaker 3: It's so interesting because there's so much there, but it's
Speaker 3: also like so many questions. Oh my gosh, I know,
Speaker 3: making me flashbacks to the multiple sclerosis episode.
Speaker 2: So Aarin, tell me, how did we get here?
Speaker 3: I'm definitely not going to answer those questions.
Speaker 1: I don't even know how to ask a question about lightning, honestly.
Speaker 3: Well, I will take you on a tour through the
Speaker 3: history of electricity right after this break. All right, so
Speaker 3: the entire history of electricity, let's begin. Just kidding, there's
Speaker 3: absolutely no way I'm going to do that, not even
Speaker 3: going to try, never planned on it. Yeah, that's outside
Speaker 3: my reach. But instead, what I decided to do was
Speaker 3: to pick four topics or stories or whatever in the
Speaker 3: history of electricity and tell you about them. Okay, so
Speaker 3: it's not going to be as deep of a dive
Speaker 3: as I normally do on like a topic, but I
Speaker 3: think it's going to be a fun or at least
Speaker 3: interesting time, and I think that you'll end up with
Speaker 3: a lot of trivia about electricity.
Speaker 2: I can't wait.
Speaker 3: Right off the bat, I want to shout out the
Speaker 3: primary source I used, which is the newest book from
Speaker 3: doctor Timothy Jorgenson called spark It's all about electricity from
Speaker 3: a biological perspective. It is a fascinating and excellent read,
Speaker 3: and I really loved it. And you might remember doctor
Speaker 3: Jorgenson from our episode on radiation that we did a
Speaker 3: couple of seasons ago, when we had him on to
Speaker 3: explain how in the heck radiation worked. And since doctor
Speaker 3: Jorgenson does such an amazing job of explaining these super
Speaker 3: complicated topics in a way that I feel like I
Speaker 3: can actually understand, I wanted to have him on again
Speaker 3: to explain how precisely electricity works. So tune in next
Speaker 3: week for the bonus episode where I get to ask
Speaker 3: him a bunch of questions about how electricity works and
Speaker 3: why it's so important in understanding biology. Yeah, okay, but
Speaker 3: are you ready to hear my little vignettes?
Speaker 2: Yes, you can't wait.
Speaker 3: Do you want to know the four topics or do
Speaker 3: you want to be surprised?
Speaker 2: I think I want to be surprised.
Speaker 3: Okay, here we go. Number one. I've got to start,
Speaker 3: of course with lightning. Oh yes, and specifically one of
Speaker 3: the most famous stories in the history of lightning is.
Speaker 2: It BF and the kit and the key.
Speaker 3: It is finally.
Speaker 2: A history story I at least have heard.
Speaker 3: Of, but starting way before that, people have long observed
Speaker 3: and revered lightning like it holds a really significant place
Speaker 3: in many historical religions or mythology. You have Zeus in
Speaker 3: Greek mythology, thor in Norse mythology. Indra is the Hindu
Speaker 3: god of storms. Uko is the finish god of thunder
Speaker 3: and sky and weather, and the finish word ukunen means lightning,
Speaker 3: and in the traditional religion of Bantu tribes in Africa,
Speaker 3: lightning is a sign of the gods being angry. And
Speaker 3: there's also representations of lightning in art and etchings going
Speaker 3: back thousands and thousands of years. And the fascination that
Speaker 3: people had with lightning and the power, like the mystical
Speaker 3: power they ascribed to it, It's completely understandable, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: it's still fascinating and terrifying. But I'm not here to
Speaker 3: talk about lightning in mythology, even though I would love
Speaker 3: to do that. But what I really want to talk
Speaker 3: about is when people realized what lightning was and how
Speaker 3: they gained that understanding. Electricity itself has long, long been
Speaker 3: recognized by people, and not necessarily in the context of lightning.
Speaker 3: Like people didn't look at lightning and immediately go, that's electricity.
Speaker 3: The word electrical comes from the Latin word electricus, meaning
Speaker 3: amber like, which refers to the fact that amber, when
Speaker 3: rubbed with a piece of wool, gets statically charged, and
Speaker 3: so you get little shocks of static electricity, which is
Speaker 3: actually the way you can tell whether it's real amber
Speaker 3: or not. But people saw this characteristic of amber, and
Speaker 3: it was believed to have mystical or healing properties for
Speaker 3: that reason, For this like electrical reason, there are amber
Speaker 3: pendants dating back to twelve thousand BCE, for instance. And
Speaker 3: over time, people began observing static electricity in other materials
Speaker 3: and began to characterize as much as they could about
Speaker 3: how this electricity worked and how these materials behaved under
Speaker 3: certain circumstances. And this process of observation and recording and
Speaker 3: reporting and so on it allowed people to harness the
Speaker 3: power of electricity, at least to a certain degree, a
Speaker 3: small degree, pretty small for centuries, and I'm glossing over
Speaker 3: a lot here. The only way that people could intentionally
Speaker 3: produce static electricity is by rubbing materials together petting your
Speaker 3: cat really hard, just kidding, like rubbing amber with wool,
Speaker 3: But doing that manually meant that the amount that you
Speaker 3: could generate was pretty limited. So people began inventing tools
Speaker 3: to help, such as hand crank tools that rotated an
Speaker 3: object against a piece of silk, a static electricity machine,
Speaker 3: and ways to temporarily store that static electricity.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 3: By the mid seventeen hundreds, the concept of electricity had
Speaker 3: generated and I put a little asterisk, yeah, a lot
Speaker 3: of attention and interest, and people would only become more
Speaker 3: and more fascinated by this over the rest of the century.
Speaker 3: So where does Benjamin Franklin fit into all this? I
Speaker 3: teased his name, and now I haven't talked about him yet. Okay,
Speaker 3: So the classic story of ben Franklin is what, oh.
Speaker 1: He like flew a kite into a cloud and got
Speaker 1: electrocuted by lightning?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Right, is something like that. I feel like I
Speaker 3: feel like I learned it as Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, okay by flying his kite in a lightning storm.
Speaker 3: But that obviously that didn't happen, right, People already knew
Speaker 3: that electricity existed. We also don't know if the kite
Speaker 3: experiment happened itself, or if Ben Franklin was involved, or
Speaker 3: if he just designed the experiment, but it seems probable
Speaker 3: that it did actually happen. So if this story has
Speaker 3: been like misrepresented over time and it's not really quite truthful,
Speaker 3: why do we all still know about it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Tell me why, Eric?
Speaker 3: Okay. So, several people, including Ben Franklin, had floated the
Speaker 3: idea that lightning storms were electrical. A lightning strike looks
Speaker 3: like a giant spark in the sky, basically like a
Speaker 3: giant sized version of that static electricity discharge spark on
Speaker 3: your cat's nose, And so people thought that maybe electricity
Speaker 3: was stored in storm clouds and then discharged under certain conditions.
Speaker 3: That's a reasonable hypothesis, but that's all it was. It
Speaker 3: was just hypothesis, and no one knew for sure, And
Speaker 3: so Ben wanted to find out. Ben were on first
Speaker 3: name basis, of course we are. So he devised an
Speaker 3: experiment that fortunately went through several revisions because the first
Speaker 3: versions were like incredibly dangerous, even more so than the
Speaker 3: final one ended up being. And they involved like a
Speaker 3: person standing on top of a wooden platform holding a
Speaker 3: metal rod in the middle of the storm and stuff
Speaker 3: like that not good ideas, and so Ben made some
Speaker 3: adjustments to this experiment to make it safer. So he
Speaker 3: decided that all he needed was a kite that had
Speaker 3: like a metal rod attached a key, a device called
Speaker 3: a lighten jar, which is essentially used to store static electricity.
Speaker 3: Apparently it's like a modern day capacitor. I don't know
Speaker 3: how that works, so I'm just going to say it's
Speaker 3: a jar that's used to store static electricity. Okay, yep.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 3: He also needed a silk ribbon and nerves of steel.
Speaker 3: The only thing left to do was to wait for
Speaker 3: the right storm, which arrived in Philadelphia in June of
Speaker 3: seventeen fifty two. According to reports from that time, Ben
Speaker 3: and his son went out into the storm and threw
Speaker 3: the kite up into the skies. The metal rod attached
Speaker 3: to the kite picked up some of the ambient electricity
Speaker 3: from the storm, not lightning itself, because he probably would
Speaker 3: have died if he'd been struck by lightning or at
Speaker 3: least been severely injured, and that electricity traveled down the
Speaker 3: wet twine string into the key that was tied to
Speaker 3: the twine and Ben was like, is this key charged?
Speaker 3: Is this key of electricity? And he felt a little
Speaker 3: spark and so he was like perfect. So he was
Speaker 3: able to collect some of the storm's electricity and store
Speaker 3: it in that lighten jar.
Speaker 1: So he did it just with the storm, not with lightning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a big difference.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a big difference. And I think that there
Speaker 3: probably were strikes that happened, Like it was clearly like
Speaker 3: a you know, thunderstorm, lightning storm or whatever, but he
Speaker 3: was able to collect that electricity without a lightning strike.
Speaker 2: Fascinating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's a It was a huge deal. And
Speaker 3: I also just want to take a moment to say,
Speaker 3: don't do this at home. Yeah, probably because it's still
Speaker 3: a very dangerous experiment. And actually, the year after he
Speaker 3: did this kite flying experiment, another scientist tried it elsewhere
Speaker 3: but was killed by ball lightning. So yeah, anyway, so
Speaker 3: newspapers all over published the accounts of Ben Franklin's experiment
Speaker 3: and it made him like quite the celebrity. And even
Speaker 3: though he didn't discover electricity in this kite situation, his
Speaker 3: experiment did teach us several things. The first is that
Speaker 3: it showed that lightning is indeed electrical, right. The phenomenon
Speaker 3: that you had when you rubbed amber was the same,
Speaker 3: but on a much much larger scale that you saw
Speaker 3: in nature when there was a thunderstorm. Another is that
Speaker 3: it hinted at the enormous electrical power in storms and
Speaker 3: how we could possibly someday either harness it or that
Speaker 3: we could maybe generate great amounts of electricity ourselves. And
Speaker 3: the last big thing that I'll mention is that this
Speaker 3: experiment kind of immediately showed that lightning rods like the
Speaker 3: rod attached to the kite, could be used to protect structures,
Speaker 3: which is an idea that Ben Franklin and others had
Speaker 3: been working on for a few years. I think that
Speaker 3: many of us, or at least I'll speak for myself,
Speaker 3: I definitely take it for granted that when I am
Speaker 3: inside my home, I am protected from lightning, Oh my gosh, yes,
Speaker 3: or like in a public building.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: But A that hasn't always been the case, and b
Speaker 3: it still is not the case for many people. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And in Ben Franklin's time, lightning posed a serious risk
Speaker 3: to people's houses and their crops and their lives, and
Speaker 3: there were always like newspaper reports of like these deadly
Speaker 3: lightning strikes and it seemed to like be a very
Speaker 3: scary and real constant threat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I absolutely reading this made me so much more terrified
Speaker 1: of lightning because I never realized how easy it would
Speaker 1: be to not have the protection that I have inside
Speaker 1: my home.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. And so when this experiment showed that lightning rods
Speaker 3: could be used to like protect your house or your building,
Speaker 3: people jumped on the idea and they begin installing them
Speaker 3: in houses in public buildings, and some of these are
Speaker 3: still in use today, such as the one on the
Speaker 3: Maryland State House, which is one of Ben's original rods,
Speaker 3: installed in seventeen eighty eight.
Speaker 2: That's pretty cool, I know, But I.
Speaker 3: Also just think this is interesting, and this is sort
Speaker 3: of where I go right into like trivia mode here.
Speaker 3: These lightning rods weren't universally popular. Churches actually didn't readily
Speaker 3: adopt lightning rods because many of these churches had bell
Speaker 3: towers ringing bells, and ringing bells were widely believed to
Speaker 3: protect the church from lightning. And apparently there are bells
Speaker 3: that have this inscription of a Latin phrase that translated
Speaker 3: into English means I break the lightning.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 3: I think that's so interesting. Turns out bells do not
Speaker 3: protect you from lightning, and in fact can be quite dangerous,
Speaker 3: especially because in a storm, bell ringers were called to
Speaker 3: go ring the bells, and so they'd be ringing this
Speaker 3: wet rope and then get struck by lightning, and so
Speaker 3: a lot of deaths happen that way. So I want
Speaker 3: to wrap up this first story with a few pieces
Speaker 3: of trivia about lightning in twenty sixteen. This is just
Speaker 3: like literally like bullet points. Here. In twenty sixteen, three
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty three reindeer in Norway were killed like
Speaker 3: all at the same time while huddling together during a storm.
Speaker 3: What uh huh. The longest lasting recorded lightning strike was
Speaker 3: seventeen point one seconds in a storm over Uruguay and
Speaker 3: northern Argentina in June of twenty twenty. Oh No, and
Speaker 3: apparently the longest single flash was four hundred and seventy
Speaker 3: seven point two miles or seven hundred and sixty eight kilometers,
Speaker 3: just like across parts of the southern US in April
Speaker 3: twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Okay, trivia over, Moving on to number two Ben's kite
Speaker 3: flying it had expanded the boundaries of what electricity could
Speaker 3: be and how and where it could appear. And in
Speaker 3: the decades after his experiment, electricity researchers dug deeper into
Speaker 3: the characteristics of electricity and especially whether different special types
Speaker 3: of electricity existed. Was all electricity the same? And this
Speaker 3: ultimately led to a huge debate over something called animal electricity,
Speaker 3: and that debate, in turn led to one of the
Speaker 3: most impactful advancements in the history of electricity. Okay, So,
Speaker 3: animal electricity was this idea put forth in the seventeen
Speaker 3: hundreds and championed heavily in the late seventeen hundreds by
Speaker 3: an Italian researcher named Luigi Galvani. Okay. And it was
Speaker 3: the idea that all animals created and stored electricity in
Speaker 3: their bodies, particularly in their brains, and that this animal
Speaker 3: electricity was responsible for movement.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: So he believed that this type of electricity was unique
Speaker 3: to living things only, and it was not the same
Speaker 3: electricity that you could store in a leiden jar, for instance,
Speaker 3: And part of why he was so adamant that this
Speaker 3: was the way things were and that animal electricity was
Speaker 3: unique is because he was deeply religious and he believed
Speaker 3: that it was heresy to try to understand the inner
Speaker 3: workings of God's creations or to try to imitate them.
Speaker 3: And so he was like, no, if you can generate
Speaker 3: satic electricity and store that in a lighten jar, there's
Speaker 3: no way that that could be the same thing that
Speaker 3: is in animals.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay.
Speaker 3: So to prove that animal electricity existed, Galvani did this
Speaker 3: series of experiments involving dead frogs in different metal wires.
Speaker 3: So when he attached these frog's legs to the wires,
Speaker 3: he noticed that they jumped or twitched, which he concluded
Speaker 3: was proof that the wires were simply allowing the stored
Speaker 3: up animal electricity to be released, like opening the valve.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I don't understand how you reached
Speaker 1: that conclusion, But okay, Galvani, well give me some more.
Speaker 3: You know who else didn't understand how he could reach
Speaker 3: that conclusion was another Italian researcher, Alessandro Volta ah Volta
Speaker 3: Volta and so Volta was the opposite of Galvani in
Speaker 3: like every way, and so he looked at this experience
Speaker 3: and was like, just like you said, I don't know
Speaker 3: how you could conclude that it was the frog and
Speaker 3: not the wires. So on the two sides of this,
Speaker 3: Galvani saying, no, the movement is coming from internal electricity,
Speaker 3: from the animal itself, and Volta was like, no, it
Speaker 3: is the application of external electricity causing the movement. And
Speaker 3: the two went back and forth in their feud until
Speaker 3: Volta decided that he needed to settle the matter once
Speaker 3: and for all. So he was he was always experimenting
Speaker 3: with things, and he had noticed that when he placed
Speaker 3: coins made of different metals on his tongue and like, yeah,
Speaker 3: put them down, he felt a bit of a tingle,
Speaker 3: kind of like an electric shock. And the strength and
Speaker 3: the strength of that tingle depended on which types of
Speaker 3: metals the coins were made of. Okay, And so he
Speaker 3: wanted to understand what was going on Like that seemed
Speaker 3: to him like electricity, But how could he use that?
Speaker 3: And so he went to the literature and he came
Speaker 3: across the description of an animal that gave him a
Speaker 3: little spark of inspiration.
Speaker 2: I love the acube drop in these uh huh.
Speaker 3: Of the torpedo fish, also called the electric red Oh, Yeah,
Speaker 3: torpedo fish are so cool. So torpedo fish are kinds
Speaker 3: of rays found in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean and in
Speaker 3: the Mediterranean, And what makes them so unbelievably fascinating is
Speaker 3: that they have the ability to generate an electric shock
Speaker 3: so strong that it can knock a person unconscious.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yes, they use this to stun prey of course. Oh,
Speaker 3: I was so tempted to go into the evolutionary history
Speaker 3: of electricity, electrosensory organs and fish and stuff like that,
Speaker 3: but I resisted. But people had been aware of these
Speaker 3: torpedo fish for hundreds even thousands of years, and they
Speaker 3: were thought to have mystical properties because of this shock.
Speaker 3: Of course, they were used by some physicians in ancient
Speaker 3: Rome to treat various medical issues, like they would just
Speaker 3: like put the torpedo fish on the person. One of
Speaker 3: the ailments that they were used for is hemorrhoids second owl.
Speaker 3: I know, like terrible. But the nature of this shock
Speaker 3: that they delivered was debated. Was it electricity? There was
Speaker 3: no visible spark, so was it actually just the sting
Speaker 3: or was it something totally different. In the seventeen seventies,
Speaker 3: so a couple of decades before the debate between Galvani
Speaker 3: and Volta kind of came to a head. An English
Speaker 3: scientist named Henry Cavendish showed that the torpedo fish produced electricity,
Speaker 3: But still there was this question of like, well, what
Speaker 3: kind of electricity is it? Is this the same kind
Speaker 3: that we could artificially produce, or is it this animal electricity?
Speaker 3: And so when Volta came across descriptions of this fish
Speaker 3: and particularly their electric organs, these columns of jelly filled disks,
Speaker 3: he thought, I wonder if these work in the same
Speaker 3: way that my metal coins on my tongue do. Like
Speaker 3: just a couple of coins stacked together give me a
Speaker 3: light tingle. But if I increase the number of coins
Speaker 3: that touch like the way these columns of disk in
Speaker 3: the electric fish are arranged, would the amount of electricity
Speaker 3: also increase and lead to a larger shock. Huh? So
Speaker 3: he tried it out. He stacked disks of copper and
Speaker 3: zinc and other metals along with cloth dipped in either
Speaker 3: dilute acidic solution or salt water, until he had this
Speaker 3: big pile of disks. He attached wires to each end,
Speaker 3: and then he tested it on his tongue. Again that idea,
Speaker 3: and sure enough a stronger tingle. But not only was
Speaker 3: it a greater shock, he was also surprised to find
Speaker 3: out that it was continuous electricity was flowing out of
Speaker 3: his pile like water. Hence why we call things like
Speaker 3: electrical current or the flow of electricity was like liquid.
Speaker 3: People thought it was liquid in nature. It wasn't this
Speaker 3: one and done shock. And that is how inspired by
Speaker 3: the torpedo fish, in seventeen ninety nine, Volta created the
Speaker 3: first true battery battery. How cool is that?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 3: I love it? It's so cool. And also not only did
Speaker 3: he just like create this incredible source of electricity that
Speaker 3: would forever change things, he also proved Galvani wrong because
Speaker 3: he was like, I can generate electricity in the same
Speaker 3: way that the torpedo fish did, but without any animal
Speaker 3: parts present. So he won. Wow. Yeah, so that's where
Speaker 3: volt comes from. Yeah, and also like galvanized too.
Speaker 1: Galvanized Yeah wow, I know.
Speaker 3: So are you ready for number three?
Speaker 2: Yeah? My brain it'd still just like reeling.
Speaker 3: Great.
Speaker 2: I want number three.
Speaker 3: Okay, So let's now see one of the things that
Speaker 3: people did with this new knowledge of how to generate
Speaker 3: larger amounts of continuous electricity. Okay, jumping ahead to the
Speaker 3: eighteen eighties, so by this time the world had come
Speaker 3: a long way from Ben Franklin and his kite. Several
Speaker 3: cities had street lights powered by electricity, and while we
Speaker 3: were still several decades away from being able to easily
Speaker 3: bring power into people's homes, electricity was in the process
Speaker 3: of becoming a more widely accessible, everyday practical tool, rather
Speaker 3: than something that was used in just magic shows or
Speaker 3: tinkered with only in scientific labs. But many people who
Speaker 3: were living in these cities that were lit by electrical lamps,
Speaker 3: they were still like pretty wary of this power, especially
Speaker 3: as newspapers reported on an increase see number of accidental
Speaker 3: deaths from electricity. One of these deaths would inspire the
Speaker 3: invention of one of the US's most gruesome devices. On
Speaker 3: August seventh, eighteen eighty one, in Buffalo, New York, a
Speaker 3: man named George Lemuel Smith had had a bit too
Speaker 3: much to drink, and he stumbled into a power plant,
Speaker 3: reportedly seeking the thrill of an electrical tingle. What, yeah,
Speaker 3: he I don't know, Well, he got his tingle and
Speaker 3: a lot lot more. His death by electrocution was presented
Speaker 3: by a coroner to an audience of medical professionals in Buffalo,
Speaker 3: and in that audience was a dentist by the name
Speaker 3: of Alfred P. Southwick. You know, people find inspiration in
Speaker 3: all kinds of ways, Like maybe an idea comes to
Speaker 3: you when you're in a shower, or when you're reading
Speaker 3: a book, or when you're on a long walk, or
Speaker 3: maybe it comes to you in the form of an
Speaker 3: autopsy report of an electrocuted man. As Southwick listened to
Speaker 3: this case, an idea began to form. What if we
Speaker 3: could harness this power and put it to good use,
Speaker 3: which in his eyes, was to kill people who had
Speaker 3: been sentenced to death. I Ah, Southwick teamed up with
Speaker 3: a physician and the head of the Buffalo ASPCA to
Speaker 3: test out this new method of execution on the stray
Speaker 3: animals of Buffalo. I knew it just gets worse. Oh dear,
Speaker 3: he always does, it always does. I'm not even gonna
Speaker 3: like venture a guess or say anything about whether Southwick
Speaker 3: was a sociopath or something like that, but it does
Speaker 3: seem that his intentions were like, maybe not good, but
Speaker 3: at least not evil. Because at the time Capital punishment
Speaker 3: was done prime merely through hanging, which is not always
Speaker 3: reliable and was associated with a lot of pain and
Speaker 3: injury and just bad, like just gruesome. Yeah, And so
Speaker 3: there was a series of botched hangings that had led
Speaker 3: to quite a bit of pushback against both hanging as
Speaker 3: well as capital punishment in general. And so Southwick viewed
Speaker 3: death by electrocution as a much more humane option. It
Speaker 3: seemed quick and painless, and with practice, more reliable. So
Speaker 3: he took the calculations that he had gathered from his
Speaker 3: animal experiments, scaled them up for humans, and designed a
Speaker 3: delivery method a chair not unlike a dental chair, and
Speaker 3: that is how the electric chair was born. So he
Speaker 3: brought this design to New York politicians and lobbied them
Speaker 3: to replace hanging with his electric chair. The governor at
Speaker 3: the time was like, huh, you know what, you might
Speaker 3: be onto something here, So he put together a commission
Speaker 3: to investigate the electric chair alongside the other common methods
Speaker 3: and not so common methods of execution that were used,
Speaker 3: which by the end of their investigations totaled thirty four
Speaker 3: different methods. WHOA, yeah, I know, it's disturbing. A number
Speaker 3: some of these methods were tossed out pretty quickly, but
Speaker 3: others proved to be stiff competition, like decapitation via kellotine keuillotine.
Speaker 3: But the commission concluded that electrocution was the winner. They
Speaker 3: still had concerns, but it seemed like the best choice.
Speaker 3: What also helped make this be number one choice was
Speaker 3: that the electric chair got a vote of confidence from
Speaker 3: one very prominent figure in electricity, Thomas Edison. You know, Aarin,
Speaker 3: I would love to spend so much time talking about
Speaker 3: the electricity wars between Edison and Nikola Tesla and Westinghouse,
Speaker 3: but I just I can't. If there was ever an
Speaker 3: episode for it to happen, it would be this one,
Speaker 3: but I decided against it.
Speaker 2: I'm actually shocked by that, because I know your feelings
Speaker 2: about Thomas Edison.
Speaker 3: You're shocked by that. So what you need to know,
Speaker 3: essentially is that Thomas Edison was a huge proponent of
Speaker 3: direct current. That's what he worked in. That's what he
Speaker 3: invested so much time and money into having that be
Speaker 3: the type of energy used in homes commercially everywhere. Nikola Tesla,
Speaker 3: on the other hand, had worked with alternating current. Edison
Speaker 3: was extremely threatened by Tesla and Westinghouse's Alternating Current, and
Speaker 3: so he launched essentially a smear campaign against it. One
Speaker 3: strategy of this campaign was to get the alternating current
Speaker 3: powered electric chair approved for executions, because if AC was
Speaker 3: used to kill people, would you really want it in
Speaker 3: your homes. So, with Edison's backing and just a few
Speaker 3: pesky details to be worked out, like the amount of
Speaker 3: charge and how long and blah blah blah, the Commission
Speaker 3: recommended the electric chair as a primary form of execution,
Speaker 3: and on August sixth, eighteen ninety nine, years minus one
Speaker 3: day after the death of George Smith that kicked off
Speaker 3: this whole situation, the first execution via electric chair on
Speaker 3: a person was carried out. A man named William Kembler
Speaker 3: had been convicted of murdering his girlfriend, Tillie Ziegler with
Speaker 3: a hatchet in front of like enough witnesses to easily
Speaker 3: put him away, and he had been sentenced to death.
Speaker 3: His electrocution did not go well. I think the eyewitness
Speaker 3: account says it best, Oh dear, and if you would
Speaker 3: rather not he a pretty gruesome description of an electric
Speaker 3: chair execution, I would suggest skipping ahead about a minute
Speaker 3: and a half to two minutes, okay quote. The scene
Speaker 3: of Kemmler's execution was too horrible to picture. Men accustomed
Speaker 3: to every form of suffering grew faint as the awful
Speaker 3: spectacle was unfolded before their eyes. Those who stood in
Speaker 3: the sight were filled with awe as they saw the
Speaker 3: effects of this most potent of fluids, electricity which is
Speaker 3: only partially understood by those who have studied it most faithfully,
Speaker 3: as it slowly, too slowly, disintegrated the fiber and tissues
Speaker 3: of the body through which it passed, the heaving of
Speaker 3: the chest, which it had been promised would be stilled
Speaker 3: in an instant of peace as soon as the circuit
Speaker 3: was completed. The foaming of the mouth, the bloody sweat,
Speaker 3: the writhing of shoulders, and all other signs of life.
Speaker 3: Horrible as these all were, they were made infinitely more
Speaker 3: horrible by the premature removal of the electrodes and the
Speaker 3: subsequent replacing of them for not seconds, but minutes, until
Speaker 3: the room was filled with the odor of burning flesh,
Speaker 3: and strong men fainted and fell like logs upon the floor.
Speaker 2: That's horrific.
Speaker 3: It's absolutely it's horrific. There were debates about whether he
Speaker 3: was brain dead and actually like had any pain sensation.
Speaker 3: And I think that that has long been a controversy
Speaker 3: in terms of electric chair Oh, I'm sure execution. But
Speaker 3: I think one of the things that surprised me the most,
Speaker 3: or maybe it shouldn't have, but this happened, and people
Speaker 3: were like, you know what, we're gonna keep going.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's try it again.
Speaker 3: I mean, in popular news reports, the doctors were completely slammed.
Speaker 3: They were like, you botch this, this is terrible. You
Speaker 3: need to do better. And so yeah, maybe they maybe
Speaker 3: they were just convincing enough that like, no, we can
Speaker 3: do better next time. But yeah, And so in the
Speaker 3: months and years that followed this first electric chair execution,
Speaker 3: the entire process was tweaked a bit here and there
Speaker 3: to avoid a repeat of what happened with Kemler, and
Speaker 3: death by electric chair became a very common method of
Speaker 3: execution in the US and basically nowhere else. And in
Speaker 3: the US, states appointed electrocutioners who were generally people whose
Speaker 3: skills lay not in human physiology and how our bodies worked,
Speaker 3: but in electricity. One of these, Robert g. Elliot, was
Speaker 3: the state executioner for New York and ended up executing
Speaker 3: three hundred and eighty seven people during his lengthy career.
Speaker 3: At the end of his life, he wrote an autobiography
Speaker 3: reflecting on his whole life and career and experiences, and
Speaker 3: I wanted to mention it because I think his takeaway
Speaker 3: is super interesting. He believed at the end of all
Speaker 3: of this that the death penalty should be abolished. And
Speaker 3: it's not that he felt morally responsible for these deaths
Speaker 3: or worried about the people that he had executed having suffered.
Speaker 3: He thought that it was a painless process and he
Speaker 3: was like, I'm just doing my job. But he felt
Speaker 3: that capital punishment in general wasn't any use. It wasn't
Speaker 3: a deterrent to crime, and it was really more society
Speaker 3: taking its revenge. There was no good outcome of this.
Speaker 3: He felt that witnessing an execution should be a civic
Speaker 3: duty like jury service for all citizens, and felt that
Speaker 3: if that were to happen, if there had to be like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is the committee that's going to watch this execution,
Speaker 3: that he was like, the death penalty, it would be
Speaker 3: gone very quickly.
Speaker 2: That's an interesting thought, isn't that an interesting thought?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, since that first execution via electric chair of
Speaker 3: Kemler in eighteen ninety. There have been over forty three
Speaker 3: hundred executions by electric chair in the US, and I
Speaker 3: feel like it holds a pretty infamous place in history
Speaker 3: or in like pop culture. There are famous electric chairs
Speaker 3: like Gruesome, Gurdy, Old Smoky, Old Sparky, and it's been
Speaker 3: featured in countless songs shout Out to Ride the Lightning
Speaker 3: by Metallica, which I was I was about to say,
Speaker 3: forced to listen to for the first time the other day,
Speaker 3: and also it's featured in books and movies and shows
Speaker 3: like Off the top of my head, I can think
Speaker 3: of several the Green Mile right. Starting in the late
Speaker 3: nineteen seventies, the electric chair began to be phased out
Speaker 3: as lethal injection took over in states where the death
Speaker 3: penalty still exists. But this gruesome chapter in electricity history
Speaker 3: is not quite over, because the electric chair is still
Speaker 3: an option in some US states, and some states allow
Speaker 3: people to choose their method of execution, which is yeah,
Speaker 3: So maybe how about we stop here in electric chair
Speaker 3: and we move on to a slightly lighter bit of history. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 3: So I wanted to end the history section on a
Speaker 3: bit of a happier note by talking about how electricity
Speaker 3: has been used not to kill people, but rather to
Speaker 3: try to help them. Okay, I'm going to just do
Speaker 3: a very very quick tour through this history and hope
Speaker 3: that one day I get to do a deeper dive
Speaker 3: on something like electroconvulsive therapy, for instance. Okay, so I
Speaker 3: already mentioned how both amber and electric fish were used
Speaker 3: thousands of years ago to try to treat or cure people.
Speaker 3: But the age of electro therapy really began when the
Speaker 3: study of electricity kicked off in the seventeen hundreds. People
Speaker 3: may not have understood exactly how electricity worked. Turns out
Speaker 3: they still don't, I guess, but they still tried to
Speaker 3: use it to treat basically any condition they could think of.
Speaker 3: Throughout the eighteen hundreds and into the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: electrotherapy became incredibly popular, and physicians who practice electrotherapy actually
Speaker 3: called themselves electricians. Huh yeah, And it was an incredibly
Speaker 3: lucrative field to be in. And apparently I learned that
Speaker 3: many of the early advances in electricity technology were driven
Speaker 3: by physicians wanting to have better control over the electrical
Speaker 3: charge that they applied to their patients.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 3: Interesting, Yeah, because unlike many of the electrical scientists at
Speaker 3: the time, the physicians actually had a strong revenue stream
Speaker 3: from their patients to be able to focus those research efforts. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and so many of these early elects innovations were medical focused.
Speaker 3: Some of these devices may have helped people a little,
Speaker 3: but as you can imagine, this was a field full
Speaker 3: of snake oil. For example. I just wanted to talk
Speaker 3: briefly about one of the most popular electrotherapy devices in
Speaker 3: the early twentieth century, which was the Pulvermacher belt. You
Speaker 3: could get it by mail order only, of course. So
Speaker 3: picture if you will, a normal belt strap, somehow batteries
Speaker 3: to it, and then put that around your waist directly
Speaker 3: on your bare skin. Okay, So it was supposed to
Speaker 3: release like a steady electrical current. They gave off a
Speaker 3: nice little tangle where the belt rested. At first, the
Speaker 3: belt was widely marketed to everyone, but then the focus
Speaker 3: narrated a bit with the release of the Pulvermacher pouch,
Speaker 3: which you would attach to the front of the belt
Speaker 3: and rest your genital inside. It was just like I
Speaker 3: think you have to see, like the drawing of this belt.
Speaker 3: It kills me. It's so funny. So it was advertised
Speaker 3: as improving sexual vitality, and it was an absolute best seller,
Speaker 3: like so much so that you know those clickbait headlines
Speaker 3: that are like, doctors hate this one trick that is
Speaker 3: essentially the pulvermacher. But they wanted it to be banned.
Speaker 3: They were like, we need patients to come in to
Speaker 3: see us, and they're just sitting at home with these
Speaker 3: belts on. Also, maybe they wanted it to be banned
Speaker 3: because it didn't work to do anything really, And that's
Speaker 3: when people were generally realizing about electrotherapy, especially as things
Speaker 3: like germ theory revealed the underlying pathologies of various diseases
Speaker 3: which didn't necessarily have any overt link to electric Whereas
Speaker 3: in the eighteen hundreds, electrotherapy was considered essentially a cure all,
Speaker 3: by the early decades of the nineteen hundreds, it had
Speaker 3: fallen out of favor more or less and was kind
Speaker 3: of seen as a specialist treatment, but it didn't go
Speaker 3: away entirely. In the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 3: there was a lot of research looking into a possible
Speaker 3: relationship between epilepsy and schizophrenia, and several physicians mistakenly believed
Speaker 3: that they represented opposite ends of a disease spectrum, and
Speaker 3: the implication of that was that if you induced seizures
Speaker 3: in someone with schizophrenia, you could treat the disease. And
Speaker 3: that is how electroconvulsive therapy first began to be used
Speaker 3: for schizophrenia, and it seemed at least somewhat effective, but
Speaker 3: the how and the why was not and I think
Speaker 3: is still not fully known. And despite the bad popular
Speaker 3: reputation it has mostly owing to issues with informed consent
Speaker 3: and negative media portrayals, which I would love to talk
Speaker 3: more about in like a bigger episode, it's still used
Speaker 3: today to treat many different disorders in addition to schizophrenia,
Speaker 3: one of the most common being certain kinds of depression,
Speaker 3: and it's like successfully used and it seems like we've
Speaker 3: come a long way from the nineteen twenties and the
Speaker 3: nineteen thirties in the way that we treat people with this,
Speaker 3: and so I think that ECT is kind of this
Speaker 3: example that we have where like something that started out
Speaker 3: a long time ago, electrotherapy in general, as snake oil
Speaker 3: or mostly placebo effect has now evolved so much over
Speaker 3: time that it is used very effectively in many different
Speaker 3: types of conditions. Right, you have ect used to treat
Speaker 3: types of depression, vagus nerve stimulation to treat some epilepsy,
Speaker 3: deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson's disease, and there are many,
Speaker 3: many more examples. And even if we still have more
Speaker 3: to understand about how electricity works, it's amazing to me
Speaker 3: to think of how much it has taught us about
Speaker 3: ourselves with like different nerves and different muscles, or maybe
Speaker 3: in the future, what lightning strikes can teach us about
Speaker 3: brain functionality. Yeah, so speaking of lightning strikes, Arin, what's
Speaker 3: happening with electrical shocks and lightning strikes and whatever else today?
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know.
Speaker 4: Let's take a break and then find out.
Speaker 1: So bringing it all the way back to lightning where
Speaker 1: we began. First off, like I said earlier, we truly
Speaker 1: have no clue how many people are struck by lightning
Speaker 1: or the death toll from lightning strikes straight up. Two
Speaker 1: recent studies estimated between six thousand and twenty four thousand
Speaker 1: fatalities per year, which is a very huge range. Yeah, really,
Speaker 1: big differences in different studies, and a lot of papers
Speaker 1: kind of assume that globally there are at least ten
Speaker 1: times as many injuries as there are deaths. So for
Speaker 1: estimates of twenty four thousand fatalities, that's over two hundred
Speaker 1: and forty thousand injuries globally.
Speaker 3: How has changed over time.
Speaker 1: It's a great question. It definitely has changed. The biggest problem.
Speaker 1: There's two biggest problems. Number One, most countries simply don't
Speaker 1: report this type of information because they're not collecting it right.
Speaker 1: Even in the US, our lightning data, from what I read,
Speaker 1: and I think that this is still true, it's mostly
Speaker 1: gathered by like Noah, and so it's not gathered in
Speaker 1: specific by any kind of medical establishment, and so we
Speaker 1: still don't even have good numbers for the US, and
Speaker 1: the same is true in most, if not all, other countries.
Speaker 2: And also, of course.
Speaker 1: Lightning isn't exactly evenly distributed across the globe, so there
Speaker 1: are some areas that at certain times of year have
Speaker 1: a lot of lightning and other places that don't really
Speaker 1: have much lightning year round, et cetera. In general, from
Speaker 1: what I could gather, the overall death rate does seem
Speaker 1: to be declining, especially in developed and high income countries
Speaker 1: where we have good infrastructure that can help protect people
Speaker 1: from lightning strikes. So, for example, in the US, older
Speaker 1: papers that I read estimated like one hundred fatalities a year.
Speaker 1: Even older ones said it used to be as high
Speaker 1: as four hundred a year. More recent numbers.
Speaker 2: Cited about thirty deaths.
Speaker 1: Annually in the US. So in the US we've certainly
Speaker 1: seen a decline. In many other countries likely a decline,
Speaker 1: but there are still so many risk factors in a
Speaker 1: lot of places in the world associated with increased lightning
Speaker 1: deaths that really come down to infrastructure issues, right, not
Speaker 1: having lightning safe dwellings or workplaces or schools.
Speaker 2: So the short answer is we still don't really know.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Agree.
Speaker 1: As a comparison, though, I didn't realize and this made
Speaker 1: me so much more terrified. Even though I'm in San Diego,
Speaker 1: we don't have a lot of lightning, although I heard
Speaker 1: thunder this morning. There are more than twenty million cloud
Speaker 1: to ground lightning strikes annually in the lower forty eight
Speaker 1: States alone, twenty million clouds strikes.
Speaker 3: That is so many in one year, in one year, yeah.
Speaker 1: Wild, So The other question then, is what is going
Speaker 1: to continue to happen in the future. Certainly we know
Speaker 1: what types of infrastructure and what types of dwellings can
Speaker 1: help to protect people from lightning strikes. What happens globally,
Speaker 1: especially as our.
Speaker 2: Climate changes our favorite thing to talk about on.
Speaker 3: This podcast, wondering about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm still wondering about it. One paper that I read,
Speaker 1: which was a modeling paper, estimated that global lightning flash
Speaker 1: rate could actually decrease with climate change. They estimated about
Speaker 1: a fifteen percent decrease in lightning strikes with climate change
Speaker 1: based on their models, but other papers have estimated the
Speaker 1: exact opposite, an increase of anywhere from four to sixteen
Speaker 1: percent in lightning with climate change. And from what I
Speaker 1: can gather, there's definitely like a strong theoretical possibility that
Speaker 1: warmer global temperatures, especially in the tropics, can result in
Speaker 1: greater lightning frequency because of those.
Speaker 2: Warm air fronts.
Speaker 1: And we know that like those are the kinds of
Speaker 1: conditions under which lightning can occur. But it really comes
Speaker 1: down to it's not as simple as temperature equals lightning,
Speaker 1: and I mean, climate change isn't as simple as temper
Speaker 1: which are equals anything, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Other papers have looked at more of the secondary effects
Speaker 1: of lightning, right, and which we didn't even get into
Speaker 1: because that's a whole nother situation. But other papers have
Speaker 1: looked at things like an increasingly dry climate increases the
Speaker 1: risk of things like forest fires that are associated with lightning.
Speaker 1: Lightning is a major cause of forest fires, and so
Speaker 1: even if the actual amount of lightning might decrease or
Speaker 1: not change, if the dry season is longer, then that
Speaker 1: could actually contribute to an increasing risk associated with.
Speaker 2: Those lightning strikes.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, yeah right, Yeah, So it's complicated and
Speaker 1: we don't really know what's going to happen with the
Speaker 1: future of lightning.
Speaker 2: But there is so much room for fascinating research there.
Speaker 3: Is, there really is, and also better monitoring.
Speaker 2: Yes, definitely, for sure.
Speaker 3: Should we do sources we should.
Speaker 2: I have some great ones I want to shout out.
Speaker 3: Ooh me too. Okay, Number one, I want to shout
Speaker 3: out again the book Spark by Timothy Jorgenson. So good, fascinating,
Speaker 3: go check it out. Then I have some more multimedia sources.
Speaker 3: So I watched a great documentary called Shock and Awe,
Speaker 3: The Story of Electricity it's by BBC. It's on YouTube.
Speaker 3: All link to it. It's really fascinating. Then a couple
Speaker 3: of podcast episodes. The first one is by Outside Podcast
Speaker 3: and it's called Science of Survival Struck by Lightning. That's
Speaker 3: a very impactful episode. I felt that not only talked
Speaker 3: about like someone's experience, but also a little bit more
Speaker 3: about like science and stuff like that too.
Speaker 2: It was great.
Speaker 3: And then the last one is one that I listened
Speaker 3: to with my sister when she came to visit me
Speaker 3: and we drove up to the Tetons in Wyoming, and
Speaker 3: it's a podcast called National Park after Dark and they
Speaker 3: do episodes focused on different stories, and the one we
Speaker 3: listened to was about the Titons the Grand Teton National
Speaker 3: Park and it was a it's called a fatal lightning
Speaker 3: strike and the Jenny Lake Rangers and that is a wow.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was riveting.
Speaker 1: I had a book in an book chapter that was
Speaker 1: absolutely awesome and like so comprehensive focus specifically on lightning.
Speaker 1: One was called Reducing Lightning Injuries Worldwide. That's the book,
Speaker 1: and then there was Lightning Related Injuries and Safety, both
Speaker 1: written by Mary Ann Cooper at All. And then there's
Speaker 1: a few others kind of older papers that were on
Speaker 1: both electrical and lightning strike if you're interested in kind
Speaker 1: of both of those in comparing contrasting, as well as
Speaker 1: those papers on the kind of climate change projections. We'll
Speaker 1: post the sources for this episode and all of our
Speaker 1: episodes on our website, this podcast will kill You dot com.
Speaker 3: Thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this
Speaker 3: episode and all of our episodes.
Speaker 2: Thank you to exactly rate Network.
Speaker 3: And thank you to you listeners. You're the best. You
Speaker 3: are the best. I hope you liked this. I thought
Speaker 3: this was a very interesting and kind of a different.
Speaker 2: Ooh ooh, I have a good one. I hope you
Speaker 2: found it enlightening.
Speaker 3: Ooh good one. Good one erin I mean, I can't
Speaker 3: add any more than that. So thank you also to
Speaker 3: our wonderful patrons. We appreciate you so much, so much. Well,
Speaker 3: until next time, wash your hands.
Speaker 2: You filthy animals.
Speaker 3: Um um um