“It has pleased God,” he says, “in His goodness to mankind, at length to discover to them the means of securing their habitations and other buildings from mischief by thunder and lightning. The method is this: Provide a small iron rod, which may be made of the rod-iron used by nailors, but of such a length that one end being three or four feet in the moist ground, the other may be six or eight feet above the highest part of the building. To the upper end of the rod fasten about a foot of brass wire, the size of a common knitting needle, sharpened to a fine point; the rod may be secured on the house by a few small staples. If the house or barn be long, there may be a rod and point at each end, and a middling wire along the ridge from one to the other. A house thus furnished will not be damaged by lightning, it being attracted by the points and passing through the metal into the ground, without hurting anything. Vessels also having a sharp-pointed rod fixed on the top of their masts, with a wire from the foot of the rod reaching down round one of the shrouds to the water, will not be hurt by lightning.” =Introduction of Lightning Rods into England.=--The progress of lightning conductors was more slow in England and on the Continent of Europe, owing to a fear, not unnatural, that they might, in some cases, draw down the lightning where it would not otherwise have fallen. People preferred to take their chance of escaping as they had escaped before, rather than invite, as it were, the lightning to descend on their houses, in the hope that an iron rod would convey it harmless to the earth. But the immense amount of damage done every year by lightning, soon led practical men to entertain a proposal which offered complete immunity from all danger on such easy terms; and when it was found that buildings protected by lightning conductors were, over and over again, struck by lightning without suffering any harm, a general conviction of their utility was gradually established in the public mind. The first public building protected by a lightning rod in England was St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London. On the eighteenth of June, 1764, the beautiful steeple of Saint Bride’s Church, in the city, was struck by lightning and reduced to ruin. This incident awakened the attention of the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s to the danger of a similar calamity, which seemed, as it were, impending over their own church. After long deliberation, they referred the matter to the Royal Society, asking for advice and instruction. A committee of scientific men was appointed by the Royal Society to consider the question. Benjamin Franklin himself, who happened to be in London at the time, as the representative of the American States in their dispute with England, was nominated a member of the committee. And the result of its deliberation was that, in the year 1769, a number of lightning conductors were erected on St. Paul’s Cathedral.