A conductor mounted in this manner will, probably enough, draw down lightning from the clouds; but it is more likely to discharge it, with destructive effect, into the building it is intended to guard, than to transmit it harmlessly to the earth. An example is at hand in the case of Christ Church, in the town of Clevedon, in Somersetshire. This church was provided with a very efficient system of lightning conductors, five in number, corresponding to the four pinnacles and the flagstaff, on the summit of the principal tower. The five conductors consisted of good copper-wire rope; all were united together inside the tower, through which they were carried down to earth, and there ended in an earthenware drain. This kind of earth contact might be pretty good as long as water was flowing in the drain; but whenever the drain was dry the conductor was practically insulated from the earth. On the fifteenth of March, 1876, the church was struck by lightning, which for some distance followed the line of the conductor; then finding its passage barred by the earthenware drain, which was dry at the time, it burst through the walls of the church, displacing several hundredweight of stone, and making its way to earth through the gas-pipe.[34] Another very instructive example is furnished by the lightning conductor attached to the lighthouse of Berehaven, on the south-west coast of Ireland. It consists of a half-inch copper-wire rope, which is carried down the face of the tower “until it reaches the rock at its base, where it terminates in _a small hole, three inches by three inches, jumped out of the rock, about six inches under the surface_.” Here, again, we have a good imitation of Professor Richman’s experiment, with only this difference, that a small hole in the rock is substituted for a glass bottle. A lightning conductor of this kind fulfills two functions: it increases the chance of the lightning coming down on the building, and it makes it positively certain that, having come, it cannot get to earth without doing mischief. The lightning did come down on the Berehaven Lighthouse, about five years ago. As might have been expected, it made no use of the lightning conductor in finding a path to earth, but forced its way through the building, dealing destruction around as it descended from stage to stage. The Board of Irish Lights furnished a detailed report of this accident to the Lightning Rod Conference, in March, 1880, from which the above particulars have been derived.[35]