light moves around 300 000 km in a second, whereas the speed of sound is only one millionth of it, around 330 meters per second? Based on that, there is a formula on how to count how far a lightning occurs once we know when the thunder occurs. And did you know that the person who invented the lightning rod was Benjamin Franklin?

By the year 1750 Franklin - in addition to wanting to prove that lightning was electricity - began to think about protecting people, buildings, and other structures from lightning. This grew into his idea for the lightning rod. Although not the first to suggest a correlation between electricity and lightning, Franklin was the first to propose a workable system for testing his hypothesis.

More or less at the same time there were experiments of lightning rods in Europe as well. For as buildings became taller (especially churches), lightnings became more of a threat to them.

But we do enjoy them too, don’t we?! And without lightning and thunder, our planet just wouldn’t be the same. How different would life on Earth be without them? No one knows exactly. Meteorology is a fascinating subject that we all could know a bit more of.