The conductor which was attached to the spire was not adequate and competent for the protective work which it was intended to perform. It had been put up sixteen years ago, when a new spire was erected in the place of the old one, which fell in consequence of having been added as an after-thought to a tower that had not been prepared to bear its weight, and was of a form which is, happily, now obsolete. It originally consisted of twelve No. 15 gauge[1] copper wires arranged in a double series, side by side, and held together by a double strand of zinc and copper wire crossing them transversely, and acting as a kind of weft to the longitudinal copper warp. The conductor was thus a sort of ribbon of copper wire, with transverse binding-threads of zinc. The weight of the metal in this compound conductor was ten and a quarter ounces per yard, instead of being thirty-six ounces per yard, as it ought to have been at the very least if it had fulfilled the conditions that are now required for such a task as it had been required to perform. But, besides this, in consequence of having been exposed for sixteen years in its sub-littoral situation to the blasts of the moist sea-wind, the copper wires were in many places eaten into by corrosive action where the zinc wire of the woof crossed them, so as to reduce to some considerable extent their original conducting capacity. The conductor was so fixed that it descended from the summit of the spire along the slope, and along the face of the tower, then crossed the lead flashing of the roof, passed down the main wall of the building near the intersection of one of the transepts with the nave, and was finally plunged into a well dug into the grave-yard about twenty feet from the place where it reached the ground. At the time of the storm a flash of light was seen to pass along the upper part of the track of the conductor, and this flash was accompanied by an instantaneous crash of thunder, that awoke most of the slumbering inhabitants of the close. The destruction of the conductor, however, was not discovered uutil the second morning after the storm, when some shattered fragment was observed projecting from the tower. It was then found that about forty feet of the conductor at the top of the spire still remained uninjured in its place, but that for the next one hundred feet below this the woven metallic band had been scattered into a shower of short fragments of copper wire, which were strewed thickly upon the roof of the tower and of the lower building. These fragments were three quarters of an inch long, corresponded in length with the materials of the transverse crossings of the zinc wire, and bore unmistakable indications of galvanic corrosion upon their ends. The lower portion of the conductor was uninjured, but one of the iron rain-pipes, which descended from the roof of the transept a few feet away, had been shattered by the discharge. It was therefore manifest that from the leaden covering of the roof downward the incompetent conductor had been assisted in its work by the roof and
- ↑ That is, of one sixteenth of an inch in diameter.
