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Brief history of lightning

Lightning phenomenon and its impact on human activities have long attracted people’s attention. There are records about thunder and lightning in the oracle bone inscriptions of the Yin Dynasty as early as the 14th century BC. Later, in the Huai Nan Zi waiting for Liu An in the Western Han Dynasty, he put forward the idea of “the thin phase of yin and Yang is thunder, and the excitement is electricity”. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Wang Chong wrote in “Lun Heng. Lei Xu” that “the thunder is the exciting Qi of the sun. Why does the Sun move in the first month of the Ming Dynasty, so the thunder begins in the first month, and the sun is prosperous in May, so the thunder is fast in May, the sun declines in autumn and winter, and so the thunder is latent in autumn and winter”. It describes the seasonal characteristics of lightning phenomena.
By the 18th century, in order to reveal the nature of lightning, many scientists had carried out detection experiments. For example, the American scholar B. Franklin proposed in 1750 that the lightning rod installed on the high tower should be used to lead electricity from the cloud for measurement. In June 1752, he risked the risk of lightning strike and carried out the famous experiment of kite detecting lightning in Philadelphia. He observed the electric spark generated by thunderstorm cloud through the kite lead, which confirmed the consistency of the electric essence generated by natural lightning and friction. At the same time, Soviet scholars Μ.Β. Romonosov and Γ.Β. Richman detected the electric spark caused by the transit of thunderstorm with a self-made mine detector. Unfortunately, Richman was killed by lightning. Since then, the modern research on Lightning based on electricity began.