Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/840

822 the side of this street which is opposite to the cathedral stands the Dolphin, the principal hotel of the city. About an hour after the accident, and while the inmates of the hotel who had been startled by the lightning and thunder were still awake, and in some alarm, a smell of fire was perceived to be pervading the house. The landlord at once rose and proceeded to investigate the cause, and was led by the odor of burning wood to one of the cellars in the basement, where he found the small gas-pipe fixed to furnish it with light melted for several inches, a large flame issuing from the improvised gap, and a beam of wood a little above the blaze already on fire. A thorough and exhaustive examination of the place at the time, and afterward, revealed no trace anywhere else of the passage of the lightning. A water-pipe running in from the outside main, however, transversely crossed, and almost touched, the gas-pipe as this descended from the ceiling to the bracket, and just where the gap had been made. The popular notion among the servants of the hotel was that the lightning had come in through some open cracks in the cellar-door from the pavement of the street, that it had run along the water-pipe, and that it had cut through the gas-pipe as it passed across. The more scientific explanation of the insidious invasion by fire, in the dead of the night, no doubt is that, when the discharge of lightning issued from the cloud to the earth, it had scattered itself in various directions, using such stepping-stones by the way as offered in its path. One part of the discharge, then, first seizing upon the gas-pipes connected with the street lamps, took a course through them to reach the earth, but, coming opportunely by the way across the water-pipe in the cellar of the hotel, transferred itself to that pipe on account of the greater facilities that were offered by it for making an easy and good earth contact through the largely expanded subterranean mains, but "sparked" as it passed from pipe to pipe, and in doing so opened a breach in the small fusible metal wire, and lit the gas as it began to escape. The flame then enlarged the breach by melting a considerable portion of the pipe, and was making good progress toward burning down the house, when its mischievous proceedings were happily discovered, and arrested in the manner which has been described.

The telegraph-wire which, according to the opinion of Mr. Preece, may be sufficient for the protection of any house, is also, it must be remembered, capable of acting as a source of very considerable danger in circumstances that are by no means unfrequently encountered in the arrangements of every-day life. At the time of thunder-storms, portions of the electrical discharge are apt to be conveyed into the interior of buildings by telegraph and telephone wires that are distributed to them for the service of signaling-instruments, and may possibly set fire to badly conducting and inflammable substances that chance to be in connection with them. Instances of this form of accident are now often met with, especially in situations where telegraph-wires