Effects of Lightning upon Electric Lamps

Abstract

I HAVE often seen luminous trails, similar in appearance to those shown in Mr. Webb's photographs (p. 343), in photographs taken at night. That there are any effects in these or Mr. Webb's pictures that cannot be explained by a moving camera, I am unable to convince myself of. The identical form of the discharges from different lamps has been explained by the distance of the discharge causing them. Granting that it is possible to have a discharge, so intricate in character, exactly duplicated at a second lamp (which is scarcely conceivable), their magnitudes in the pictures should be inversely proportional to their distances. But we find that, in the pictures, the scrawls are all of the same size. A lamp close to the camera, and a distant lamp, show the trails on the same scale.