Regionaly, and temporarily, that was general knowledge. Now, it isn’t. Like thousands of other facts I hold, is useful once at most. I think that’s why I share it, not because it can be looked up, but because it somebody reads, sees, or hears it once, some neurons may say, “I think we should look up that bit of minutiae.” I liked reading your post because I saw how you worked through your thoughts. You didn’t edit it down to what you found online but rather typed your thoughts as they came to you and posted them.
Now to bring it back to science fiction. The bulb or ball became one of the selling features. The rods came in all sorts of forms. The bulbs either had a hole through the middle, and weren’t too different from glass chimney or lamp globe. The bulb that stuck in my head was the other type, like a glass float but in a cage. My mother has a love for science fiction and read Bradbury to my sister and I. In Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, the lightning rod salesman precedes the storm. After my mother read the opening of the book I thought the idea of lightning rods amazing and it just stuck. My father gave me a talk about annealing glass, lightning rods, and rolled right off the topic, as I often do, to the terror and randomness of tornados and the dangers found on farms.
Note: I type too much.
