Business & Finance: Lightning Rods

Though lightning is supposed never to strike twice in the same place, and might be supposed by now to have struck each & every place in the U. S., the U. S. lightning rod industry continues. According to Department of Commerce figures issued last week, lightning rod business was $923,000 in 1928, $1,232,000 in 1929. Sales at present are running slightly ahead of normal. Thus the lightning rod industry must be added to those very select trades which are depression proof.

Not always has the industry enjoyed stability. When Benjamin Franklin advocated lightning rods in 1747 people thought the whole idea was stupid, sacrilegious. But finally there came a boom. The whole country became lightning-rod-minded. In 1885 a body of scientific men studied the Washington Monument, already hit a few times, and recommended conductors for it. Wide-awake salesmen made a racket of the craze, slapping useless pieces of metal on roofs. Gradually people became aware of the fact that lightning was striking even where the so-called rods were. The rods were thereupon denounced as expensive folly. About the turn of the century, “lightning rod salesman” became synonymous in New England with “horse thief” in Kansas.

Most industries in such a situation would form an association, hire a good publicity man, set things right. But the lightning-rod-makers, while they published sales booklets filled with startling pictures of lightning and burnt houses, did not have to do this. In 1915 the National Board of Fire Underwriters set standards for equipment and ever since has urged the use of lightning-rods.

A great field still lies open. Lightning does an average property damage of $16,300,000 a year. It can strike anything, and venerable Boston Lightning Rod Co. gravely asserts: “No good reason is known why a place that has been struck once may not be struck again.”