This Podcast Will Kill You - Ep 93 Lightning & Other Stories: Power Hour (and a Half)

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Lightning strikes have an aura of myth and legend around them, and their mystical reputation is inflated by stories that tell of people who, after having been hit by lightning, are suddenly able to speak a new language or play the piano expertly. However, such embellished stories often fail to distinguish truth from fiction and rarely acknowledge the devastating toll that getting struck by lightning can have on your body and mind. Which is where TPWKY hopes to set the record straight. In this episode, we explore what lightning is, how it can cause injuries or death, and what distinguishes it from other electrical shocks. Then, rather than focusing solely on the history of lightning, we take a tour through four vignettes in the broad history of electricity that tell of ways humanity has harnessed it for both bad and good. By the end of the episode, you’ll be shocked by the story of a dentist from Buffalo, electrified with the knowledge of how lightning forms, energized with the current status of lightning around the globe, and left with no resistance to terrible electricity-themed puns. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. There are already enough things charging your card every month. Dinner should not be one of them, which is exactly why Blue Apron is now subscription-free. You heard that right, Blue Apron no longer requires a subscription. You can order meals when you want them and skip when you don't without adding another recurring charge. Blue Apron meals are designed by chefs and arrive with pre-portioned ingredients, so there's no meal planning and no extra grocery trip. Order now at Blue Apron.com. Get 50% off your first two orders plus free shipping with code this podcast 50.

Terms and conditions apply. Visit blue apron.com slash terms for more information. On eBay, every find has a story. Like if you're looking for a vintage ban tea. Not just a tea. The ban tea. You wore it everywhere. Until your BFF stole it.

Now you're on eBay. And there it is. Same tea from the same tour. The things you love have a way of finding their way back to you, especially on eBay. Where else can you find that mint trading card you searched everywhere for? Or your first

car, the one you wished you never sold. It has to be eBay. Shop eBay for millions of fines, each with a story. eBay, things people love. Indeed, sponsor jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Spend

less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, Less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire?

This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. I have lately made an experiment in electricity that I desire never to repeat. Two nights ago, being about to kill a turkey by the shock from two. large glass jars, containing as much electrical fire as forty common files, I inadvertently took the hole through my own arms and body. The company present say the flash was very great, and the crack as loud as a pistol. Yet my sense is being instantly gone, I neither saw the one nor heard the other, nor did I feel the stroke on my hand, though afterward I found that it raised a round swelling where the fire entered as big as half a pistol bullet, by which you may

judge the quickness of the electrical fire, which by this instance seems to be greater than the sound, light, or animal sensation. What I can remember of the matter is that I was about to try whether the bottles were fully charged by the strength and length of the stream issuing to my hand, as I commonly used to do, and which I might safely enough had done if I had not held the chain in the other hand. I then felt what I know not how to describe. A universal blow through my whole body from my head to my foot, which seemed within as well as without. After which the first thing I took notice of was a violent, quick shaking of my body, which gradually, my sense as gradually returned, and I then thought the bottles must be discharged, but could not conceive how,

till at last I perceived the chain in my hand, and recollected what I had been about to do. That part of my hand and fingers which held the chain was left white, as though the blood had been driven out, and remained so eight to ten minutes after, feeling like dead flesh. And I had a numbness in my arms and the back of my neck, which continued till the next morning, but wore off. Nothing remains now of this shock but a soreness in my breastbone, which feels as if I had been bruised. I did not fall, but suppose I should have been knocked down if I had received the stroke in my head. The hole was over in less than a minute. I had a lot of fun reading that one. Um, So I am really glad that you read that because you always do such a great job.

And I'm also glad because it means that I get to tell you then who that quote was from. Please, because I don't know anything about it. Benjamin Franklin. Yes. Oh, that was my second guess. Yeah. So Benjamin Franklin, as we all know, was a huge lover of turkeys. But he was, like, most fond of eating them.

I absolutely did not know that about him. Oh, yeah. But one of his, like, preferred methods of killing a turkey before he ate it was electrocution until this incident in which he was like, wow, that was really bad. I could have died. And so he went back to, like, normal killing a turkey. But one of my favorite things about this passage is that I think this was like in a letter to a friend or something because then he followed it up with, okay, you can tell this person, but don't spread it more widely because I'm really embarrassed. Oh my goodness. I also like don't understand how he was about to electrocute this turkey. I don't either because I still feel like I don't fully understand electricity.

Oh, yep. But same. Yeah. But I think that, you know, over the course of this episode and then the next week's bonus episode will have a greater understanding of how he did that. Yeah, I think so too. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh. And I'm Aaron Olman Updike. And this is, this podcast will kill you.

And today we're talking about lightning? Electricity? Either way. I mean, a little bit of both. Yeah. Electricity and the impact that it has on biological systems. Yes. Especially unexpected electricity.

Not like how do our nerve impulses work. Right, right, wait, wait. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Is it quarantini time? It's quarantini time.

Let's get to it. Let's get to it. What are we drinking this week? Thunderstruck. Is that what we decided on? That is what we decided on. Yeah. But I want everyone to know that I think the discussions for the quarantini name for this episode went longer than any other one has, at least in recent memory or the past couple of years.

So I wrote down a few of my favorites. Oh, I love it. The power sour. That's a good one. Lightning in a jar. Current affairs. I really loved all of the current ones because when you kept suggesting this, I was like, I don't get it. Oh, electric current.

Okay. Now I get it. Super juice. Super juice. Plug and chug. And I think finally the least creative, but the one that we were both maybe second most tempted by was energy drink. I actually love energy drink. But we went with Thunderstruck.

So, Aaron, what is in Thunderstruck? It is lemonade, vodka, and blue carousel. Yeah. It's based on a real drink whose name I can't remember now. Maybe Blue Lagoon. It's delicious. Yeah. And we'll post the full recipe for our quarantini as well as our non-alcoholic placebo

on our website, this podcast will kill you.com. On our website, this podcast will kill you.com. We have everything that you could ever want to find on a website. We've got merch. We've got lists of all of the sources from all of our episodes. We have a Goodreads list. We have a bookshop.org affiliate account. You can find links to Bloodmobile, our music.

You can find our Patreon account. You can find that's all of it, right? I think it's close enough. It's pretty close. Transcripts. There we go. I have one more piece of business, please. So a lot of people have asked us how we find our firsthand accounts.

And it's a mix of things, really. But one of the ways is that listeners will often reach out to us and be like, oh, if you're ever covering this in the future, I'm willing to share my story, et cetera. And so if you have a firsthand account that you might like to share on the podcast or want to at least learn more about it, the best way to get in touch is either through the contact us form on our website or by emailing us at this podcast, We'll Kill You at gmail.com. And I want to just take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone who has ever reached out to us over the years with their experiences and also for everyone who has ever

shared their firsthand account. Yeah. Okay. Should we take a quick break and then get into it? Let's okay. Dinner shows up every night, whether you're prepared for it or not. And with Blue Apron, you won't need to panic order takeout again. Blue Apron meals are designed by chefs and arrive with pre-portioned ingredients so there's no meal planning and no extra grocery trip. There, assemble and bake meals take about five minutes of hands-on prep. Just spread the pre-chopped ingredients on a sheet pan, put it in the oven, and that's it. And if there's truly no time to cook, dish by Blue Apron meals are fully prepared. Just heat them in the oven or microwave, and dinner is ready. And here's the exciting news. Blue Apron no longer requires.

a subscription. You can order meals when you want them and skip when you don't without adding another recurring charge. Order now at blue apron.com. Get 50% off your first two orders plus free shipping with code this podcast 50. Terms and conditions apply. Visit blue apron.com slash terms for more information. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something. That's why O'Keefe's working hands hand cream is such a relief. It's a concentrated hand cream that is specifically designed to relieve extremely dry, cracked hands caused by constant hand washing and harsh conditions. Working hands creates a protective layer on the skin that locks in moisture. It's non-greasy, unscented,

and absorbs quickly. A little goes a long way. Moisturization that lasts up to 48 hours. It's made for people whose hands take a beating at work, from health care and food service to salon, lab, and caregiving environments. It's been relied on for decades by people who wash their hands constantly or work in harsh conditions because it actually works. O'Keefs is my hand cream of choice in these dry Colorado winters when it feels like my skin is always on the verge of cracking. It keeps them soft and smooth, no matter how harsh it is outside. We're offering our listeners 15% off their first order of O'Keefs. Just visit O'Keef's company.com slash this podcast and code this podcast at checkout. A time wardrobe starts with pieces that are built well from the beginning. From the fabrics to the fit,

everything needs to last beyond one season. And that's how Quince approaches design. Quince has all the staples covered, from 100% organic cotton sweaters to premium denim made with stretch for all-day comfort and luxe cotton cashmere blends, perfect for the changing seasons. The quality shows in every detail, the stitching, the fit, the fabrics. Every piece is thoughtfully designed to be your new wardrobe essential. And each piece is made with premium materials in ethical trusted factories and priced far below what other luxury brands charge. I recently got a pair of Quince's Bella stretch wide-leg jeans and they are now in constant rotation. They are so comfortable. The fit is amazing and they come in a bunch of different washes so I'm about to go order some more.

Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash this podcast to get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash this podcast to get free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com slash this podcast. So today we're talking about mostly lightning. Like when we first were talking about this episode, it was a lightning episode. But then we realize that to talk about lightning, we have to also talk about electricity, of course. So I want to just say up front, I don't understand electricity. It still feels like magic to me. Lightning seems to genuinely be magic. So that's the end of the episode. Just kidding. We're going to do our best, as always. But what I want to focus on, like you said, Aaron, is our body's responses to electricity

and especially the difference in how we react or how electricity reacts with us when it comes from, say, your household outlet versus lightning. Because they are very different, as it turns out. So electricity, really basically, electric current is simply the flow or the movement of positively and negatively charged ions, right? electrons and protons moving around. That's electricity. All of the things around us have charge, either positive or negative or neutral charges, our earth, our atmosphere, our bodies, our couches, our cats' hair that we rub, right? We're all made up of atoms that have protons and electrons and thus carry charges or have the potential to carry charges. So electricity is all around us. Lightning, in a very, very simplified sense, is one massive electric discharge, essentially.

Here's how it happens, kind of. Lightning is created when there are temperature differences between air masses. So what happens is like the warm air down close to the earth moves up since warm air rises. It condenses to form clouds. the water droplets freeze to become like ice crystals or whatever, and they're continually being pushed around by all of the air movement, and all of this movement between the ice crystals creates this friction that causes electrons and protons to be transferred between these water molecules,

and they're continually moving around in this giant storm, right? And this storm is moving along the ground. And so what happens is these ions, ions, the positive and negative ions, redistribute into these layers, and generally the positive ones hang out on the top of the cloud. The negative ions accumulate at the bottom. And the Earth, which usually is kind of negatively charged compared to the atmosphere, now has this positive charge because of how strong the negative charge at the bottom of this cloud is. So these positive charges are accumulating, they're running along the ground, they're running up the trees along buildings,

trying to move upward towards this cloud to close this gap. And when it just gets to be too much, when the potential difference between the charges at the top of this cloud and the bottom of this cloud and the earth get to be just too strong, boom, lightning strike. And then thunder, which is a really important part of lightning, because It shows you the power of what's happening. Thunder is the shock waves from this explosive expansion of air that becomes superheated and ionized by this massive bolt of electricity that just shot through it. Now, on a really, really, really tiny scale, we are all very familiar with this phenomenon because it's the same phenomenon that creates the static electricity that we're familiar with, right?

You pet your cat too hard and then you shock their nose by accident. I like that that's your example. It happens so often. I'm like socks on carpet. Yeah, I was going to say that too, but I don't wear socks as much lately and I don't have a lot of carpet. Or like you rub a balloon on your hair, right? Those actions caused the same kind of ion transfer and lining up of those positive and negative

charges and then eventually a little teeny tiny bolt of lightning happens between you and the floor or your cat's nose. So that is lightning and like some real basics about how it happens. Now when it comes to lightning, there are a few different ways that it can end up traveling from that cloud to your human body. And they vary. And I couldn't find good statistics on like how often you have one versus the other. And really, as we'll see, when it comes to like lightning strike statistics in general, we just don't have good stats. But all of these are possible types of like the way that you would come into contact with lightning. First of all, you can have a direct strike. If that lightning from that cloud hits a person directly,

that's a direct strike. It's probably less common. But again, stats are not great. And some papers will say a direct strike is absolutely the most deadly. But I think because our stats are so poor, it's actually probably hard to get a handle on whether or not that's true. But you can imagine you're taking a greater amount of that lightning strike if it hits you directly versus in some of the other ways I'll talk about. So the next way is you can have a contact injury. And that happens if you are touching an object that's part of the path. of that current. Like let's say you're touching a faucet in your house and your house pipes get hit by lightning and then it goes through that faucet and into you. Or you're touching a tree at the moment

that that tree gets hit. That's a contact entry. Then there's something that I think is so fascinating that's called a side flash or a splash. And that's when the lightning hits that's somewhere nearby to you and then jumps. It crosses an air gap and then jumps to you as a nearby person. So you're just like splashed with some of the force of the lightning as it makes its way towards the ground. Oh, that's really fascinating. Yeah. So the numbers that we have are not great, like you said. And so I'm guessing that I already know the answer to this question, which is like how much do we know about the strength or variability of those different types of contact with lightning? That's a great question.

I don't fully know. It definitely, like, the less direct the contact is, the less total amount of electricity or energy that you're being exposed to. But in all cases, the duration of contact is unbelievably short in all of these cases. And then there is also ground current, and that is if the lightning hits the ground near you and then spreads out like radially and then comes up and hits you from the ground up. Those are the main types. There's also, and I think this is just, oh my goodness, there has been reports of something that's called an upward streamer. So you know how I said that all those positive charges are running along the ground and up to try and get to the cloud. as that energy from the cloud is coming down.

So there has been reports of people being struck from the energy just from those upward streamers of energy. Even without them making contact with the actual lightning strike, which is like, what? Well, it's also interesting, like, because how do you determine what it was? I will post the paper where they did this. It was a really interesting, like, forensic analysis paper where they showed, like, Like they determined, you know, it wasn't all of these other types and it couldn't have been from the electric lines that we're working on because of the patterns of injury, etc. And so, yeah, that was like what they were left with. And I think it had been like a theoretical concept prior to that.

But this was one of the first like documented. Look, this is what caused this injury. Oh, man. Yeah. Wow. So that is how you can be struck by lightning. what happens when you get hit? Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot. Oh, Erin, there's just so much. And so much of what it comes down to that I think is so interesting is that, A, we do not understand lightning. We do not understand the effects that it has on the body. And two, the rules that apply to. electricity and electric shocks and the body don't seem to apply to lightning. Why? Let me get into it. So a lot of the papers that describe both lightning and electricity

injuries talk a lot about the characteristics of electricity that determine how much of the electric current actually flows through someone's body, right? So these papers tend to focus on six main things, six components of electricity. They talk about the type of current, which is whether it's an alternating current or a direct current. They talk about the voltage, the voltage being the pressure that causes that current to flow. They talk about the amperage, which is like the volume of electrons that are flowing. It's a measure of like the rate of flow. And then they talk about the resistance, which is an intrinsic property of an object and different body tissues have different resistances. It's like the ease or the difficulty with which the electric current can

actually travel. And then they talk about the pathway that the current takes, which I kind of talked with lightning, the different ways that you can come into contact. and if you're thinking of household electronics, you can grab it with your hand by accident. Little kids might put electric cords in their mouth, right? So that will determine literally like where in your body is this current going to flow. And then the duration of contact. Now, when it comes to lightning, the voltage and the amperage that we're talking about, unbelievably high, like 10 or more million volts and 40 or more thousand amps.

I don't really, I don't have like a frame of reference for that, but that sounds like a lot. So your household electric outlet is like 110 volts and like 15 or 20 amps. Oh, okay. Yeah, okay. That's a lot. It's a lot. but lightning does a few things that regular electricity doesn't do. First of all, it's a very different type of current.

So your household electric outlet is alternating current. A battery is direct current. But lightning, some papers that I read said that lightning is like a direct current, but the paper that I liked the best described it as, quote, a unidirectional massive current impulse. Right. It's a strike. It's not a current in that there's not a continuous flow for long periods of time. Exactly. And that's the thing that makes it so massively different from any other source of electricity is that the duration of contact is instantaneous. It's fractions of milliseconds.

Whereas, especially if you come into contact with a household electric source or something that's like putting out alternating current, your body reacts to that alternating current by having repetitive contractions. So it can force you to actually grab and continue to hold on to that source, prolonging the duration of contact and therefore prolonging the damage. But this is the literal opposite because it's such an instantaneous thing that it actually causes an effect that I still don't fully understand that's called flashover. Let's talk about flashover. So if you think of your body as an empty can, bear with me, when you come into contact with like our home electricity, an AC current, it flows in and out of that can, in and out, in and out. And every time that it flows in and out and that current reverses, it's doing damage the whole time over seconds and seconds or even just a fraction of a second, but a long fraction, like almost a whole second. That creates a lot of thermal energy, right? Because that electrical energy gets transferred into thermal energy.

That results in a lot of burning, superficial as well as deep burns as it penetrates through our tissues or burning. through the can or whatever. With lightning, the amount of current and the rate at which it travels is so massive that that can gets filled up instantaneously and the rest of that current flows out and over the can. It spills all around it rather than staying contained within and causing damage. That is flashover. And so as it flows over, it can cause other damage that like normal electricity wouldn't cause because it's flowing out over your body rather than through it, even though it's going through it also. Yeah.

But again, it happens so quickly that we're exposed to all of that current for a matter of fractions of milliseconds. So it can definitely cause superficial damage. It can melt our clothes to our skin. It can rip apart clothes from steam vapor explosion. of the steam within our clothes. It can singe your hair. It can heat up metal buckles and melt them.

But it's a very different pattern, especially of burns than we see in typical electric burns. It's like very, very different. Isn't that interesting? It's really interesting. And I think it's like very, I mean, honestly, it's kind of terrifying. It is. It is. I think one of the ways that I started to think about this was that.

lightning strikes, the damage tends to be a lot less physical. So you might not see very much damage, even if you look with like an MRI or with imaging. It's almost like it just does electrical damage in our bodies. And we can't see what that ends up doing. Whereas electricity, if you're exposed to it from a household source, because that duration of exposure is longer, that electrical energy gets transferred into heat energy. So you have a lot more typical burns. You have a lot more visual and physical damage that we're able to see. And these type of injuries that your brain probably associates with electricity. Yeah, that makes sense. And I think that that seems to be what makes it so difficult to characterize and to like categorize and to like categorize and to understand because we still,

it seems like we still don't know so much about like how our brain delivers signals and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so when something goes wrong, we don't know, we know that something went wrong, but we don't know how it went wrong. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So let's talk about what kinds of damage this lightning is actually. inflicting, shall we? Let's hear it. Because it's not to say that lightning doesn't cause physical damage.

It certainly does. It's just quite different than the damage that we see with other types of electricity. So the most instantaneously deadly injury that happens with lightning strikes is damage to our heart. Our heart has its own little electrical system. So especially if current of any type, not just lightning, is passing vertically through our bodies. It has a pretty good chance of passing over our heart, which sits kind of right in the center. And that current can then disrupt our heart's internal electric system and lead to arrhythmias.

It can lead to acystally, essentially stopping the heart entirely. Or it can lead to what's called ventricular fibrillation, which is when the bottom of your heart, the part that's supposed to pump the blood out of your heart to the rest of your body, stops contracting and really instead goes like and fibrolates. It's not a good, sorry. You can't see my hands.

It was a good, I think it was an adequate sound effect. Thank you. So what lightning can do is it can cause one single, instantaneous depolarization of the entire heart. One massive contraction that just then stops. the heart, and that's what it does. Often, because your heart has its own little electrical system, it will start again on its own. But if the respiratory centers of your brain, which control our respiratory drive, also get affected by this current, then you can have respiratory arrest as well. So you stop breathing. If you stop breathing, your heart stops beating. That then can prolong the cardiac arrest.

So lightning strike can cause death. I read anywhere from 5 to 30% of the time. Most sources said 10 to 30% and a few papers said 5 to 10% of the time. And usually it's immediate death because of that cardiac arrest either without the heart ever returning to normal function or if you have both a cardiac and a respiratory arrest without resuscitation, then you have death because of that. And one thing that's really interesting about lightning strikes specifically is that it's actually far more likely to have successful resuscitation in the case of a cardiopulmonary arrest from lightning than from a lot of other reasons for cardiac arrest. And there's a lot of different hypotheses as to like why. Part of it might be that because it happens so, I just keep saying this, like it feels repetitive, but it is so instantaneous, this complete stop, that there's a thought that maybe you have more time before the tissue damage starts to occur.

Right? Whereas with a heart attack or something, that blockage, like, starts to cause cell damage over a period of seconds or minutes, so you've already lost time. But many times people who are struck by lightning are otherwise young and quite healthy. So it might just be that they have more reserves, so to speak. We don't really know. But it's really interesting because it changes the paradox of, for example, in an emergency situation, who should be the first person that you like go to to try and save?

Right. The triage is like opposite. Exactly. With lightning, it's the person who looks dead. That's the person you go to first because their heart probably stopped. They might have stopped breathing, but you'll probably get them back. Whereas if someone is breathing, is moaning, is making any kind of movement or noise, they're going to be okay, most likely, in the immediate emergent period. But so that's kind of the most extreme thing that happens.

But lightning can also cause a lot of skin damage. It can cause linear burns from water on the skin being vaporized. It can cause these fascinating, feathery snowflake lightning strike patterns that actually aren't burns at all. And we don't even really understand what causes them. But they tend to disappear in a matter of hours. It can cause these small, round burns that can be deep, but they're really small in diameter or an area. So in general, the skin and burn injuries that we see from lightning tend to be much. less severe, first of all, than you would expect from such a huge amount of electricity,

but also less severe than what we see from a lot of other electric sources. Lightning, though, can cause a lot more trauma damage than some other electric sources, except for perhaps high-tension wires. But because of the shock wave that's generated by lightning, that shockwave itself can actually cause barotrauma, which can cause injury to our internal organs. It can cause a concussion. It can rupture the eardrums.

That is... It's wild. It's terrifying. It's also thought that during flashover, the current can actually reenter our body through our eyes and our nose, which can then cause ocular damage, like cataracts. And then, of course, you can have trauma from falls, from being blasted away, or from shrapnel, from a chest, from a chest, tree, et cetera. So there's a lot of different ways that lightning can harm you. Yeah. But then, of course,

there's the neurologic damage. And the neurologic effects can also be pretty wide ranging. They can be transient where they go away really quickly. And it's actually pretty common to have something called caranoparalysis, which is pretty specific to lightning strikes. It's a total paralysis, especially of the lower extremities, but it's transient and it goes away within a matter of hours, not fully understood. Lightning strikes can cause a lot of autonomic instability, which means, like, your autonomic nervous system is the part of your body that controls all of our involuntary actions, your heart rate, your temperature control, your blood vessel, your digestion. Right. So this can manifest as temperature instability, as a fast heart rate for seemingly no reason, as blood pressure problems.

But again, these type of findings tend to improve relatively quickly. There can also be immediate effects from a lightning strike neurologically that don't recover as quickly, that are more prolonged. And that can happen either from direct damage from electric current or from things like ischemic injury from like a hemorrhage or a stroke, if you have damage to blood vessels, etc. Gotcha. And then there are a lot of delayed onset of symptoms that can be anything from movement disorders, like if there's motor neuron damage.

But then, of course, there are neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric findings that in many cases can be profound and can be completely life-changing. and we do not understand the mechanism or the extent. It's so I feel like lightning is portrayed as like, oh, it's this deadly thing, which it absolutely is. And if you survive it, then you have special powers afterwards where you can suddenly play the guitar or speak nine different languages that you didn't know before. And like, first of all, those stories, I looked into a couple of them and they're not, They're not true.

They're obviously not true. Yeah. But I think also what's glossed over is that, yes, you can survive lightning, but it can be hugely disruptive for the rest of your life, or at least for like way longer afterwards. I didn't know that. No, I absolutely did not either. So the neuropsychiatric effects, they can be very wide-ranging. They can be anything from like photophobia, so difficulty with light, hyperaccusis,

so like really sensitive to sounds. It can cause emotional lability, mood swings that go in a second from like really, really overjoyed to like everything is terrible, but something that you have absolutely no control over. Sleep disturbances. It can cause anxiety or hypervigilance. It can result in a lot of memory deficits, especially in working memory or difficulty with word finding or auditory memory. There's been studies that have shown that it can affect your processing speed. Post-traumatic stress disorder happens in about 30% of people after a lightning injury. It's so wide-ranging. And I think what's so important about this type of neuropsychiatric findings is the downstream effect that these can have on somebody's life. Because they not only can affect the way that somebody interacts with the world, but they then can go on to affect a person's relationships, marriages, friendships, things that, like,

make a person who they are, which is terrifying. Yeah. And it also seems, I think, probably very frustrating that we know so little about this, which means that we know so little about how to treat or help provide any sort of symptom management in terms of those sorts of things. Yeah. And I think it comes down to we know so little about how the brain works. Yeah.

That how do we know how this, you know, instantaneously. massive force of electricity, how has that affected the wiring of your brain? It affects it. Right. We know. But we don't understand how. But yeah, Erin, that's a very long-winded and probably not detailed enough. Lightning. It's so interesting because there's so much there, but it's also like so many questions. Oh my gosh, I know. Making me flashbacks to the multiple sclerosis episode. So, Erin, tell me, how did we get here? I'm definitely not going to answer those questions. I don't even know how to ask a question about lightning, honestly.

Well, I will take you out a tour through the history of electricity right after this break. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something. That's why O'Keefe's working hands hand cream is such a relief. It's a concentrated hand cream that is specifically designed to relieve extremely dry, cracked hands caused by constant hand washing and harsh conditions. Working hands creates a protective layer on the skin that locks in moisture.

It's non-greasy, unscented, and absorbs quickly. A little goes a long way. Moisturization that lasts up to 48 hours. It's made for people whose hands take a beating at work, from health care and food service to salon, lag, and caregiving environments. It's been relied on for decades by people who wash their hands constantly or work in harsh conditions because it actually works. O'Keefs is my hand cream of choice in these dry Colorado winters when it feels like my skin is always on the verge of cracking. It keeps them

soft and smooth no matter how harsh it is outside. We're offering our listeners 15% off their first order of O'Keefs. Just visit o'Keefscom slash this podcast and code this podcast at checkout. John, I'm putting my foot down. We can't put off renovating this house any longer. Our kitchen is so small. We need to finish the basement for the kids and don't even get me started on the bathrooms. Honey, renovating is so expensive. We can't do all those projects. With Renify, we can. What's Renify? Renify loans are a new type of home equity loan only for homeowners during renovations. We can get up to $750,000 and keep our existing loan mortgage rate locked in. With Renify, we can do everything on our renovation list and we don't have to refinance. That's right. Renify loans are the only home equity loan that use the after-renovation value. Just what we need. How do we get started with Renify? I've already started. See, I'm at Renify.com. Visit Renofi.com. That's R-E-N-O-F-I.com to receive a text message to see if you qualify for up to $750,000 to renovate your home with Renewfi.

Unlock the future value of your home right now to get the money you need without refinancing. Visit renofi.com or R-E-N-O-F-I-com to get started today. NMLS number 180-2847. Terms apply. Not all borrowers or properties qualify. Equal Opportunity Broker. Truck Month is going on now at your local RAM dealer. Hurry in for great deals and exceptional offers on a powerful selection of RAM trucks.

And right now purchase and get 0% financing for 60 months on 2026 RAM-500 Big Horn and Laramie models. Don't miss this great offer. See your local RAM dealer. Not compatible with any other offers. 0% APR financing for 60 months equals 1667 per month per 1,000 financed for well-qualified buyers through Stalantus Financial Services regardless of down payment. Not all customers will qualify. Contact dealer for details. Offer ends 3-2. All right. So the entire history of electricity, let's begin. Just kidding. There's absolutely no way. I'm going to do that. Not even going to try, never planned on it. Yeah, that's outside my reach. But instead, what I decided to do was to pick four topics or stories or whatever in the history of electricity and tell you about them.

Okay. So it's not going to be as deep of a dive as I normally do on like a topic, but I think it's going to be a fun or at least interesting time. And I think that you'll end up with a lot of trivia about electricity. I can't wait. Right off the bat, I want to shout out the primary source I used, which is the newest book from Dr. Timothy Jorgensen called Spark. It's all about electricity from a biological perspective.

It is a fascinating and excellent read, and I really loved it. And you might remember Dr. Jorgensen from our episode on radiation that we did a couple of seasons ago when we had him on to explain like how in the heck radiation worked. And since Dr. Jorgensen does such an amazing job of explaining these super complicated topics in a way that I feel like I can actually understand, I wanted to have him on again to explain how precisely electricity works. So tune in next week for the bonus episode where I'm I get to ask him a bunch of questions about how electricity works and why it's so important in

understanding biology. Yeah. Okay. But are you ready to hear my little vignettes? Yes, I can't wait. Do you want to know the four topics or do you want to be surprised? I think I want to be surprised. Okay, here we go. Number one. I've got to start, of course, with lightning. Oh, yes. And specifically, one of the most famous stories in the history of lightning. Is it BF and the kite in the key? It is. Finally, a history story I at least have heard of. But starting way before that, people have long observed and revered lightning.

Like it holds a really significant place in many historical religions or mythology. You have Zeus in Greek mythology, Thor in Norse mythology. Indra is the Hindu god of storms. Uko is the Finnish god of thunder and sky and weather. And the Finnish word Ukonen means lightning. And in the traditional religion of Bantu tribes in Africa, lightning is a sign of the gods being angry. And there's also representations of lightning in art and etchings,

going back thousands and thousands of years. And the fascination that people had with lightning and the power, like the mystical power they ascribed to it, it, it's completely understandable, right? I mean, it's still fascinating and terrifying. But I'm not here to talk about lightning in mythology, even though I would love to do that. But what I really want to talk about is when people realized what lightning was and how they gained that understanding. Electricity itself has long, long been recognized by people and not necessarily in the context of lightning. People didn't look at lightning and immediately go, that's a like. People don't look at lightning. And,

electricity. The word electrical comes from the Latin word electricus, meaning amber-like, which refers to the fact that amber, when rubbed with a piece of wool, gets statically charged. And so you get little shocks of static electricity, which is actually the way you can tell whether it's real amber or not. But people saw this characteristic of amber, and it was believed to have mystical or healing properties for that reason, for this like electrical reason. There are amber pendants dating back to 12,000 BCE, for instance. And over time, people began observing static electricity in other materials and began to characterize as much as they could about how this electricity worked and how these materials behaved under certain circumstances.

And this process of observation and recording and reporting and so on, it allowed people to harness the power of electricity, at least to a certain degree, a small degree. Pretty small. For centuries, and I'm glossing over a lot here, the only way that people could intentionally produce static electricity is by rubbing materials together. Petting your cat really hard. Just kidding. Like rubbing amber with wool.

Yeah. But doing that manually meant that the amount that you could generate was pretty limited. Right. So people began inventing tools to help, such as hand crank tools that rotated an object against a piece of silk, a static electricity machine, and ways to like temporarily store that static electricity. By the mid-1700s, the concept of electricity had generated, and I put a little – Did that on purpose? Yeah. Nice.

A lot of attention and interest. And people would only become more and more fascinating. by this over the rest of the century. So where does Benjamin Franklin fit into all this? I teased his name and now I haven't talked about him yet. Okay. So the classic story of Ben Franklin is what? Oh, he like flew a kite into a cloud and got electrocuted by lightning. Yeah. Right? Is that it? Something like that. I feel like I learned it as Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity. Oh, yeah. Okay. By flying his kite in a lightning storm. But that, obviously, that didn't happen, right? People already knew that electricity existed. We also don't know if the kite experiment happened itself or if Ben Franklin was involved or if he just designed the experiment,

but it seems probable that it did actually happen. So if this story has been like misrepresented over time and it's not really quite truthful, why do we all still know about it? Yeah, tell me why, Eric. Okay. So several people, including Ben Franklin, had floated the idea that lightning storms were electrical. A lightning strike looks like a giant spark in the sky, basically like a giant-sized version of that static electricity discharge spark on your cat's nose. And so people thought that maybe electricity was stored in storm clouds and then discharged under certain conditions. That's a reasonable hypothesis, but that's all it was. It was. It was. It was. was just a hypothesis and no one knew for sure. And so Ben wanted to find out. Ben, we're on first name basis. Of course we are. So he devised an experiment that fortunately went through several revisions because the first versions were like incredibly dangerous, even more so than the final one ended up being. And they involved like a person standing on top of a wooden platform holding a metal rod in the middle of a storm and stuff like that, not good ideas. And so Ben made some

adjustments to this experiment to make it safer. So he decided that all he needed was a kite that had like a metal rod attached, a key, a device called a Leiden jar, which is essentially used to store static electricity. Apparently it's like a modern day capacitor. I don't know how that works. So I'm just going to say it's a jar that's used to store static electricity. Okay. Yeah, cool. He also needed a silk ribbon and nerves of steel. The only thing left to do was to wait. for the right storm, which arrived in Philadelphia in June of 1752. According to reports from that time, Ben and his son went out into the storm and threw the kite up into the skies. The metal rod attached to the kite picked up some of the ambient electricity from the storm, not lightning itself, because he probably would have died if he'd been struck by lightning or at least been severely injured.

and that electricity traveled down the wet twine string into the key that was tied to the twine. And then Ben was like, is this key charged? Is this key have electricity in it? He felt a little spark. And so he was like, perfect. So he was able to collect some of the storm's electricity and store it in that lighten jar. So he did it just with the storm, not with lightning. Yeah. That's a big difference. Well, it's a big difference. And I think that there probably were strikes that happened. Like, it was clearly like a, you know, thunderstorm, lightning storm or whatever. But he was able to collect that electricity without a lightning strike. That's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a, it was a huge deal. And I also just want to take a moment to say, don't do this at home. Yeah. Probably. Because it's still a very dangerous experiment. And actually the year after. he did this kite flying experiment, another scientist tried it elsewhere but was killed by

ball lightning. So anyway, so newspapers all over published the accounts of Ben Franklin's experiment and it made him like quite the celebrity. And even though he didn't discover electricity in this kite situation, his experiment did teach us several things. The first is that it showed that lightning is indeed electrical, right? The phenomenon that you had when you rubbed amber was the same, but on a much, much larger scale that you saw in nature when there was a thunderstorm. Right. Another is that it hinted at the enormous electrical power in storms and how we could possibly someday either harness it or that we could maybe generate great amounts of electricity ourselves. Right. Oh, wow. And the last big thing that I'll mention is that

that this experiment kind of immediately show that lightning rods, like the rod attached to the kite, could be used to protect structures, which is an idea that Ben Franklin and others had been working on for a few years. I think that many of us, or at least I'll speak for myself, I definitely take it for granted that when I am inside my home, I'm protected from lightning. Oh my gosh, yes. Or in like in a public building, right? But A, that hasn't always been the case. B, it still is not the case for many people. Yeah. And in Ben Franklin's time, lightning posed a serious risk to people's houses and their crops and their lives.

And there were always like newspaper reports of like these deadly lightning strikes. And it seemed to like be a very scary and real constant threat. Yeah. I absolutely reading this made me so much more terrified of lightning because I never realized how. easy it would be to not have the protection that I have inside my home. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And so when this experiment showed that lightning rods could be used to, like, protect your house or your building, people jumped on the idea and they began installing them in houses and public buildings. And some of these are still in use today,

such as the one on the Maryland State House, which is one of Ben's original rods installed in 1788. That's pretty cool. I know. But I also just think this is interesting. And this is sort of where I'd go right into like trivia mode here. These lightning rods weren't universally popular. Churches actually didn't readily adopt lightning rods because many of these churches had bell towers, ringing bells. And ringing bells were widely believed to protect the church from lightning. And apparently there are bells that have this inscription of a Latin phrase that translated into English means, I break the line. And I break the lightning. I think that's so interesting. Turns out, bells do not protect you from lightning and in fact

can be quite dangerous, especially because in a storm, bell ringers were called to go ring the bells. And so they'd be ringing this wet rope and then get struck by lightning. And so a lot of deaths happen that way. So I want to wrap up this first story with a few pieces of trivia about lightning. In 2016, this is just like literally like bullet points here. In 2016, 323 reindeer in Norway were killed, like all at the same time while huddling together during a storm. What? Uh-huh. The longest lasting recorded lightning strike was 17.1 seconds in a storm over Uruguay and northern Argentina in June of 2020.

Oh, no. And apparently the longest single flash was 477.2 miles or 768 kilometers, just like across parts of the southern U.S. in April 2020. Wow. Anyway. Okay. Trivia over. Moving on to number two. Ben's kite flying, it had expanded the boundaries of what electricity could be and how and where it could appear.

And in the decades after his experiment, electricity researchers dug deeper into the characteristics of electricity, and especially whether different special types of electricity existed, was all electricity the same? And this ultimately led to a huge debate over something called animal electricity. And that debate, in turn, led to one of the most impactful advancements in the history of electricity. Okay. So animal electricity was this idea put forth in the 1700s and championed heavily in the late 1700s by an Italian researcher named Luigi Galvani. Okay. And it was the idea that all animals created and stored electricity in their bodies, particularly in their brains, and that this animal electricity was responsible for movement. Okay. So he believed that this type of electricity was unique.

to living things only, and it was not the same electricity that you could store in a Leiden jar, for instance. And part of why he was so adamant that this was the way things were and that animal electricity was unique is because he was deeply religious. And he believed that it was heresy to try to understand the inner workings of God's creations or to try to imitate them. And so he was like, no, if you can generate static electricity and store that in a lighten jar, there's no way that that could be the same thing that is in animals. Okay, okay. So to prove that animal electricity existed, Galvani did this series of experiments involving

dead frogs and different metal wires. So when he attached these frogs' legs to the wires, he noticed that they jumped or twitched, which he concluded was proof that the wires were simply allowing the store. up animal electricity to be released. It's like opening the valve. I know. I know. I don't understand how you reached that conclusion, but okay, Galvani. Give me some more. You know who else didn't understand how he could reach that conclusion was another Italian researcher, Alessandro Volta. Ah, Volta. And so Volta was the opposite of Galvani in like every way. And so he looked at this experiment and was like, just like you said, I don't know how you could conclude that it was the frog and not the wires.

So on the two sides of this, Galvani saying, no, the movement is coming from internal electricity from the animal itself. And Volta was like, no, it is the application of external electricity causing the movement. And the two went back and forth in their feud until Volta decided that he needs to. to settle the matter once and for all. So he was always experimenting with things, and he had noticed that when he placed coins made of different metals on his tongue and like, yeah, put them down, he felt a bit of a tingle, kind of like an electric shock. And the strength of that tingle depended on which types of metals the coins were made of. Okay. And so he wanted to understand what was going on. Like, that seemed to him like electricity, but how could he use that?

And so he went to the literature. And he came across the description of an animal that gave him a little spark of inspiration. I love that you keep dropping these. Uh-huh. The torpedo fish, also called the electric ray. Oh, yeah. Torpedo fish are so cool. So torpedo fish are kinds of rays found in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and in the Mediterranean.

and what makes them so unbelievably fascinating is that they have the ability to generate an electric shock so strong that it can knock a person unconscious. Wow. Yes. They use this to stun prey, of course. Oh, I was so tempted to go into the evolutionary history of electricity, electrosensory organs and fish and stuff like that, but I resisted. But people had been aware of these torpedo fish for hundreds, even thousands of years. years, and they were thought to have mystical properties because of this shock.

Of course. They were used by some physicians in ancient Rome to treat various medical issues. Like they would just, like, put the torpedo fish on the person. Shock them. One of the ailments that they were used for is hemorrhoids. It's like an... Ow! I know.

Like, terrible. But the nature of this shock that they delivered was. debated. Was it electricity? There was no visible spark, so was it actually just the sting? Or was it something totally different? In the 1770s, so a couple of decades before the debate between Galvani and Volta kind of came to a head, an English scientist named Henry Cavendish showed that the torpedo fish produced electricity, but still there was this question of like, well, what kind of electricity is it? Is this the same kind that we could artificially produce, or is it this animal electricity? And so when Volta came across descriptions of this fish, and particularly their electric

organs, these columns of jelly-filled discs, he thought, I wonder if these work in the same way that my metal coins on my tongue do. Like just a couple of coins stacked together, give me a light tingle. But if I increase the number of coins that touch, like the way these columns of disk in the electric fish are arranged, would the amount of electricity also increase and lead to a larger shock? Huh. So he tried it out. He stacked disks of copper and zinc and other metals, along with cloth dipped in either dilute acidic solution or salt water, until he had this big pile of disks.

he attached wires to each end and then he tested it on his tongue. Again, bad idea. And sure enough, a stronger tingle. But not only was it a greater shock, he was also surprised to find out that it was continuous. Electricity was flowing out of his pile like water. Hence why we call things like electrical current or the flow of electricity. It was like liquid. People thought it was liquid in nature.

It wasn't this one-and-done shock. And that is how, inspired by the torpedo fish, in 1799, Volta created the first true battery. Battery! How cool is that? What? I love it. It's so cool. And also, not only did he just, like, create this incredible source of electricity that would forever change things,

he also proved galvani wrong because he was like I can generate electricity in the same way that the torpedo fish did but without any animal parts present so he won wow yeah so that's where a volt comes from yeah and also like galvanized too galvanize yeah wow I know so are you ready for number three yeah my brain is still just like reeling I know I know Great. I want number three. Okay, so let's now see one of the things that people did with this new knowledge of how to generate larger amounts of continuous electricity. Okay. Jumping ahead to the 1880s. So by this time, the world had come a long way from Ben Franklin and his kite. Several cities had streetlights powered by electricity. And while we were still several decades away from being. able to easily bring power into people's homes, electricity was in the process of becoming a more widely accessible everyday practical tool rather than something that was used in just magic shows or tinkered with only in scientific labs. But many people who were living in these cities that were

lit by electrical lamps, they were still like pretty wary of this power, especially as newspapers reported on an increasing number of accidental deaths, from electricity. One of these deaths would inspire the invention of one of the U.S.'s most gruesome devices. On August 7, 1881 in Buffalo, New York, a man named George Lemuel Smith had had a bit too much to drink, and he stumbled into a power plant, reportedly seeking the thrill of an electrical tingle. What? Yeah. He, I don't know. Well, he's He got his tingle and a lot, a lot more. His death by electrocution was presented by a coroner to an audience of medical professionals in Buffalo,

and in that audience was a dentist by the name of Alfred P. Southwick. You know, people find inspiration in all kinds of ways. Like maybe an idea comes to you when you're in the shower or when you're reading a book or when you're on a long walk. Or maybe it comes to you in the form of an autopsy report of an electrocuted man. As Southwick listened to this case, an idea began to form. What if we could harness this power and put it to good use, which in his eyes was to kill people who had been sentenced to death? Aye.

Uh-huh. Southwick teamed up with the physician and the head of the Buffalo ASPCA to test out this new method of execution on the stray and, animals of Buffalo. I know. It just gets worse. Oh, dear. It always does. It always does. I'm not even going to, like, venture a guess or say anything about whether Southwick was a sociopath or something like that. But it does seem that his intentions were, like, maybe not good, but at least not evil. Because at the time, capital punishment was done primarily through hanging, which is not not always reliable and was associated with a lot of pain and injury and just bad.

Yeah, gruesome. Yeah. And so there was a series of botched hangings that had led to quite a bit of pushback against both hanging as well as capital punishment in general. And so Southwick viewed death by electrocution as a much more humane option. It seemed quick and painless and with practice more reliable. So he took the calculations that he had gathered from his animal experiments, scaled them up for humans, and designed a delivery method. A chair, not unlike a dental chair.

And that is how the electric chair was born. Wow. So he brought this design to New York politicians and lobbied them to replace hanging with his electric chair. The governor at the time was like, huh, you know what, you might be on to something here. So he put together a commission to investigate the electric chair alongside the other common methods and not so common methods of execution that were used, which by the end of their investigations totaled 34 different methods. Whoa. Yeah, I know. It's disturbing a number. Some of these methods were tossed out pretty quickly, but others proved to be stiff competition like decapitation via guillotine.

guillotine. But the commission concluded that electrocution was the winner. They still had concerns, but it seemed like the best choice. What also helped make this be number one choice was that the electric chair got a vote of confidence from one very prominent figure in electricity, Thomas Edison. You know, Aaron, I would love to spend so much time talking about the electricity wars between, Edison and Nicola Tesla and Westinghouse, but I just, I can't. If there was ever an episode for it to happen, it would be this one, but I decided against it. I'm actually shocked by that because I know your feelings about Thomas Edison. You're shocked by that?

So what you need to know, essentially, is that Thomas Edison was a huge proponent of direct current. That's what he worked in. That's what he invested so much time and money into having that be the type of energy used in homes, commercially, everywhere. Nikola Tesla, on the other hand, had worked with alternating current. Edison was extremely threatened by Tesla and Westinghouse's alternating current, and so he launched essentially a smear campaign against it. One strategy of this campaign was to get the alternating current powered electric chair approved for executions, because if AC was used to kill people, would

you really want it in your homes? So with Edison's backing and just a few pesky details to be worked out, like the amount of charge and how long and blah, blah, blah, the commission recommended the electric chair as a primary form of execution. And on August 6, 1890, nine years minus one day after the death of George Smith that kicked off this whole situation, the first execution via electric chair on a person was carried. out. A man named William Kemmler had been convicted of murdering his girlfriend, Tilly Ziegler, with a hatchet in front of like enough witnesses to easily put him away, and he had been sentenced to

death. His electrocution did not go well. I think the eyewitness account says it best. Oh dear. And if you would rather not hear a pretty good. gruesome description of an electric chair execution, I would suggest skipping ahead about a minute and a half to two minutes. Okay, quote, the scene of Kemmler's execution was too horrible to picture. Men accustomed to every form of suffering grew faint as the awful spectacle was unfolded before their eyes. Those who stood in the sight were filled with awe as they saw the effects of this most potent of fluids, electricity, which is only partially understood by those who have studied it most faithfully, as it slowly, too slowly, disintegrated the fiber and tissues of the body through which

it passed. The heaving of the chest, which it had been promised, would be stilled in an instant of peace as soon as the circuit was completed, the foaming of the mouth, the bloody sweat, the writhing of shoulders and all other signs of life. Horrible as these all were, they were made infinitely more horrible by the premature removal of the electrodes and the subsequent replacing of them for not seconds but minutes until the room was filled with the odor of burning flesh and strong men fainted and fell like logs upon the floor. That's horrific. It's absolutely, it's horrific. There were debates about whether he was brain dead and actually, like, had any pain sensation. And I think that that has long been a controversy in terms of electric chair execution.

But I think one of the things that surprised me the most, or maybe it shouldn't have, but this happened. And people were like, you know what, it's fine. We're going to keep going. Yeah. Let's try it again. I mean, in popular news reports, the doctors were completely slid. They were like, you botched this. This is terrible. You need to do better. And so, yeah, maybe they, maybe they were just convincing enough that, like, no, we can do better next time.

Right. Yeah. And so in the months and years that followed this first electric chair execution, the entire process was tweaked a bit here and there to avoid a repeat of what happened with Kemmler. And death by electric chair became a very common method of execution in the U.S. and basically nowhere else. And in the U.S., states appointed electrocutioners, who were generally people whose skills lay not in, like, human physiology and how our bodies worked, but in electricity. One of these, Robert G. Elliott, was the state executioner for New York and ended up

executing 387 people during his lengthy career. At the end of his life, he wrote. an autobiography, reflecting on his whole life and career and experiences. And I wanted to mention it because I think his takeaway is super interesting. He believed at the end of all of this that the death penalty should be abolished. And it's not that he felt morally responsible for these deaths or worried about the people that he had executed having suffered. He thought that it was a painless process and he was like, I'm just doing my job. But he felt that capital punishment in general wasn't any use. It wasn't a deterrent to crime. And it was really more society taking its revenge.

There was no good outcome of this. He felt that witnessing and execution should be a civic duty like jury service for all citizens and felt that if that were to happen, if there had to be like, oh, this is the committee that's going to watch this execution, that he was like, the death penalty will be gone very quickly. That's an interesting thought. Isn't that an interesting thought? Yeah. So since that first execution via Electric Chair of Kemler in 1890,

there have been over 4,300 executions by Electric Chair in the U.S., and I feel like it holds a pretty infamous place in history or in like pop culture, There are famous electric chairs like gruesome gertie, old smoky, old sparky, and it's been featured in countless songs. Shout out to Ride the Lightning by Metallica, which I was about to say forced to listen to for the first time the other day. And also it's featured in books and movies and shows like off the top of my head I can think of several. The Green Mile, right? starting in the late 1970s the electric chair began to be phased out as lethal injection took over in states where the death penalty still exists but this gruesome chapter in electricity history

is not quite over because the electric chair is still an option in some U.S. states and some states allow people to choose their method of execution which is yeah so maybe how about we stop here in electric chair and we move on to a slightly lighter bit of history. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay.

So I wanted to end the history section on a bit of a happier note by talking about how electricity has been used not to kill people, but rather to try to help them. Okay. I'm going to just do a very, very quick tour through this history and hope that one day I get to do a deeper dive on something like electroconvulsive therapy, for instance. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I already mentioned how both Amber and Electric Fish were used thousands of years ago to try to treat or cure people. But the age of electrotherapy really began when the study of electricity kicked off in the 1700s.

People may not have understood exactly how electricity worked. Turns out they still don't, I guess. But they still tried to use it to treat basically any condition they could think of. Throughout the 1800s and into the early 1900s, electrotherapy became incredibly popular, and physicians who practice electrotherapy actually called themselves electricians. Huh. This is that great. Yeah.

And it was an incredibly lucrative field to be in. And apparently, I learned that many of the early advances in electricity technology were driven by physicians wanting to have better control over the electrical charge that they applied to their patients. Huh. Interesting. Yeah. Because unlike many of the electrical scientists at the time, the physicians actually had a strong revenue stream from their patients to be able to focus those research efforts. Yeah. And so many of these early electrical innovations were medical focused. Some of these devices may have helped people a little, but as you can imagine, this was a field full of snake oil. For example, I just want to talk briefly.

about one of the most popular electrotherapy devices in the early 20th century, which was the Pulvermocker belt. You could get it by mail order only. Of course. So picture, if you will, a normal belt. Strap somehow batteries to it and then put that around your waist directly on your bare skin. Okay.

So it was supposed to release like a steady electrical current. They gave off a nice little tingle where the belt rested. At first, the belt was widely marketed to everyone, but then the focus narrowed a bit with the release of the Pulvermocker pouch, which you would attach to the front of the belt and rest your genitals inside. It was just like, I think you have to see like the drawing of this belt. It kills me. It's so funny. So it was advertised as improving sexual vitality. Of course.

And it was an absolute bestseller. Like so much so that, you know, those clickbait headlines that are like, doctors hate this one trick. Uh-huh. That is essentially the pulver macker advice. They wanted it to be banned. They were like, we need patients to come in to see us. And they're just sitting at home with these belts on. Also, maybe they wanted it to be banned.

because it didn't work to do anything, really. And that's what people were generally realizing about electrotherapy, especially as things like germ theory revealed the underlying pathologies of various diseases, which didn't necessarily have any overt link to electricity. Whereas in the 1800s, electrotherapy was considered essentially a cure-all. By the early decades of the 1900s, it had fallen out of favor, more or less, and was kind of seen as a specialist treatment. But it didn't go away entirely.

In the 1920s and the 1930s, there was a lot of research looking into a possible relationship between epilepsy and schizophrenia. And several physicians mistakenly believed that they represented opposite ends of a disease spectrum. And the implication of that was that if you induced seizures in someone with schizophrenia, you could treat the disease. And that is how electroconvulsive things, therapy first began to be used for schizophrenia.

And it seemed at least somewhat effective, but the how and the why was not, and I think, is still not fully known. And despite the bad popular reputation it has, mostly owing to issues with informed consent and negative media portrayals, which I would love to talk more about in like a bigger episode, it's still used today to treat many different disorders. in addition to schizophrenia, one of the most common being certain kinds of depression. And it's like successfully used. And it seems like we've come a long way from the 1920s and the 1930s in the way that we treat people with this.

And so I think that ECT is kind of this example that we have where like something that started out a long time ago, electrotherapy in general as snake oil or mostly placebo effect has now evolved so much over. time that it is used very effectively in many different types of conditions, right? You have ECT used to treat types of depression, vagus nerve stimulation to treat some epilepsy, deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson's disease. And there are many, many more examples. And even if we still have more to understand about how electricity works, it's amazing to me to think of how much it is taught us about ourselves with like different nerves and different muscles or maybe in the future what lightning strikes can teach us about brain functionality.

Yeah. So speaking of lightning strikes, Aaron, what's happening with electrical shocks and lightning strikes and whatever else today? Well, I don't know. Let's take a break and then find out. So bringing it all the way back to lightning. where we began. First off, like I said earlier, we truly have no clue how many people are struck by lightning

or the death toll from lightning strikes straight up. Two recent studies estimated between 6,000 and 24,000 fatalities per year, which is a very huge range. Yeah. Really big differences in different studies. And a lot of papers kind of assume that globally, there are at least 10 times as many injuries as there are deaths. So for estimates of 24,000 fatalities, that's over 240,000 injuries globally. How has that changed over time? It's a great question.

It definitely has changed. The biggest problem, there's two biggest problems. Number one, most countries simply don't report this type of information because they're not collecting it, right? Even in the U.S. are lightning data from what I read. And I think that this is still true. It's mostly gathered by like Noah. And so it's not gathered in specific by any kind of medical establishment. And so we still don't even have good numbers.

for the U.S., and the same is true in most, if not all, other countries. And also, of course, lightning isn't exactly evenly distributed across the globe. So there are some areas that at certain times of year have a lot of lightning and other places that don't really have much lightning year round, etc. In general, from what I could gather, the overall death rate does seem to be declining, especially in developed and high-income countries where we have good infrastructure that can help protect people from lightning strikes. So, for example, in the U.S., older papers that I read estimated like 100 fatalities a year, even older ones said it used to be as high as 400 a year, more recent numbers cited about 30 deaths annually in the U.S. So in the U.S., we've certainly seen a decline

in many other countries, likely a decline. But there are still so many risk factors in a lot of places in the world associated with increased lightning deaths that really come down to infrastructure issues, right? Not having lightning safe dwellings or workplaces or schools. So the short answer is we still don't really know. Yeah, I agree. As a comparison, though, I didn't realize, and this made me so much more terrible. terrified even though I'm in San Diego. We don't have a lot of lightning. Although I heard thunder this morning, there are more than 20 million cloud-to-ground lightning strikes annually in the lower 48 states alone.

Hmm. 20 million cloud to ground strikes. That is so many. In one year. In one year. Yeah. Wild. So the other question then is like what is going to continue to happen in the future? Certainly we know what types of infrastructure and what types of dwellings can help to protect people from lightning strikes. What happens globally, especially as our climate changes? Yeah. Our favorite thing to talk about on this podcast. I was wondering about that.

Yeah, I'm still wondering about it. One paper that I read, which was a modeling paper, estimated that global lightning flash rate could actually decrease with climate change. They estimated about a 15% decrease in lightning strikes with climate change based on their models. But other papers have estimated the exact opposite, an increase of anywhere from 4 to 16% in lightning with climate change. And from what I can gather, there's definitely like a strong theoretical possibility that warmer global temperatures, especially in the tropics, can result in greater lightning frequency because of those warm air fronts. And we know that like those are the kinds of conditions under which lightning can occur. But it really comes down to it's not as simple as temperature equals lightning. And I mean, climate change isn't as simple as temperature equals anything.

Right. Yeah. Other papers have looked at more of the secondary effects of lightning, right? And how, which we didn't even get into because that's a whole other situation. But other papers have looked at things like an increasingly dry climate increases the risk of things like forest fires that are associated with lightning. Lightning is a major cause of forest fires. And so even if the actual amount of lightning might decrease or not change, if the dry season is longer, then that could actually contribute to an increasing risk associated with those lightning strikes. That makes sense, yeah.

Right? Yeah. So it's complicated, and we don't really know what's going to happen with the future of lightning. But there is so much room for fascinating research. There is. There really is. And also better monitoring? Yes, definitely.

For sure. Should we do sources? We should. I have some great ones I want to shout out. Ooh, me too. Okay. Number one, I want to shout out again, the book Spark by Timothy Jorgensen. So good, fascinating.

Go check it out. Then I have some more multimedia sources. So I watched a great documentary called Shock and Aw. The Story of Electricity. It's by BBC. It's on YouTube. I'll link to it. It's really fascinating. Then a couple of podcast episodes. The first one is by outside podcast, and it's called Science of Survival, struck by Lightning. That's a very impactful episode. I felt that not only talked about someone's experience, but also a little bit more about science and stuff like that, too. Oh, it was great.

And then the last one is one that I listened to with my sister when she came to visit me and we drove up to the Teton's in Wyoming. And it's a podcast called National Park After Dark. And they do episodes focused on like different stories. And the one we listened to was about the Teton's, the Grand Teton National Park. And it was a, it's called a fatal lightning strike and the Jenny Lake Rangers. And that is a wow. I mean, it was riveting. I had a book and a book chapter that was absolutely awesome and so comprehensive,

focus specifically on lightning. One was called Reducing Lightning Injuries Worldwide. That's the book. And then there was lightning-related injuries and safety, both written by Mary Ann Cooper at all. And then there's a few others, kind of older papers that were on both electrical and and lightning strike, if you're interested in kind of both of those in comparing contrasting, as well as those papers on the kind of climate change projections. We'll post the sources for this episode and all of our episodes on our website.

This podcast will kill you.com. Thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you to Exactly Right Network. And thank you to you, listeners. You're the best. You are the best. I hope you liked this. I thought this was a very interesting and kind of a different one.

Ooh, I have a good one. I hope you found it enlightening. Ooh, good one. Good one, Aaron. I mean, I can't add any more than that. So thank you also to our wonderful patrons. We appreciate you so much. So much.

Well, until next time, wash your hands. You filthy animals. Truck month is going on now at your local ram dealer. Hurry in for great deals and exceptional offers on a powerful selection of ram trucks. And right now purchase and get 0% financing for 60 months on 2026 RAM-500 Big Horn and Laramie models. Don't miss this great offer. See your local RAM dealer. Not compatible with any other offers.

0% APR financing for 60 months equals 1667 per month per 1,000 financed for well-qualified buyers through Stalantus financial services regardless of down payment. Not all customers will qualify. Contact dealer for details. Offer ends 3-2. Virgin Voyages presents. from Alaska. Alaska isn't complicated. It just needs to be done right. Waking up to glaciers, spotting wildlife from the deck, spending the day hiking, kayaking, or exploring, and then coming back to a beautifully designed ship with epic food and a drink waiting. This is Alaska, the best way.

Award-winning adults-only Alaska cruising from Virgin Voyages, sailing from Seattle. Explore Sailing at virgin voyages.com. Lego Star Wars just made the jump to hyperspace. Introducing the Lego Smart Brick. New Lego Star Wars sets with smart bricks inspire your child's imagination, taking their play to uncharted regions of the galaxy. With responsive lights, a color recognition scanner, a synthesizer, and an accelerometer,

your child's play doesn't just come alive. It allows the Lego Star Wars galaxy to play back. May the Force be with you. Shop Lego Star Wars sets now on Lego. or in Lego Retail Stores.