Over the six months during which I have been working almost constantly on translating and editing your works, I have familiarized myself a little with electricity. One would have to be very obtuse indeed to keep from becoming an electrician along with you! But in this kind of science, as in all the others, you prefer to search for what is most useful, and by an admirable institution of the Creator, what is most useful always proves to be the easiest to understand and the least abstract. This fact suits my natural preference and the mediocrity of my talents very well.

Since you demonstrated that it was possible to extract and conduct lightning, and since the soundness of your principles has been confirmed by the experiment of Marly-la-Ville and by countless others, thunderstorms have still caused many new misfortunes that it would have been possible to prevent.

You have proposed perfect methods for protecting houses, churches, ships, and especially gunpowder storehouses from lightning. Numerous physicists have spread your findings in all directions, and nevertheless, outside America, the public has profited from these discoveries very little.

You have shown people who have a fear of thunder, and who find themselves during a thunderstorm in a house that lacks electrical conductors on the outside, what are the most favorable locations they could select, and the wisest precautions they could take, to ensure their safety in such a situation.

In Holland it has been proposed that a certain number of electric rods should be placed at fixed intervals around an entire town and through it, with good conductors connecting the rods to one another, in order to protect all the buildings and all the inhabitants from thunderstorms. I leave it to you to discuss whether this method would be an effective one, but even so, would not other particular cases remain that are worthy of consideration, and that no one seems to have taken an interest in before now?

1. Creating a safe refuge for oneself out of the very apartment to which one is restricted within a house that is not entirely at one’s disposal, when the owner has neglected to take all of the desirable safety measures.

2. When one is travelling in a carriage, knowing whether any precautions should be taken for the carriage, and if so, which ones, taking into account both its shape and the material of which it is made?

3. When one is obliged to go out on foot, either in town or in the country, in weather when there is danger of thunderstorms, would there not be some ways of protecting oneself from the thunder, as well as from the rain and sun?

With regard to the first point, it seems that a bed made entirely of wood—without any metal at all, and whose four legs would stand on four electric stools—along with a table and chair insulated by similar stools, would provide a sure means of eating, working and sleeping in the most perfect peace of mind, despite any thunderstorms. However, it would be a good idea to take the additional precaution of not having any kind of metal in the apartment, unless it were part of a sort of unbroken electrical circle, both ends of which would be located outdoors.

As for the second article, which concerns protective carriages, a theory could easily be derived from the same principles; but going into detail about the different applications that could be made of the theory would take me too far afield, and would be out of place here.

3. Finally, for those who travel on foot, in whom I have always taken a preferential interest, I have a kind of paratonnerre to propose to you (if I may permitted to express myself thus), that I am going to submit to your judgment.

This apparatus is scarcely any different from a parasol, except for a few little accessories, that can easily be fitted to it in case of a storm.

The main part, comprising the body of the parasol, includes:

1. A piece of taffeta, rounded in the ordinary way into the form of a dome, but with one seam that is covered on top by a plait or little silver braid.

2. A stick or handle made of light wood, approximately two feet long.

3. An iron rod, half an inch in diameter, and eight to ten inches long, placed above opposite the handle, and with a nut fastened to the upper end.

4. A ring, small sticks and a copper spring, also to be placed above; this ring, sliding along the iron rod, will serve both to fold and unfold the parasol’s ribs, and by means of the ribs to spread out the taffeta, or close it up again.

5. Nine to ten ribs, each consisting of two pieces, braced in the ordinary way, but placed above the taffeta; one of these ribs, adjoining the silver braid, should be equipped with a piece of copper with a nut fastened to the end. The accessories include:

1. A slender copper staff one foot long, with a fine spike fastened to the upper end, and a screw to the lower end; this screw can be easily fitted if desired into the nut on the iron rod.

2. A thick brass wire one and a half feet long, with a little screw fastened to the end; this screw can be easily fitted if necessary into the nut on the piece of copper, with which we said that one of the ribs was equipped. The wire should point at an angle towards the ground.

4 [sic]. A silver cord, hanging from the lower end of this brass wire, and at the end of the cord, a small fringe tuft made of the same material and trailing a little on the ground.

With this paratonnerre put up correctly, a man can pass fearlessly beneath stormclouds, or beneath electrified cucurbites, as he knows for certain that as soon as he comes within range of electric shock, the spike on the upper staff will attract all of the formidable fire to itself alone, and the fire will be conducted from there harmlessly along the iron rod, the braid, the piece of copper, the brass wire, the cord and the tuft—all excellent metallic conductors—until it reaches the ground, which is the great common reservoir of electrical fire. Not the least spark of this fire will pass into or through the taffeta, which does not attract electricity at all.

Therefore, when someone thinks that he sees an imminent storm, or when this storm appears to have dispelled entirely, within less than a minute he can put together or take apart the two components of this apparatus, and convert his parasol into a paratonnerre, or reduce his paratonnerre to a simple parasol.

Once one has worked first of all on one’s own behalf, it is right to seek to inform others of the advantages that one has succeeded in procuring for oneself; to enjoy a good thing alone, whatever it may be, is to enjoy it only halfway. I anticipate a fuller satisfaction from my paratonnerre; I flatter myself that every apparatus of this kind, since it will be capable of neutralizing a small electrical cloud, and of driving away several similar clouds at the same time, will be sufficient to protect a certain expanse of space around it, and to protect this space for a certain amount of time, although I am not able to specify the limits either of the space or of the amount of time.

In order to arrive at a good understanding of this principle, let us suppose, first of all, a large metal tube that is highly charged with electricity, and a dozen persons stationed on both sides of it, almost within range of shock, that is, a little further away than they would have to be in order to receive sparks of electricity. If someone at the same distance away from the tube, or even at a distance more than twice as long, were to hold out the point of a stylus, that point would attract all the electricity to itself, and would discharge it entirely.

Secondly, let us suppose, as in one of your own fine experiments, several tufts of cotton not too close together, hanging below that same tube, and attached to one another by short pieces of thread; the more the tube is charged with electricity, the more these tufts will tend to separate; they will grow longer and spin themselves out, of their own accord, so to speak, and the last tuft will fall very low. If one brings the point of the stylus a little closer to the last tuft, when it is in this position, the stylus will draw the electricity from it, and that tuft will draw it from the preceding one, and so on in turn, so that all the tufts will grow tighter and shorter, and rise up again toward the tube, as though an occult power had impelled them forcefully upward.

This should be the effect of the staff of the paratonnerre on little clouds charged with electricity from the heavens. The staff will empty of electricity the cloud that is closest to it, and by making this cloud react upon the others, it will force several of these clouds to rise toward the upper regions of the atmosphere.

But what becomes of the electricity that is drawn out in this way? We should not trouble ourselves over it, so long as we make it encounter good conductors that will send it back into the great reservoir from which it has been pumped, and into which it must return to lose itself again. Now metals are the best of all conductors, with water coming next, and animal bodies third. Therefore, if care has been taken to provide metallic conductors for the electrical fire attracted by the paratonnerre, one can be perfectly assured, first of all, that the fire will follow its conductors to the end, since nothing is capable of drawing it off route; and second, that the conductors will discharge the fire definitively into the very depths of the earth, where every electrical fire re-establishes its balance of its own accord, and ceases at once to be active. All the threads of the silver fringe that trails along the ground could be considered so many fine spikes, and we know that spikes are just as capable of diffusing electrical fire as they are of receiving it.

A torrent of fire does not behave like a torrent of water; the latter can only be redirected, but the former can be either redirected or completely extinguished. Electrical fire is kindled less frequently than ordinary fire, and is extinguished even more quickly; it lets itself be guided more easily, is more inclined to regain its balance, and has never caused as much devastation as ordinary fire. Nonetheless, let us give an example of how even ordinary fire can be managed by the power of art.

If, on a sunny summer day, someone directed onto a leaden ball the center of the great silver mirror that was built by Monsieur de Buffon in imitation of Archimedes, the ball will immediately enter a state of fusion, and will have evaporated within an instant. If this ball had been placed just short of the mirror’s center, or beyond it (although it were still placed in the same direction), the same solar rays would not have produced the slightest discernible effect upon the ball, since the rays would not yet have come together in the one case, and would already have been scattered apart in the other. This, more or less, is how a minor change of circumstance can make lightning explode with the greatest fury, or dispel the lightning with no commotion at all, by reducing its power to zero, so to speak.

If there were any need to do so, one could cite a thousand other examples to confirm this prodigious difference between the effect of certain elements when assembled, and the effect of the same elements when dispersed. So it is that printed characters, according to the different ways in which they are arranged, can produce a Bible or a Koran; but they can also be taken at random, or set up in print cases, in such a way that they yield no meaning whatever; and if it requires a great deal of time to make an Iliad out of them, it requires less than a minute to turn the Iliad back into chaos, so dependent is matter on form.