One of the most beautiful things we can witness on this planet is a lightning strike. These spectacular sights often leave viewers with a sense of awe as they light up the sky. Lightning is fairly common and is experienced regularly all over the world. Its power can be as incredible as it is dangerous, killing around 20 people in the U.S. each year and starting many forest fires. There is a reason many ancient cultures associated lightning with divine gods.
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Modern science has taught us many things about why and how lightning strikes. Amazingly, there are an average of 100 lightning strikes per second around the globe. Despite their frequent occurrence, lightning is very hard to study because of how unpredictable it is. It remained a mystery for millennia until the daring work of Benjamin Franklin. One of the United States’ Founding Fathers, Franklin was also an accomplished scientist. He performed numerous experiments on the nature of electricity and theorized that lightning was a form of electricity. To prove this, he did an incredibly dangerous test where he flew a kite with metal into a thunderstorm.
