ATMOSPHERIC ELECTRIC DISCHARGE.

Benjamin Franklin Experiment

Sir Benjamin Franklin

When an arbitrary electric discharge happens from a charged object to a close conductor without touching it, a spark jumps in between the both objects. The British scientist sir William Wool in 1708 was the first who had referred the atmospheric Lightning to the same explanation. after that by fifty years the American Scientist Benjamin Franklin had conducted an experiment to prove that the Lightning electric discharge is actually caused by an Electric charge. then he started by attaching a wire to a kite and fly it during a thunder storm and attached a silk thread at his bottom end to the conducting wire in his hand reach. then he attached a little key made from steel to his end of the silk thread, and during the passage a thunder cloud over his kite, then he tried to touch the key and immediately a spark jumped in between his finger and the key. this experiment had assured him that thunder clouds contain an electric charge, and some of this charge could really pass thru the thin wet silk thread to the steel key, and the aggregation of the electric charge in the key is because of the spark that happened when he tried to touch the key.

Lightning Rod.

That was fascinating experiment for sure, but in the same time it was a big risk no doubt, luckily Franklin had survived, because someone else tried to retry the same experiment and he was shocked by the electric charge. but Franklin experiment did not go for nothing, because after it was proven that electric charge in the thunder clouds, he started to design a method of protecting houses from the Lightning , by attaching a metal column on top of each house it's called the "Lightning Rod", it's a logical simple conclusion that he made out to attache a conductor wire to the Lightning Rod and then attache the bottom wire terminal to the ground on deep distance from the surface. though when an

Airplane equipped with rods

electric charge is passed thru the wire then it will drive itself to the ground. for sure these lightning rods had decreased the risks of being hit by lightning and the damage that caused  by it, while the lightning is still a dangerous phenomena and causes a number deaths each year.
The Lightning discharge could happen between a cloud and another or between the cloud and the ground and in both cases the discharge happens in one lightning that formed of several flashes varies from five to fifteen flashes, so close to each other taking thru the same path. while the time period between each flash and the other is estimated by milliseconds but it looks to the human eye as one lightning strike. Because of the amount of heat that was produced by the lightning strike, adjacent air ambient expands and shrink in a very few time, and this causes the thunder sound that we hear at thunder storms, and we see the lightning

Lightning hits Power distribution network

first then we hear the thunder after that because of the light transition in the ambient speed estimated as 299792.801 kilometers per second and is faster than the speed of sound transition which is 0.33 kilometer per second. the late thunder that is heard after the lightning hits by 3 seconds means that the lightning discharged on a distance of 1 kilometer from you.