In a recent XKCD comic, the protagonist fashions a canister to fly on a kite carrying a load of sand to be fused into glass by a lightning bolt. As the alt-text says, the whole thing is “for some value of ‘actually work’”. So, how possible or impossible is the idea?
Well, the first problem I can see with it is that the canister is in-line with the string; in order for the lightning to flow through the canister and heat it up, wouldn’t it have to go down the string and earth itself?
Into the guy holding the string.
There’s nothing wrong with turning sand into glass using electricity as far as I can see, that’s what in-situ vitrification is.
But the guy is not holding the string at the time that the lightning strikes–it’s tethered to the ground.
So it is. In my defense, a nail in the ground looks remarkably like a stick figure from a certain angle. :smack:
Amazingly, something like this has been done: http://ira.usf.edu/CAM/exhibitions/1998_12_McCollum/supplemental_didactics/16.VoltTrig.pdf
Lots more stuff on the page where I found this document: http://home.att.net/~amcimages/pdffiles.html