ref: Do-lightning-rods-really-work
Realizing I am responding to a classic, and maybe a zombie thread, my father owned a static generator which had belonged to a traveling lightning rod salesman.
It had a set of houses of various sorts which would demonstrate the dangers of lightning, and why you NEEDED a lightning rod on your house / barn / shed / whatever. One had metal gutters and a little figure of a man reaching to clean them out, one caught fire, and so on. The machine itself would throw a spark a foot or more on a good dry day.
I used it for a science project in school one time, and incidentally shocked the heck out of a classmate who didn’t listen to instructions.