One of the greatest mild discomforts that millions of people go through unknowingly is static sparks. Static sparks or static electricity is the one you generate when you rub plastic pen against your hair and then you bring the pen closer to pieces of paper - the pieces of paper are attracted to the pen. Static electricity can sometimes build to very high voltages in our bodies causing great damage including death. A case in point is in football field in central Africa where eleven players of a team perished leaving intact the eleven players of the opposing team. Each one of us has a certain amount of static electricity but in mild amounts and the discomfort is equally mild. Since we are not aware of it or we do not know what the discomfort is, it does not matter. But it should matter. To the few people who are aware of static electricity in their bodies, the biggest complaints they have is that static electricity causes sparks or gives them mild shocks when they touch things or even other people. Most people experience this problem in the dry weather.

When the weather is dry, it means there is very little water vapour in the air. During winter or during periods that the temperatures are high, then chances are very high that there is very little moisture in the air. In science, moisture in the atmosphere is referred to as Relative Humidity. This Relative Humidity is the ratio of partial pressure of water vapour to the saturated vapour pressure of water at a given temperature. Relative Humidity is measured by an instrument called a hygrometer .

Dry air is a non-conductor of static electricity - it does not readily let electrons pass through it. In contrast, moist air will slowly allow static electricity or electrons leave your body and fly to the ground. This therefore means that when the air is dry and you do not touch a material that is a conductor of static electricity, then the static electricity will continue to build up in your body to thousands of volts. When you are this much charged you do not feel it but the truth is, you are a great security risk to your own life and to the safety of the others. And to those who remotely check security to airports, fuel deports and other sensitive areas, it would in addition help to look for a decent way to discharge these unsuspecting victims.

But where do the charges come from? They come from the earth or the ground. The earth is neutral with infinite positive and negative charges canceling each other. In as long as you walk bare footed, all is well. But because we must put on shoes, the soles of our shoes become the determining factor. Certain synthetic rubber soles on shoes create a lot of static electricity. Like in a magnet that has North pole on one end and South pole on the other, the synthetic sole of your shoes determines the polarity in that for every step you make, it leaves prints of positive charges on the ground and negative charges goes to your body or the vice versa. The more you move, the more charged you become. If the air is moist, then your body will slowly discharge to the moist air and to the ground. If the air is dry, then the charges will remain in your body until you get your next victim. When it is dry, first and foremost check on the soles of your shoes.

Winter or no winter, you will hear of "electric" people. These are people you will curse shaking their hands. They are people whose skin is usually very dry and, or the surface area of skin hair is very high. The dry skin, skin hair combined with the clothing material and shoes these "electric" people put on causes the buildup of static charges. One thing they should do is try to use sufficient moisturizers and lotions to control the dryness. They can experiment with different types of moisturizers and lotions until this problem is solved. Naturally what people can not understand they result to mysteries, myths and legends to explain these unfortunate situations. And do not loss sight that they may be the ones handling their babies or your baby too. If you have young children who can not be able to explain themselves when you touch them, try using a humidifier to raise the humidity in your house, plus you have to decide if to do away with your carpet. Get yourself those decorative hygrometer and thermometer that you can hung somewhere on the wall. A relative humidity under 30 percent or a temperature above 27 degrees Celsius is sufficient to warrant precaution. If your pajamas and bed sheets are the type of materials that create static electricity when rubbed together, you will be bothered with shocks all night long on a dry weather night. Try using pajamas and bed sheets made of non-static materials. Cotton does not seem to develop as much static electricity as some artificial fibers. And since mothers like using plastic materials on those children that wet the bed, then care should be taken to cover the plastic material with sufficient cotton material to prevent plastic coming into contact with body.

Static sparks comes with a lot of pain especially when you touch a good conductor like metal. If you drive, perhaps it would help to find if your passengers go through static electricity discomforts. In as long as you are the one holding the keys and the steering wheel, you will never realize. Your passengers do not know what it is and neither do they want to risk to sound silly. They may be suffering quietly and will never tell you. When you are in the car, you are one surface and the car seat is the other. When you sit on a synthetic or plastic car seat in dry weather, the contact between your clothes and the seat causes polarity and electrical charges of the materials are transferred between the surfaces. One surface ends up with more negative charges than positive, and has a negative charge-imbalance. The other surface has more positive charges than negative, and has a positive charge-imbalance.

In as long as you remain seated nothing happens. As long as the surfaces remain near each other, the positives and negatives cancel out, but the fact is you are a great risk to yourself and to others. But when you open the car door and step outside, you take just one polarity of charge along with you, while the car seat retains the opposite polarity. As you step out of the car, you have ten of thousands of voltage with you. Your shoes soles are poor conductor and the charges can not escape fast enough into the earth. You have to close the car door and there you get a zap - the car door is metal and good conductor, the air in between and your fingers are both poor conductors, and because of resistance differential, there is a lot of heating giving you deep hot burn on your fingertips. The guy driving handily gets these as he slowly discharges through the steering wheel and ignition key. Similarly, when there is thunder, avoid holding metallic materials otherwise you and the metallic materials will become the shortest path to the ground, and because there is great resistance differential between your hand and the metal, you will get burnt.

Get yourself a hygrometer for your car. Whenever the relative humidity goes below 30 percent, then you have a reason to start taking care both for yourself and your passengers. Replace your synthetic plastic car seat covers with cloth or leather. Avoid the specific clothing which makes the problem worse. Things like woolen sweaters, woolen under wares and plastic raincoats.

If for some reason you will purchase gasoline or petrol in a container - perhaps for your home electric generator or for whatever reason, always make sure to place the container on the ground when filling it, otherwise the petrol fumes and static electricity will ignite fire that will burn you and the filling station.

Free things are good and many of us like them but they can turn out to be very costly. In areas where gasoline is transported by trucks, trucks do overturn and the surrounding community will gather with containers to benefit from the free fuel. With the volatile gasoline, there are lots of fumes and with hundreds of people competing for the free gasoline, chance are very high one of them will ignite static spark and then an explosion. It is a pity hundreds of souls are lost this way. And because the communities may not understand where the fire came from, they comfort themselves that one of them must have been smoking a cigarette. The next time it happens, they say, "no smoking", but the explosion still happen.

Static electricity spark will damage electronics including cell phones and computers. Normally, when operating a cell phone or a computer, static electricity is not a problem. But if you find you are having problems with static electricity causing sparks when you touch things, it is logical to take precautions before touching even the computer keyboard. And if you are to venture into the inside of your computers, then you should have a anti-static pad on the floor and use a anti-static ground straps on your wrist that will discharge any excess charges from your body.

Your hair, and especially to the ladies, is a thing of the beauty. We spend a lot of our resources and time so that we can look neat and beautiful. On a dry day, after you attend your hair it can tend to fly up and separate. That is because the hair strands have the same electrical charge and like-charges will repel thus the hair flying up and separating. The solution to this problem is simply to use anti-static spray that will eliminate this problem.

If static electricity is a serious problem to you, try using a key or a metal object and use it to touch other metal things first with it. This will cause the spark to fly from the key and not your finger. Another thing you should do is to ground yourself before touching something metal or another person. Touch poor conducting surfaces like walls or wood.

In view of the above I have considered only those small scale static electricity discomforts that may affect you. Next we look at the dangers of large scale static electricity to man - the guys in the aviation industry places so much caution on this that a report of one thunder and they can no longer lift the aircraft.

Lightning may not look much like static electricity, but actually they are similar. Both are sparks of electricity created through the attraction of unlike charges. The only difference is that static electricity creates a small spark, while lightning is a huge spark of electricity on a large scale.

For a spark to occur, it will need both a non-conductor and a conductor or two conductors with great differential resistance. These conditions include the rapid movement of tiny water particles in a storm. Certain conditions will cause enough static electricity buildup to cause a spark or lightning. Lightning is an extreme example of a spark. A spark is a stream of electrons jumping across an air gap, heating the air until it glows and expands.

In storm clouds, normally the cumulonimbus clouds, tiny particles in the cloud move around picking up positive or negative energy charges. Either smoke, dust or ice particles will determine the polarity. The positive charged particles will tend to be lighter and rise to the top of the cloud. The negative charged particles will tend to be heavier and will collect at the bottom of the cloud.

This buildup of charges will continue and charges will divide into opposing groups in the cloud. When the power of attraction between them gets too great, the particles discharge their energy at each other, completing a path for electricity to travel through the air. This flow of electricity is lightning.

Why there is the glow of lightning is because the air in between has resistance which heats up the air white-hot. Since air is a non-conductor of electricity, it does not readily let electrons pass through it. But when the attraction is great enough, some electrons will leave their cloud and fly to the other cloud. While they move through the air, they smash into and bounce off molecules or atoms that are in their way. This heat up the air white-hot and this is lightening. The thing is this: introduce high voltage into higher resistance, the voltage will reduce and the current will increase. High current is heat which can go up to 30,000 degree Celsius.

Back to the grouping of positive and negative charges in the clouds. At the bottom of the cloud are the negative charges. When the negatively charged particles have build up and lower enough to the ground, they begin to seek out positive charges from the ground below. The excess electrons create a channel of charged air called a leader that reaches down to the ground below. The leaders attract other charged ground-based channels called streamers, and this can pass through plants, buildings and yourself. When the stepped leader from the cloud meets a returning streamer from the ground, the path is ready. An electrical current called the return stroke, travels back up the path. This return stroke releases tremendous heat energy with bright light and thunder. There are several strokes in a single second. When enough electrons have made the jump to create equilibrium, the attraction is reduced and the flow stops. The spark quickly cools down and the air stops glowing. It is all over within a fraction of a second. A bolt of lightening travels at a speed of 160,000 km/h. In the case of static electricity it is a small spark and you may only feel a slight discomfort from the heat of the spark. But in the bolt of lightning, it can cause an enormous amount of damage to humans, animals, plants and buildings.

When air is heated it expands and contract when it cools. And because the spark happens so fast, the air expands and contracts very rapidly. When it contracts, the air slaps together. The noise you hear from a spark is just a snap, because it is on a small scale, whilst on the other hand, the sound of lightening is tremendous crash. This crash is called the thunder and because light travels faster than sound, thunder may seem to lag a moment from lightening.
The way to protect yourself when there is lightening is to avoid holding metallic things because charges will always look for the shortest and easiest route to the ground. Check on your footwear and clothing - if the wear will give you excess of positive charges and the cloud right above is negatively charged, then you automatically become the ideal candidate to be struck. Recall the Central Africa case where eleven players of soccer in a football pitch all perished leaving intact the eleven players of the opposing team. Lighting can strike you out in the rain and you should not stand under a tree during a thunderstorm, in case the tree gets struck with lightning. And it is not a good idea to walk out in an open area with an umbrella, because if you are the highest object in the field, you may be a target for the lightning strike. Ensure that you install lightning rods in all your buildings and these rods should therefore be the highest parts of the structures. In case of very tall and wide buildings, the rods should not only the tallest points but also should be installed by the sides. Studies show that larger, rounded rods are more effective than sharp pointed rods contrary to the believe people have that static electricity is attracted more to a pointed end of the rod.

Air transport is today the safest means of transport. One of the greatest obstacles that will put the guys that operate aircrafts off is static electricity. A single report of thunder and the mission is abandoned until the thunder clears. When the aircraft is airborne, it collects charges from the surrounding air and clouds. To prevent excessive buildup of charges that would not only result in radio navigation difficulties but also can produce huge sparks that would instantaneously destroy the aircraft completely, an aircraft is installed with static wicks on the ailerons and tail feathers to return charged electrons so collected back to the surrounding air. Fueling an aircraft poses another risk due to static sparks. Fueling is in thousands of litres and is done at a very high rate and fumes do develop. To prevent static sparks, a formula based on pump rate, humidity and temperate is used to determine the amount of charges in the fuel. If the charge is high, the the fuel is discharged. Whenever the aircraft land, the first thing you do before anything else is to discharge the plane body by using static discharge reels.
Where there is thunder there are strong convective cumulonimbus clouds. These clouds have turbulences with strong updraft and downdraft forces. Aim your plane at those convective clouds and the updraft and downdraft forces will take control of your plane and all the souls in your plane will most likely have a sad ending.