Imagine a bright-eyed, inquisitive fiveyear-old watching her father knock down his concrete silo with the lightning rod on top of it on their dairy farm in 1976 because he no longer milked cows. The silo preserved fermented feed for the animals. As he does, the heavy silo crashes to the ground with the rod, but the white milk pleated round glass ball decorating the rod does not shatter. Imagine again the little girl's eyes grow wide as she inches in to see her father and two hired hands surround the ball, stunned. “Why Daddy, it didn't break!” she exclaimed. It was a miracle. That was the moment that piqued Susan Summerfield of Maryland, a middle school math teacher's interest in lightning rod balls.
But it was not until 1990 when she was in college and spotted it again in her father's tool shed, that her desire to learn more about lightning rod balls, or globes, took hold. “I realized then that these balls were simply ornaments for the
