Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderCoincidence

Roy Sullivan, a park ranger in Virginia, was struck by lightning seven separate times between 1942 and 1977 and survived every one. The strikes cost him a big toenail and his eyebrows, and twice set his hair on fire.

Guinness World Records

ScienceBiography

The story behind the card

Sullivan worked in Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains, high ground where summer thunderstorms are common, which helps explain one or two strikes but hardly seven. In the United States the odds of being struck even once in a lifetime are roughly 1 in 15,000. He came to fear storms, and said that some people kept their distance from him in bad weather. Guinness World Records lists him as the person struck by lightning more times than anyone else on record, and two of his scorched ranger hats have been shown in Guinness exhibition halls in New York and South Carolina. He died in 1983.

Türkçe oku
Virginia'da park korucusu olan Roy Sullivan'a 1942 ile 1977 arasında yedi ayrı kez yıldırım çarptı ve hepsinden sağ çıktı. Yıldırımlar ona bir ayak başparmağının tırnağına ve kaşlarına mal oldu, iki kez de saçlarını tutuşturdu.

Sullivan, yaz fırtınalarının sık görüldüğü Blue Ridge Dağları'ndaki Shenandoah Ulusal Parkı'nda çalışıyordu; yüksek arazide olmak bir iki yıldırımı açıklar, ama yedisini açıklamaz. ABD'de bir insanın ömrü boyunca bir kez bile yıldırım çarpmasına uğrama olasılığı kabaca 15.000'de birdir. Sullivan zamanla fırtınalardan korkar oldu ve kötü havalarda bazı insanların ondan uzak durduğunu anlattı. Guinness Dünya Rekorları onu, kayıtlara göre en çok yıldırım çarpan insan olarak gösteriyor; yanmış iki korucu şapkası da Guinness'in New York ve Güney Carolina'daki sergi salonlarında sergilendi. Sullivan 1983'te öldü.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Roy Sullivan
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderSpace

In 1962 John Glenn asked for NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson to check the electronic computer's orbit calculations by hand before his flight. If she said the numbers were good, he said, he was ready to go. He became the first American to orbit Earth.

Johnson worked from 1953 at the Langley research centre in Virginia, first for NASA's predecessor, NACA, and then for NASA. She began among the 'human computers', mostly women who did calculations by hand, in the segregated West Area Computing unit for Black mathematicians. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, checked Glenn's orbit and later worked on Apollo 11's path to the Moon. When Apollo 13 was crippled in 1970, her work on backup procedures and charts helped the crew return safely. She retired in 1986, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and became widely known through the 2016 book and film Hidden Figures. She died in 2020, aged 101.

NASARead card
WonderBiography

In her 1925 doctoral thesis, the British-American astronomer Cecilia Payne showed that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium, unlike the Earth. She read this from starlight split into its colours, using new physics that explained how heat strips electrons from atoms.

At the time, astronomers assumed stars had roughly the same make-up as the Earth. Working at Harvard College Observatory, Payne showed that the differences between star spectra, starlight spread out into its colours, came mainly from temperature rather than composition, and that hydrogen was vastly more abundant than anyone expected. Henry Norris Russell, the leading American astronomer, found this implausible, and in the published thesis she called her own hydrogen figure 'almost certainly not real'. Four years later Russell reached the same result by other means and acknowledged her work. The astronomers Otto Struve and Velta Zebergs later called hers the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy. In 1956 she became the first woman promoted to full professor in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Cecilia Payne-GaposchkinRead card
WonderBiography

In 1912 Henrietta Swan Leavitt found that certain pulsing stars, called Cepheids, take longer to brighten and dim the brighter they really are. That rule turned them into cosmic measuring sticks: by timing a Cepheid, astronomers can work out how far away it is.

Leavitt joined Harvard College Observatory in 1893, at first as a volunteer, as one of the women known as 'computers' who measured stars on photographic plates for low pay. Studying the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies whose stars all lie at roughly the same distance from us, she catalogued 1,777 variable stars. Because they were all about equally far away, a Cepheid that looked brighter really was brighter, which revealed the link between brightness and period. Once others had measured the distances to a few nearby Cepheids, the rule could be used anywhere. In the 1920s Edwin Hubble used it to show that the Andromeda nebula lies far outside the Milky Way. Leavitt died in 1921, before the importance of her work was widely recognised.

Henrietta Swan LeavittRead card
WonderBiography

At 19, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that a white dwarf, the dense core left when a star like the Sun dies, cannot be more than about 1.4 times the Sun's mass. Above this limit, now named after him, it can no longer hold itself up against its own gravity.

Chandrasekhar did the calculation in 1930 on the ship taking him from India to England to study at Cambridge, combining quantum mechanics with Einstein's special relativity. A white dwarf is held up by electron degeneracy pressure: when electrons are squeezed very tightly together, they resist being packed any closer, a purely quantum effect. He showed that this resistance has a ceiling. When he presented the result in 1935, the influential astronomer Arthur Eddington mocked it in public, and many colleagues sided with Eddington for years, although the mathematics was right. The limit is now central to understanding supernovae and neutron stars. Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the structure and evolution of stars.

Subrahmanyan ChandrasekharRead card
WonderScience

Marie Tharp, an American geologist, drew the first detailed maps of the Atlantic seafloor from ships' depth readings. In the early 1950s she found a deep valley running along the middle of the undersea Mid-Atlantic Ridge, strong evidence that the seafloor is spreading apart.

Tharp joined Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory in New York in 1948. Women were not allowed to work on its research ships, so for nearly two decades her colleague Bruce Heezen collected echo-sounder depth readings at sea while she turned them into profiles and maps ashore. In 1952 she spotted a V-shaped valley along the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an undersea mountain chain longer than any range on land, and read it as a rift where the seafloor is pulling apart. Heezen at first dismissed it as 'girl talk', because it supported continental drift, then a controversial idea. He changed his mind when a separate map of undersea earthquakes lined up with her valley. With the Austrian painter Heinrich Berann, they published The World Ocean Floor map in 1977.

Marie TharpRead card
Next card in the archiveIn 1822 a white stork turned up in Germany with an African hunting spear through its neck. It was striking proof that European storks spend the winter in Africa.Read next →