Lightning frequently strikes the same place multiple times. Tall structures like the Empire State Building are struck dozens of times per year.
The saying persisted in classrooms and science textbooks well into the twentieth century, often appearing in lists of weather safety rules or as a casual aside in discussions of probability. It had the ring of folk wisdom, the kind of maxim that seemed to encode practical experience. After all, if you stood beneath a tree during a storm and survived a nearby strike, surely the odds of a second strike hitting that exact spot while you were still standing there were vanishingly small. The claim seemed to make intuitive sense as a statement about randomness and misfortune, and that plausibility carried it into educational settings where it was repeated as fact rather than metaphor.
The problem is that lightning is not random. It is the violent equalization of an electrical imbalance between a charged cloud and the ground, and it follows the path of least resistance through the air. Tall structures, isolated trees, radio towers, and anything that reduces the distance the discharge must travel through the atmosphere will attract strikes preferentially. This has been understood since Benjamin Franklin's experiments with lightning in the 1750s. Franklin did not merely fly a kite in a storm and observe a spark. He systematically investigated the electrical nature of lightning and, crucially, invented the lightning rod, a grounded metal conductor placed at the highest point of a building to provide a preferred pathway for strikes. The technology worked because lightning struck the rod repeatedly, predictably, by design. Every functional lightning rod installation was a refutation of the claim, visible on rooftops across Europe and America by the early nineteenth century.
The definitive evidence, however, required buildings tall enough and instrumented well enough to produce undeniable data. The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, provided exactly that. Within its first decade of operation, it was struck by lightning more than one hundred times. The structure became an informal laboratory for atmospheric electricity research, and the numbers were published widely. The building is struck approximately twenty-five times per year. The Eiffel Tower, similarly exposed, experiences roughly the same rate. The CN Tower in Toronto, taller still, is struck seventy-five to eighty times annually and operates a dedicated lightning research program precisely because the strikes are so frequent and so predictable.
These are not statistical anomalies. They are the expected outcome of known physics. A thundercloud carries an enormous electrical charge, often hundreds of millions of volts. The air between the cloud and the ground is a poor conductor, an insulator that resists the flow of current until the charge differential becomes so extreme that the air breaks down and a conductive channel forms. Tall objects shorten that path. A skyscraper four hundred meters high eliminates four hundred meters of resistive air. The lightning does not choose randomly among all the points on the landscape below. It follows the gradient of electrical potential, and that gradient is steepest at the highest, most conductive points. Those points are struck over and over because the conditions that made them attractive the first time persist.
This is also why isolated trees in open fields are dangerous during thunderstorms. A tall oak standing alone on a hilltop is a preferential target. If lightning strikes it once, the tree remains the tallest object in the area, and a second strike before the storm passes is entirely ordinary. The advice to avoid sheltering under such trees is based on exactly this principle. The danger is not random bad luck, but predictable physics applied to landscape geometry.
The phrase itself almost certainly originated as a comment on probability in human affairs, meaning roughly that the same misfortune is unlikely to repeat in quick succession. In that context, it functions as reassurance or as a way of thinking about streaks of bad luck. The error was in taking a metaphor about fortune and applying it to a physical process governed by unchanging principles. The places that attract lightning do so because of their height, their conductivity, their position in the landscape. Those features do not change between strikes. The corrected understanding is simply this: lightning goes where the physics takes it, and the physics takes it to the same places, again and again.
In random sequences, a streak of one outcome makes the opposite outcome more likely; the 'law of averages' must balance things out.
Independent random events have no memory. A fair coin's probability of landing heads is exactly 50% regardless of any preceding streak. The law of large numbers describes proportions converging over enormous sample sizes but makes no promise about any individual event or short sequence.
Microwaving metal always causes fires and explosions.
While metal in a microwave can cause sparks and fire under certain conditions, smooth metal objects (like a spoon in a cup) are often safe. The danger depends on shape, edges, and the presence of arcing paths.
Nuclear power plants are completely safe and produce energy that is 'too cheap to meter.'
Nuclear power carries real risks including core meltdowns (Three Mile Island 1979, Chernobyl 1986, Fukushima 2011), radioactive waste storage challenges, and catastrophic failure modes. The 'too cheap to meter' quote was taken out of context but reflected genuine 1950s–60s optimism.
Spinach is an excellent source of iron because it contains much more iron than other vegetables.
A 1930s decimal point error made spinach appear to have 10x more iron than it actually does. Spinach contains oxalates that inhibit iron absorption. It is not exceptionally high in bioavailable iron.