Originally Posted by
westom
From Dr Charles Moore's Nov 1975 paper and from others:
"... our results indicate that the sharpened rod usually acted to protect itself by emitting ions whenever the electric field exceeded the breakdown threshold. The blunt rod, on the other hand, emitted ions with great difficulty...the fields around the blunt rod often large values that when breakdown did occur at the blunt rod a positive streamer could propagate for appreciable distances away from the blunt rod."
"Field trials in the summers of 1994-98 at Langmuir Labs have provided electric current measurements flowing from various shaped lightning rods. These were correlated to changes in electric fields caused by lightning discharges. Results of this work confirm earlier theoretical models about sharp vs blunt rod behavior. (3) Sharp rods are poorer receptors for lightning than blunt rods."
Again the point. In many fields where knowledge comes mostly from hearsay: what is popularly believed (without numbers) too often does not agree with reality.