Faraday to the editor of The Builder   c. November 1854¹

You have done me the favour to report what I said at Liverpool about lightning conductors. It is to me astonishing that the accounts of what passes in hasty conversation are so accurate as they are, and I should not have troubled you with anything like a correction, but that one or perhaps two slight errors in what I said, or ought to have said, has misled others. I did not say that I had been consulted about the application of a conductor to the Duke of York’s pillar; but that when I inquired why was affixed so as to be a great disfigurement to the erection, the parties who supplied it told me it had not been asked for until the column was completed. A little lower the account says that certain contrivances for insulation are absurd, a better word would be useless.

M. Faraday