The Lightning Rod Story

1985

A true story written 9/10/2012 re-written 4/2013 * 775 Words

By Howard Yasgar

In 1964, I started looking into what type of small business could do from my home.

I was looking for something that I could do from my home on a part time basis.

After giving it a lot of thought, I concluded that I needed to find something profitable to do like getting involved in the diamond business, or possibly the colored gemstone business, and I even started thinking about the precious metals business.

The one thing all these businesses had in common was that you could carry your entire inventory in an attaché case.

Also, I got to thinking that I wanted a business that had the least amount of competition.

I didn’t want to get myself into a business that already had a million people competing against me.

For a while I even thought about getting into the jewelry business, but then I thought about how many jewelry stores there were, and I quickly stopped thinking about it.

Then one day by chance I read an article about a lesser-known precious metal called platinum.

It was an item that few people knew about or could even recognize if they saw it.

Platinum was a precious metal like gold, but it looked like many other dull silvery metals, it looked like tin or lead. But unlike tin or lead, platinum was worth a lot of money.

So, dealing in platinum sounded perfect, but only if you knew where to find it, how to identify it, how to weigh it and where to sell it.

Once I learned what a troy weight balance scale looked like, I remembered seeing them in antique shops, so I thought that the next time I saw an antique balance scale in an

antique shop I would buy it.

Before I knew it, I was becoming a buyer and seller of platinum as well as a collector of balance scales.

One day in 1984,,my wife and we were driving on the Palmetto expressway heading to Fort Lauderdale, and we noticed several antique stores on the opposite side of the highway, so on our return, we made our business stopping to see if any of them had antique balance scales.

We struck pay dirt, because in the second store we found a very nice balance scale with a marble top and big wide brass pans.

The antique store owner had it priced at $150.00, but we ended up buying it for $100.00, and I proceeded to put it on a shopping cart and pushing it up to the store’s front counter to pay for it.

As we stood there, the store owner asked me, “Are you a scale collector?” I told him that I had started collecting scales because I was in the platinum business.

The store owner said, “He had a friend that had recently made a lot of money by selling platinum,”

I was curious, so I asked him how his friend did it?

He said, “That his friend was also an antique dealer like him, and he was sitting in the Library of Congress in Washington DC, doing research on old lighthouses,”

He said, light houses were always an interesting subject for antique dealers, as there are many people that collect just about anything to do with them. He said, “People just loved light houses, because their history goes back to the original colonies.”

Once the federal government took over the ownership of all lighthouses, they set about renovating them, and they did this one by one all along the eastern seaboard.

As they renovated the lighthouses, they installed newly developed “Fresnel” lenses, and platinum lightning rods.

While his friend was in the library of congress studying blueprints of light houses, he noticed where the platinum lightning rods were being used, and he knew that in that year, platinum was worth about $400.00 per ounce.

The antique dealer became very excited, and he made a list of all the light houses that the government had used platinum lightning rods on.

He found that in 1789 the government had started hiring contractors to renovate the lighthouses. So, he went to the first lighthouse on the list in Maine.

His intention was to steal the platinum lightning rod and sell it.

However, he was too late, some wily contractors had already stolen it and replaced it with a copper lightning rod.

Over the next few weeks, he drove to every single lighthouse along the East Coast, but he found that the contractors had beaten him to the punch and already replaced the platinum lightning rods with copper ones.

Eventually he found one lighthouse in upstate Florida that had not been renovated yet. He broke the lock, climbed up the steps, and removed an eighteen-pound solid platinum lightening rod.

He kept the lightening rod in his living room, that’s where the fellow telling me the story saw it.

The rod weighed eighteen pounds, that meant it was worth over $100,000.00 in scrap.

I recently read on the internet that there are many government statues, as well as monuments and buildings that still might have platinum lightning rods.

There are possibly many more platinum lightning rods all over America, just waiting to be stolen by someone.