Back in the days of landline POTS telephony (plain old telephone service, without data) six people died annually in the US while talking on the phone in a thunderstorm. That’s right — half a dozen folks met their end getting zapped by their telephone in a storm. The Old Wive’s Tale from the time was true. Of course, now that most everyone’s phone is wireless that’s a thing of the past, but there are still a lot of wired networks all over the world that use “outside plant” by necessity. The power grid, for one, but there are others. And they are all at risk for lightning strikes that can carry into your home or office and have rather…unpleasant…consequences.

In my younger days, I spent my time in research and development laboratories, first doing fiber optics applications with medium powered lasers, then later, in regular telephony materials research. One of the areas of focus my team worked on were low cost novel materials for lightning protection down phone lines, including on the side of homes where the telco networks interfaced with the customer’s premises wiring. There was a device called a NID, short for network interface device, where the lines joined. And there, we were working on a resettable lightning fuse that would short if a certainly energy level was reached and then reset itself automatically.

Of course, there were already solutions in the field that performed this job: there were gas discharge tubes that were filled with materials would ionize and then short out if lightning came down the line. And on top of these were a backup that would permanently short if the strike was overwhelming. That’s the first thing we worked on…those were carbon filled polymer sheets, and they did a great job. Problem was, once they shorted, it was permanent, and the customer was out of service until the phone company could roll a truck and replace the device. That was expensive, and the customer wasn’t grateful for their phone being out, despite it occurring protecting their lives and property.

Enter the resettable failsafe that we invented. It was a silicon gel with magnetically aligned metals that would purge themselves after activation. They were good for dozens and dozens of resets and worked quite well.

Problem was, they were an utter nightmare to manufacture. And despite the invention working like a charm, it could never be made economically in a factory. And that was the end of that. On the next project, which was DoD related and that’s all I can say.