So lighting has been around for a long time, one can almost imagine cave men peaking their heads out of caves after storms and running around looking for lighting strikes in the hopes of scoring some fire (It's how we imagine it at least). Then man built houses and we unanimously decided lightning was not so helpful anymore, so man put up lightning rods, and connected them to the ground with copper wires. Then internal plumbing was harnessed and copper wires were connected to copper pipes and electrical systems were connected to copper pipes and everything was ok for a while (may not be historically accurate). Then Graham came along and cut almost all the copper pipes out of our house and replaced them with pex pipes. Then he had a nighttime epiphany (others call them dreams) that the house was no longer grounded since the pipes were gone and the breaker panel ground was hanging loose. Long story short, an 8' copper pole had to be sunk into the ground outside and attached by a thick copper wire to the main circuit breaker. In new construction the wire is usually attached to the rebar used in the foundation, but rebar wasn't around when this house was built. The copper line is then attached to the copper pipes in the water system so that the highly conductive wet areas of the house can't shock people with stray currents. The pictures are pretty self-explanatory; Graham spent time in his least favorite crawl space drilling a hole through the external wall and feeding the copper wire through it. Once that was done he pounded the copper grounding rod into the ground with the head from an old sledgehammer - it turned out to be pretty easy, a testament to our good soil. Then it was all clamped together and voila, the farm was grounded.