We're prattling on about two separate phenomena here. The Faraday cage is about one application of the surface-effect of high-speed "signals" and the one about the trolley-pole and the golf-club a matter of simply closing a circuit as efficiently as possible.Tor wrote:As for the faraday cage, that has more to do with shielding EM fields. The reason a car would be safe is primarily because of the rubber insulation of the tyres, rather than the faraday cage.
The punk whacking a pigeon off a charged catenary would likely not get fried because the voltages involved would likely not be able to make him part of a circuit between said catenary and the covered non-skid and painted surfaces of the tram itself. 600 VDC is not enough to ionize the surrounding substances, so an arc is not possible; one needs a direct low-resistance path. (This is why fatal accidents when peeing on the 3rd rail are urban legend -- there's no low-resistance path. The Mythbusters did a great show on this bit of UL a number of years ago.) The caveat is not to try this with modern 25,000+ volt catenary systems -- those will draw arcs of several feet.
Now, the Faraday-cage on the other hand, exploits the nature of electical current to flow on the outside of the conductor it's using; this is one of the reasons why it doesn't make sense to make the conductors in electrical-transmission grids larger than what they are now -- it doesn't increase the current-carrying capacity. A car in an electrical storm is one example of this, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the tyres; if a bolt of lightning is gone to travel 2 or 3 miles Earthward from a cloud a set of Michelins is not going to stop it. The actual effect will be a direct arc from the lowest piece of the underbody to ground; the folks inside the car will be fine by virtue of all the current flowing on the outside of the frame (note: convertibles are dangerous in this regard) -- they may need to change their undergarments afterwards, but that's it.
