While grabbing a banana for breakfast today I got zapped due to static electricity building up while I was moving on my chair, but the conductor I was grabbing was said banana.
Is it possible to conduct electricity through a banana?
[Physics] Can you conduct electricity through a banana peel
conductorselectricity
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My chair usually creates a lot of static, so the same happens to me. What I usually do is to touch any big metal object before I get up (my desk is metallic, so I use that) to discharge myself. Another popular trick is to touch the doorknob, faucet, etc with a metallic object, so that the discharge goes from that instead of your fingers. Or you can use an antistatic strap, if it really bothers you.
Regarding the physical processes, when you rub against other materials (e.g. a carpet) you can get electrically charged. That's called triboelectric effect. If you then touch a metallic object, there will be an electrical discharge, like a tiny ray, that goes from your skin to the object and can be painful but not dangerous. If the air is dry (like in an office with air conditioning), you'll build more charge because the humidity makes the air ore conducting and you will slowly discharge with no sparks.
The lightning conductor provides a very low resistance path between the top of the lightning conductor rod via a substantial strip of metal to the ground so that the current as a result of a lightning strike does not flow through the building to which it is attached.
However that is not the end of the story in that the electrical length of the lightning conductor rod can be thought of a being larger than its physical length.
A large electric field will make air become a conductor and the electric field around sharp objects is larger than that where the surface is flatter.
Around the top of a pointed lightning conductor rod charges are induced by the charge on the clouds above.
When the induced charge is sufficiently large the air around the point of the lightning conductor becomes conducting thus extending the effective length of the conducting path of the lightning conductor.
Modern lightning conductor rods are now made with slightly rounded points because it has been found that although the electric field produced by a charged rounded point as compared with a changed sharp point is smaller the region over which the air is a conductor is larger. So air is conducting over a larger distance above the lightning conductor rod.
Of course the ionisation of the air around a lightning conductor rod increases the chances of lightning striking the rod but that is considered to be safer to have the lightning conductor rod than just allowing the lightning strike in a more random fashion.
There is another benefit of the lightning conductor rod in that in making the air around it a conductor it can thus contribute to the discharge of the clouds without lightning being produced and so reduce the chances of a lightning strike..
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I just happened to have a multimeter and a banana handy when I read this. For what it's worth the measured resistance for the outer skin of a dry banana was off the scale i.e. over 20 MΩ. With a wet banana the resistance measured roughly 1 MΩ fluctuating quite a bit with the way the probes were touching the fruit. This is less the resistance of my finger measured in the same way.