I would be excited if I could get a little flicker out of a light bulb by such an experiment, especially since I know virtually nothing about electricity, yet!

I still have to look up words like 'capacitor', but in a way I'm glad I didn't learn all the wrong terms and ideas, I have a lot of 'what if's' and questions because I don't know a thing about it.

I did figure out that it doesn't come from the sky, but is a flow between the earth and the atmosphere, I was trying to be careful with such wording, and since, as you noted, there is only one wire involved, it gets weird right away as far as 'current' goes. Even 'ions' are a new thing for me to conceive, so I'm oblivious to how this might work so far. I'm glad you commented, I'd hoped that a builder of castles would have some input on this topic.