If someone has already mentioned this, I apologize (I skimmed the thread, but didn't read every post). Anyway, in the first movie, the clock on the courthouse didn't have a second hand. How did they know to the second when the lightning would strike. Couldn't they have been off my as much as 59 seconds?
The clock may not have a second hand but
something in it is keeping track of the seconds so it knows when to advance the minute hand. So there's gears for the "second hand" that doesn't advance the minute had except once a minute. It's
possible that after the "original" lightning strike someone checked the gears and suck of the clock and discovered that the clock was struck at
precisely 10:04 PM by the clock's gears. Infact, Doc even points out after being shown the flier that the the lightning bolt will strike at "precisely" 10:04 so this information may have even been on the flier.
Doc's going up and checking the gearing of the clock, how it works and such could've given him the information he needed to time this all out to know when "precisely" 10:04:00 was on the Clock Tower.
(Also, note that on the flier it shows a picture of the Clock Tower with the broken ledge. The ledge was only broken after the Marty-present version of 1955 and not the "original" 1955.)
the lightning strike may have been quick, but shoving it all into a cable slowed the bastard rigth down.
The cable
did seem to have a
lot of resistance in it considering the time it took for it to travel from the tower to the poles. (Which in the real world would've pretty much happened instantly.) So the cable had the resistance in it to "slow down" the lightning (by orders of magnitude) and it's possible the however the DeLorean's circuitry works it may have been able to "store" the 1.21 gigawatts and released it when the car needed it.
Also, one wonders why Doc didn't hook things up the otherway around? Why not have the DeLorean accelerate
away from the cable into the open road (so Marty wouldn't crash into the theater when arriving in 1985) with a long cable strung between the Clock Tower and the car?
The DeLorean's 0-60 time is somewhere around 10 seconds, so let's be fair and give Marty a full 30 seconds to accelerate the car from standing still at 10:03:30 PM and get to 88 miles an hour an maintain that speed until 10:04:00. They would need about a 4000-foot long cable to do this. A long cable for sure but not un-doable.
(Though, I suppose, there'd be "some" energy loss over the the length but over a mile I sort-of doubt it. But lightning, IIRC, has
terrawatts of energy so any energy loss should've been nothing to worry about.)
I also wonder if a lightning bolt would've "really worked." The lightning bolt, we're, told has the wattage they needed but was it really enough power? The right amps, OHMs, whatever? Seems to me this should've been like trying to power a Discman that runs off of a couple AA batteries (3 volts) with a wall socket (110 volts.) I don't think it'd translate very well. (But, again, this may be due to some ignorance on part on the technical aspects of electricity.)
I know...it doesn't make sense...something more believable would be that Doc was a teacher at the school and something happened(lab accident) and lost his job...why Strickland wouldn't care for him and Marty & Jennifer know Doc because they were former students and maybe Marty worked closely with Doc after school on various projects.
