Prometheus stole fire from the gods but Hollywood nabbed lightning from Zeus himself - and here are the ten best ways they've put those thunderbolts to use.

Create Life
This is the one that started it all. Before Frankenstein, lightning was just a handy way to collect some insurance money. After Frankenstein, it could do anything. Although Mary Shelley's novel provided no description of Victor Frankenstein's methods, the classic 1931 film cemented lightning's place in the popular imagination as the giver of life. Part classical Zeus imagery and part flashy spectacle, the revivifying lightning bolt is now inseparable from Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

Save gas on your DeLorean
Great Scott! The entire plot of the first Back to the Future is centered around a lightning strike, necessary to power the DeLorean and send Marty McFly back to… well, you know. Doc Brown's plan to swap lightning for plutonium to get the necessary 1.21 gigawatts is also a clever nod to the history of technobabble – by the 80s, nuclear power had become the all-powerful pseudo-science of choice, but in the 50s lightning was still the dominant fix-it. Which leads to the most dramatic "should've gotten the longer extension cord" moment in all of movie history.

Scramble tv transmissions and DNA samples
Considering Doctor Who's long history with scientific hand-waving, you'd think they'd be old pros at the lightning fixit. But lightning saves the day in only the very lamest of the new series episodes, proving that we are better off with paradox machines and timey wimey detectors after all.

First, the mildly dreadful Idiot's Lantern climaxed with the Doctor clinging to a tv tower while some flashy pink lightning somehow trapped a face-eating television monster inside a Betamax tape. Then a year later, the exuberantly dreadful Daleks in Manhattan two-parter found the Doctor once again struck by lightning while clinging to a tower, this time the Empire State Building, causing his Time Lord DNA to mix with that of the already genetically awkward Human-Dalek hybrids. Somehow this saves the day. I don't know. I really try not to think about these episodes too much, and neither should you. If you want to try to suss it out, here's a clip:

Leap tall buildings in a single bound
It's a fairly established bit of Superman lore that a freak lightning accident can transfer the Man of Steel's powers to an ordinary human – a random Army private in a 1958 comic, a woman who would become electric villain Livewire in The Animated Series, even Lana Lang on Smallville. But my favorite example is Lois & Clark's "A Bolt From The Blue," in which lightning strikes while Superman is stopping a suicide, turning a 90 pound weakling into a 90 pound Hercules. Metropolis's newest superhero charges citizens for his services, asking Lois to print his price list, but in the end everything is put back to normal thanks to that other great scifi fixit – reversing the polarity.

Control lightning itself
The power to control lightning is not as common a side effect as you might think – so leave it to The X-Files to cover the obvious angle for us. Third season episode "D.P.O." features a young man whose lightning strike left him able to harness the power of electricity. Soon, four other men in town are conveniently struck dead by lightning, bringing in our favorite FBI agents so that poor Mulder's cell phone can get zapped as well. Check out the clip below to see Giovanni Ribisi use his powers to defibrillate Jack Black.

Teach robots to love
Yes, yes, we know: Short Circuit's Johnny 5 bears a remarkable resemblance to his adorable robot successor Wall-E. But while Wall-E gained his sentience through years of isolation on the desiccated Earth, Johnny 5's personality burst into life and into our hearts in a bolt of lightning. The lightning itself isn't the interesting part, so here's Johnny 5 busting out the moves with his friend Stephanie.

Help you cheat on tests
Saved By The Bell's Screech was one of the greatest of the tv nerds – you never knew when he was going to fall out of a locker, masquerade as a woman/teacher/alien to further one of Zack's schemes, or get struck by lightning. The wonderfully cheesy Saturday morning sitcom never shied away from patently ridiculous plot devices – see the famous Jessie Spano caffeine pill freakout and, my personal favorite, Zack's 1502 on the SATs – and it only took till the series' third episode for lightning to strike. The bolt hits Screech, of course, who becomes instantly but temporarily clairvoyant, and he uses his newfound lightning-powers to help Zack and the gang cheat on a history exam. Good thing it wasn't earth science!

Magnetize all available metals
You may be seeing Danny Kaye on your tv this time of year in White Christmas, but it was in the 1956 classic The Court Jester that he taught us how lightning can save the day even in vaguely-medieval England. The lead-up to the jousting scene is well-remembered for its impossible tongue twister about the pellet with the poison in the flagon with the dragon, but it wasn't fancy word-play that saved Danny Kaye's neck in the end – just good old-fashioned lightning. The bolt, in all its cheesy 50s special effects glory, magnetizes his suit of armor, giving him that vital edge against his enemy's mace. This is one of the greatest sketches of all time, so if you watch only one of the clips in this article, make it this one.

Magnetize all available non-metals
In another fine instance of random lightning-induced magnetism, Gilligan's Island had good old Gilligan go bowling in a storm and get struck just as he's throwing a strike. Naturally, this causes the bowling ball to become magnetized to Gilligan's hand. If the idea of a rock getting magnetized to a hand sounds implausible to you, just wait for the Professor's explanation at 3:30 on the video, one of the finest feats of technobabble ever recorded. Oh, and when they try to remove the bowling ball? Gilligan turns invisible. Of course.

Score free plastic surgery
And sometimes, lightning just makes you pretty. In a subversion of the classic Frankenstein trope, 1960's monster-family sitcom The Munsters had patriarch Herman Munster – normally green-skinned and bolt-necked like a traditional Frankenstein monster – turn magically, hideously normal after a freak lightning accident in Grandpa's lab. True to family form, the rest of the Munster clan is disgusted by Herman's newly handsome appearance. But fear not! Another lightning strike at the end of the episode turned Herman back into his usual ugly self. Check out the clip to see actor Fred Gwynne in his only appearance as Herman Munster sans make-up.

So next time you walk through a storm, hold your head up high - because if you get struck by lightning, who knows! You just might discover another fantastic power of the sci fi world's greatest fix-it.

Researchers studying data from the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe have reported that Titan’s atmosphere contains a faint electrical field, opening the door to the possibility of lightening strikes on the planet’s surface:

"As of now, lightning activity has not been observed in Titan's atmosphere," said lead author Juan Antonio Morente of the University of Granada in Spain.

But, he said, the signals that have been detected "are an irrefutable proof for the existence of electric activity."

The discovery is a significant one since many biochemists theorize that lightning triggered the reactions necessary for the creation of life on Earth. Since Titan’s atmosphere contains chemicals similar to those in Earth’s prebiotic astmosphere, it increases the possibility that life could form on Titan or in other parts of the universe:

"I look at Titan as a big, frozen, prebiotic casserole," [Jeffrey] Bada [of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography] said, referring to the state before the emergence of life.

"The idea that life could be widespread in the universe, I think, is very credible."

Electricity Found on Saturn Moon—Could It Spark Life? [National Geographic]

Time Cop. Jean-Claude Van Damme is the only one who can safeguard history against those who would change it for their own evil ends. But a corrupt U.S. Senator (Ron Silver) is messing with the timeline in order to become president in 2004. Van Damme quickly figures out what's going on. But then Silver changes history some more, so when Van Damme returns to his present, everything has changed and Van Damme no longer has a job. It's up to Jean-Claude to go back once again and change the past a second time, getting rid of Silver in the process. Weirdly, this is one of the best movies about time travel in spite of its action-movie star.

(Versions of Van Damme's Time Cops show up a lot in SF, including the ChronoGuard in Jasper FForde's Thursday Next novels, and the temporal police from the 29th century, who show up in Star Trek: Voyager a few times. Stephen Hawking has famously theorized that some kind of temporal police must exist, to prevent the horrendous paradoxes that would otherwise happen. In Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake, they're referred to as the "Quantum Angels.")

Primer. Abe and Aaron create a time machine, which requires you to lay inside it for as long as you want to go back for. They go back and start meddling with their own pasts, speculating on the stock market and tinkering with other things. But soon they're making more serious changes — knocking out their past selves and taking their places. They live through the same day or two over and over again, creating alternate timelines with subtle differences each time. Eventually, Abe and Aaron start trying to counter each other's interference, but keeping up with which version of Abe or Aaron you're seeing gets trickier and trickier.

Back to the Future Part 2. When "Doc" Brown carelessly leaves his Delorean time machine unguarded, that big lunkhead Biff goes back in time to 1955 and gives his younger self the means to become rich and powerful far beyond his pathetic dreams. Our hero, Marty, has to go back in time to 1955 for the second time in a row — except instead of changing Biff's future as he did in the first movie, he's just trying to undo the changes that Biff has already made.

Up the Line by Robert Silverberg. Jud Eliott III gets a job as a time courier, showing tourists the wonders of history. But some of his crazy colleagues start messing around with the timeline and wrecking history, so he has to keep going back and trying to fix the damage without attracting the attention of the Time Patrol. And then he falls in love with a time paradox named Pulcheria, his own great-great-great-great-grandmother, and it all goes to pot.

The End Of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. Harlan belongs to a time agency called Eternity, which exists outside of time itself. He and his fellow agents go around changing history to reduce human suffering. But then Harlan has a falling-out with his bosses over his girlfriend Noÿs, whom they want to erase from history. Harlan is supposed to help one of his colleagues, Cooper, go back to the 24th century and become the scientist whose discoveries later make the Eternals possible. In a fit of pique, Harlan sends Cooper back to 1932 instead, so he can't lay the groundwork for Eternity and Eternity will never exist. Finally, after the Eternals un-erase his girlfriend, he agrees to go back and rescue Cooper from the past — but then his girlfriend Noÿs reveals that Eternity's secret purpose is to edit history to make sure humans never colonize the stars. So instead Harlan helps her to change history so that humans discover atomic energy earlier, and start down the path of space exploration. As a consequence, Eternity ceases ever to have existed.

Lightning by Dean Koontz. Laura has a guardian angel who shows up to help her whenever she's in danger, but then it turns out other people are trying to undo the "angel's" work. Some evil Nazi time travelers are trying to destroy Laura. As Laura's son explains:

They can hopscotch around us.. They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It's sorta like... if we were the cowboys and the Indians were all psychic.

Doctor Who. For a show all about time travel, Doctor Who doesn't have that many stories where the Doctor and another time-traveler are both changing the timeline back and forth, surprisingly. But the Doctor and his fellow Time Lord the Master get into some duels on a few occasions. The most over-the-top is in the comedy special "Doctor Who And The Curse Of The Fatal Death," where the Master and Doctor meet up in a castle. The Master goes back in time and bribes the architect to put a trapdoor right where the Doctor happens to be standing. But then it turns out the Doctor also went back in time, and bribed the architect even more — to put the trapdoor where the Master is standing instead.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams contains a lot of cris-crossing back and forth in Reg Chronotis' time machine (much of which is lifted somewhat from the episodes Adams wrote for Doctor Who. In particular, the ghost of the last surviving Salaxian possesses a disgruntled literary magazine editor, inspiring him to go back in time to repair the Salaxian spaceship before it can explode, back at the dawn of life on Earth — which will have the effect of making sure life never develops on this planet. The instructions for fixing the ship are buried in the second half of Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan." But Chronotis and Dirk Gently, our detective hero, go back to Coleridge's time and ensure he never finishes that poem, so the instructions are lost and the alien plot is foiled.

Terminator. The Terminator movies and TV show are all about people and cyborgs traveling back in time to change, or safeguard history. The machines want to kill Sarah Connor before she can ever give birth to future resistance leader John Connor, so John sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect him — and Kyle becomes John's daddy. And then, the machines send more cyborgs back to kill John, and eventually Kyle's brother Derek ends up back in our time hanging out with his friend/nephew as well. And Sarah Connor either dies of cancer or travels forward in time past her own death date and somehow avoids it. Maybe in the second season of Sarah Connor Chronicles the machines will figure out they just have to wipe out the Reese brothers as kids, and all their problems go away.

Time After Time. H.G. Wells and Jack The Ripper battle each other in the bizarre future of 1979. Once they both reach the future, time travel doesn't play that much of a part in the story — except that at one point, Wells travels forward in time three days with his girlfriend Amy, only to find Amy's obituary in a newspaper. They have to travel back again and prevent Jack the Ripper from making Amy his fifth victim. (In the end, it turns out the obituary was mistaken, and it was Amy's friend who was murdered.) And then Amy goes back to the 19th century and marries Wells, changing history at least somewhat.

Meet The Robinsons. An animated Disney film, very loosely based on the book A Day With Wilbur Robinson. Tom Selleck invents a time machine. (We'll just pause to let you absorb that piece of info.) And then a villain named Bowler Hat Guy travels back in time to sabotage a memory-scanning machine that a kid named Lewis has invented, which gave rise to all the amazing inventions in Tom Selleck's utopian future. ("Tom Selleck's Utopian Future" will be my next band name.) So Tom Selleck's son Wilbur has to travel back in time to our time, to make sure Lewis repairs the memory-scanning machine.

Crime Traveler. In this British TV series, a physicist named Holly Turner invents a time machine, and a lazy detective named Slade uses it to travel back in time and solve crimes before they happen. But in the final episode, a criminal gets his own time machine, and travels back in time to give himself an airtight alibi for a couple of murders. Slade has to travel back as well, to catch the other time traveler in the act.

Research by Nivair Gabriel