Cap discharge? One story was the Robert VandeGraaff got the idea for his generator from a Boston printing plant, where the metal body of an ungrounded newspaper press on a wooden floor would give dangerous shocks to anyone approaching closely. If a machine is many meters across, and charges itself up to many tens of KV, the body capacitance may store lethal (joules) level of energy, e.g. 50KV at 1000pF.