Thomas-François Dalibard

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Thomas-François Dalibard was born in Crannes, France in 1709 and died in 1799.

[edit] Relationship with Ben Franklin

He first met U.S. scientist Benjamin Franklin in 1776 during one of Franklin's visits to France and it is said that they became friends.

In 1750, Benjamin Franklin published a proposal for an experiment to determine if lightning was electricity. He proposed extending a conductor into a cloud that appeared to have the potential to become a thunderstorm. If electricity existed in the cloud, the conductor could be used to extract it.

[edit] Experiments with electricity

Dalibard translated Franklin's proposal into French and in May of 1752 he performed an experiment using a 40-foot-tall metal rod at Marly-la-Ville. It is said that Dalibard used wine bottles to ground the pole, and he successfully extracted electricity from a low cloud. Around a month later, in June 1752, unaware of Dalibard's work, Franklin also extracted electricity from a cloud in his famous kite experiment. It was found later, by a decendant of Dalibard, that his findings were in fact published later than Franklin's.

Dalibard was the author of Florae Parisiensis Prodromus, ou catalogue des plantes qui naissent dans les environs de Paris (Paris, 1749).