He was born Václav Divíšek[2] on 26 March 1698 in Helvíkovice, Bohemia (now Ústí nad Orlicí District, Czech Republic).

In 1716, at the age of 18, he entered a gymnasium run at the Premonstratensian abbey located in the village of Louka, where he completed his basic studies in 1719.

He began a series of experiments over the next few years, mostly on plant growth and therapy with small electrical voltages.

[4] In letters, he proposed to several physicists (among them the Academies of Science in St. Petersburg and Vienna, as well as Leonhard Euler) to construct a "weather" machine"—a device that would suppress and prevent thunderstorms and lightning by constantly sucking atmospheric electricity out of the air.

[6] On 15 June 1754 he erected a forty-meter-high, free-standing pole in Přímětice, on which he mounted his "weather machine," consisting of several tin boxes and more than 400 metal spikes.

He took these occasional observations as proof of his theory that the pointed spikes extracted latent electricity out of the atmosphere, deposing them safely before lightning could form.

He was advised to unmount his second "weather machine," which he had then, for security reasons mounted on the tower of his church, and hand it over to the Louka abbey.

Fricker and Oetinger, two like-minded priests from Württemberg who had visited him during the experiments, helped him publish it abroad under the German name "Längst verlangte Theorie von der meteorologischen Electricité" (Much desired theory of the metereological electricity), in the same year that Diviš died.

Again, the theory was largely ignored, though Tetens reviewed them a few years after and called it a work of fantasy.

Despite scientific reviews of Diviš's errors (among others, German physicist Meidinger, who compared evidence about early lightning rods in 1888; and Czech scientific historians Smolka and Haubelt in 2004/05), there are still claims that Prokop Diviš invented the lightning rod.