Thomas-François Dalibard

[1] He was married to the novelist and playwright Françoise-Thérèse Aumerle de Saint-Phalier.

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.

Dalibard, who at the suggestion of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, translated Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity into French, performed Franklin's proposed experiment using a 40-foot-tall metal rod at Marly-la-Ville on 10 May 1752.

It is said that Dalibard used wine bottles to ground the pole, and he successfully extracted electricity from a low cloud.