Thomas-François Dalibard was born in Crannes-en-Champagne, France in 1709 and died in 1799.
He first met U.S. scientist Benjamin Franklin in 1767[1] 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.
Dalibard translated Franklin's proposal into French and in May 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. It is not known whether Franklin ever performed his proposed experiment.[2][3] Dalibard was the author of Florae Parisiensis Prodromus, ou catalogue des plantes qui naissent dans les environs de Paris (Paris, 1749).