1698-1739

French Physicist

Charles-François de Cisternay Du Fay is best known for his discovery of positive and negative electrical charges and some of their properties. He was one of the first to use an electroscope in his research, and his work inspired Benjamin Franklin's (1706-1790) famous kite experiment.

Du Fay was born in France in 1698, and virtually nothing is known about him until he began his experiments with electricity in the 1730s. Prior to that time, although electricity had been known for over 2,000 years (the Greeks first noticed it at about 400 B.C.), virtually nothing had been learned. The best theories of the day were that electricity, like "heaviness," was simply a property of all solid materials. However, Du Fay quickly discovered that there were at least two distinct types of electricity, obtained from rubbing...