Charles François de Cisternay du Fay

Charles François de Cisternay du Fay (1698 to 1739) was a French chemist who served as superintendent of the Jardin du Roi. He is remembered for his work on static electricity. He found that some charged bodies repel one another while others attract, proposed two kinds of electricity that he named vitreous and resinous, which correspond to positive and negative charge, and distinguished substances that conduct from those that insulate, which he called electrics and non-electrics. He showed that bodies with like charges repel and bodies with unlike charges attract, and he refuted the view of Stephen Gray that a body's electrical behaviour depends on its colour. His observations were reported in a paper of December 1733 printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1734. His many other memoirs in the Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences range from luminous barometers and phosphors to magnetism. He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1723 and died of smallpox in 1739.