When he came to the electrical property of points, he showed their discharging power in a very original way, one which must have made his assistant uneasy for a while. At times, the machine worked by Father Franz gave excellent results; at others, it failed to generate. It was noticed by the critical few that when the machine failed, Divisch was close by; while when it worked normally, he was at some distance away. After a number of such alternations of success and failure which sorely perplexed the assistant, himself a man of renown in Vienna, Divisch explained the occurrence by saying, with a merry twinkle in his eye, that the failure of the machine to generate when he was close to it, apparently seeking out the cause of the breakdown, was due to a number of pin-like conductors which he had concealed for the purpose in his peruke and which neutralized the charge on the rotating generator! The identity of the lightning of our skies with the artificial electricity of our laboratories was suspected by many before the middle of the eighteenth century. Englishmen like Hauksbee, Hall, Gray, Freke, Martin and Watson; Germans like Bose and Winkler, and Frenchmen like Abbé Nollet, had already published their suspicions and conjectures anent the matter. Franklin, too, had indicated twelve points of analogy between the two, in 1749, in his letter to Collinson, of London. Though he felt the force of the analogical agreement, he also felt that the matter could not be definitely settled without an appeal to experiment. Accordingly, he added: "The electric fluid is attracted by points; we do not know whether this property is in lightning. But since they agree in all the particulars wherein we can already compare them, is it not probable that they agree likewise in this? Let the experiment be made." [Illustration: FIG. 19 The Divisch lightning conductor (1754)] [Illustration: FIG. 20]