Editing Prokop Diviš (section)

==Scientist==
Back at the parish, Diviš became responsible for the management of farmland belonging to it. He undertook the construction of water conduits on the property. As a result, he became interested in a popular new interest of the scientific community of his day: "electricity." He began a series of experiments over the next few years, mostly on plant growth and therapy with small electrical voltages. He published the results and allegedly demonstrated at the Imperial Court in Vienna.<ref name=RP /> Diviš also constructed the [[Denis d'or]], which allegedly imitated the sounds of various musical instruments.<ref name=RP /> This instrument is dated to 1753, though only one prototype was built, and it vanished soon after Diviš's death. The novelty instrument produced electrical shocks as practical jokes for the player. It is disputed whether the Denis d'or sounds were also produced by electricity or if it was an otherwise acoustical instrument.<ref>Peer Sitter: [http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/muwi/fricke/303sitter.pdf ''Das Denis d'or: Urahn der 'elektroakustischen' Musikinstrumente?'' (''The Denis d'or - ancestor of electro-acoustic instruments?'')] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160103225303/http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/muwi/fricke/303sitter.pdf |date=3 January 2016 }} (german)</ref>

The news of the death of [[Georg Wilhelm Richmann]], a professor in St. Petersburg who was killed by lightning in 1753 during his attempt at measuring the intensity of the electric field in the atmosphere, caused Diviš to become interested in atmospheric electricity.<ref name=RP /> In letters, he proposed to several physicists (among them the Academies of Science in St. Petersburg and Vienna, as well as [[Leonhard Euler]]) to construct a "weather" machine"—a device that would suppress and prevent thunderstorms and lightning by constantly sucking atmospheric electricity out of the air. His theories were already, in his time, recognized as [[fringe science]], and thus ignored. When Diviš did not receive answers, he took it up on himself to build such a machine in his own parish.<ref name="Möhring">[https://e-pub.uni-weimar.de/opus4/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1374 Christa Möhring: Eine Geschichte des Blitzableiters. Die Ableitung des Blitzes und die Neuordnung des Wissens um 1800] (German dissertation; ''The history of the lightning rod. Conduction of Lightning and the re-ordering of knowledge around 1800'') p. 83-105</ref>

On 15 June 1754, he erected a forty-meter-high, free-standing pole in Přímětice, on which he mounted his "weather machine," consisting of several tin boxes and more than 400 metal spikes. A well-established theory at that time was that more pointed spikes would conduct electricity better. The pole was secured by heavy metal chains that inadvertently also grounded his construction, making it actually one of the first grounded lightning rods. He described his invention as being very effective at driving off storms: clouds formed when the pole was taken down and disappeared when erected again. He took these occasional observations as proof of his theory that the pointed spikes extracted latent electricity out of the atmosphere, deposing them safely before lightning could form. Several local newspapers and novelty papers from Southern Germany made reports on his attempts.<ref name="Möhring"/>

His findings were not well received in the scientific community, which largely decided to ignore him. In 1759, a drought threatened Přímětice's farmers, who now took action against their priests' attempts to control the weather and consequently destroyed the first "weather machine." This led to a dissent between Diviš and his "unruly flock" that only ended when the church superiors advised Diviš to stop his experiments. He was advised to unmount his second "weather machine," which he had then, for security reasons mounted on the tower of his church, and hand it over to the Louka abbey.<ref name="Möhring"/>

Diviš continued to correspond with scientists and promote his own theory, which he called ''Magia naturalis''. [[Johann Ludwig Fricker|Fricker]] and [[Friedrich Christoph Oetinger|Oetinger]], two like-minded priests from [[Württemberg]] who had visited him during the experiments, helped him publish it abroad under the German name "Längst verlangte Theorie von der meteorologischen Electricité" ''(Much desired theory of the metereological electricity)'', in the same year that Diviš died. Again, the theory was largely ignored, though [[Johannes Nikolaus Tetens|Tetens]] reviewed them a few years after and called it a work of fantasy.<ref name="Möhring"/>