In 1752, Benjamin Franklin famously flew a kite in a thunderstorm and literally caught lightning in his hand. In 1753, Russian physicist Georg Wilhelm Richmann tried to do the same with a metal rod and was killed by lightning. Meanwhile in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), a priest named Prokop Diviš wanted to build a machine to control the weather, specifically the electricity in the atmosphere. In 1754, he erected his weather machine atop a 40-meter pole in order to extract the natural electricity from the air and prevent thunderstorms. Scientists thought he was nuts. The local villagers believed in his machine, and tore it down when there was a drought.
The "weather machine" worked, but not in the way Diviš wanted, and for reasons he didn't quite anticipate. For a long time, people thought Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, but Diviš' tower preceded Franklin's. Read how Diviš came up with the lightning rod at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Bohemianroots)