Date: 1855
Francis Hawks- bee, who was admitted a fellow of the Royal So- ciety in 1705, published several papers in the Transactions between that year and 1711, giving an account of a series of experiments, partly per- formed with a glass globe, in the course of which he noticed a number of facts connected with elec- trical attraction and repulsion, and in particular detected for the first time the remarkable pheno- menon of the production of light by friction.  A few years later the subject was taken up by Ste- phen Gray, a pensioner of the Charter House, who, with the aid of a very poor apparatus, made out a catalogue, which he published in 1720, of bodies which show electricity on being rubbed, and in 1 732 discovered the conducting property inherent in bodies that are not electrical.  The two oppo- site kinds, or exhibitions, of electricity (which he called the vitreous and the resinous) were disco- vered by Dufay, keeper of the King's Garden at Paris, before 1739; and he also showed that bodies similarly electrified repel, and those dissi- milarly electrified attract, each other.