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A patron of learned men and engineers, Louis XV collected timepieces and precision instruments. The king’s geographers and astronomers worked to map out the country. The king encouraged maritime expeditions and offered rewards to scientific missions to bring back plant specimens from distant countries. In the King’s Garden in Paris and the Botanical Garden of the Trianon palace he oversaw the application of the classification of plants proposed by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus. The first researches into electricity also interested Louis XV. In 1746, at Versailles, the Abbé Nollet carried out before the king the experiment of the Leyden jar which produced electric discharges.