Versailles was a patron of the sciences. Jean-Baptiste Colbert made royal power aware of the importance of scientific research. He founded the Académie des Sciences, establishing a new relationship between learned men and the State. Many, including some of the most famous, assiduously frequented the court as physicians, engineers and the princes' tutors. Diderot and d’Alembert met each other there in the study of Quesnay, Madame de Pompadour's doctor. Abbé Nollet and Benjamin Franklin compared their theories before the king. Some courtiers were real experts.
The Château de Versailles offered research resources: anatomists had use of the menagerie and its rare animals, botanists of the Trianon's grounds and zoologists of the stables, where hippiatrics, the forerunner of veterinary science, was born.
New teaching methods based on cutting-edge research tools were developed for the child princes. The same was true for the kings' personal practice. Louis XIV saw himself as a protector of science, as well as of the arts, without practicing them, but his successors Louis XV and Louis XVI were true connoisseurs. A presentation to the king or demonstration before the court was the highest honour, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. The first hot-air balloon flight is well known, but many other experiments have fallen into oblivion, such as the burning mirror experiment before Louis XIV or the electricity demonstration during his successor's reign in the Hall of Mirrors.
