Pieter van Musschenbroek

Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692 to 1761) was a Dutch natural philosopher, born in Leiden, whose name is most often attached to the Leyden jar, an early device for storing electric charge. With his student Andreas Cunaeus, and with Jean-Nicolas-Sebastien Allamand as a collaborator, he found in the mid-1740s that the charge of a friction machine could be held in a glass jar of water fitted with a brass rod and released through an outside circuit; Ewald Georg von Kleist had independently built a similar device shortly before him. After studying medicine at Leiden he held professorships at Duisburg, Utrecht and Leiden, teaching mathematics, philosophy, medicine, astronomy and physics. His textbook Elementa Physica of 1726 helped carry the ideas of Isaac Newton to continental Europe, and his descriptions of testing machines and his work on the buckling of struts and on friction were early contributions to materials testing and tribology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1734.