Pieter van Musschenbroek

Pieter van Musschenbroek was born on 14 March 1692 in Leiden, Holland, Dutch Republic. His father was Johannes van Musschenbroek and his mother was Margaretha van Straaten. The Van Musschenbroeks, originally from Flanders, had lived in the city of Leiden since circa 1600. His father was an instrument maker, who made scientific instruments such as air pumps, microscopes, and telescopes. Van Musschenbroek attended Latin school until 1708, where he studied Greek, Latin, French, English, High German, Italian, and Spanish. He studied medicine at Leiden University and received his doctorate in 1715. He also attended lectures by John Theophilus Desaguliers and Isaac Newton in London. He finished his study in philosophy in 1719. Musschenbroek belonged to the tradition of Dutch thinkers who popularised the ontological argument of God's design. He is author of Oratio de sapientia divina (Prayer of Divine Wisdom. 1744). ==Academic career==

Duisburg In 1719, he became professor of mathematics and philosophy at the University of Duisburg. In 1721, he also became professor of medicine. Musschenbroek's Elementa Physica (1726) played an important part in the transmission of Isaac Newton's ideas in physics to Europe. Leiden .|alt=An early 20th-century illustration of a Leyden jar.|left In 1739, he returned to Leiden, where he succeeded Jacobus Wittichius as professor. The apparatus was a glass jar filled with water into which a brass rod had been placed; and the stored energy could be released only by completing an external circuit between the brass rod and another conductor, originally a hand, placed in contact with the outside of the jar. Van Musschenbroek communicated this discovery to René Réaumur in January 1746, and it was Abbé Nollet, the translator of Musschenbroek's letter from Latin, who named the invention the 'Leyden jar'. Soon afterwards, it transpired that a German scientist, Ewald Georg von Kleist, had independently constructed a similar device in late 1745, shortly before Musschenbroek. He made a significant contribution to the field of tribology. In 1754, he became an honorary professor at the Imperial Academy of Science in Saint Petersburg. ==Works==

• Elementa Physica (1726) • Aeris praestantia in humoribus corporis humani (1739) (1744) • Institutiones physicae conscriptae in usus academicos (in Latin). Lugduni Batavorum : Apud S. Luchtmans et filium, 1748. • • • • Institutiones logicae (1764) • • • • ==References==