A Brill Calendar: February 14

Pieter Musschenbroek: University Professor

Few Leyden burghers can have been surprised when Pieter Musschenbroek became University Professor in 1740.

Although this Leyden alumnus had hardly set eyes on both city and Academy since more than twenty years...

After his academic medical degree there under the great Boerhaave, he had been teaching in Duisburg, in the Rhineland and more recently in the University of Utrecht, nearer the city he had been born in on February 14, 1692.

Pieter stemmed from a large & distinguished local family which had developed close ties with the University; working as craftsmen building delicate & subtle scientific instruments for Professors in physical sciences like botany, medicine and (in the case of Pieter’s father) astronomy. The family also boasted the 16th century ‘arch-typographer’ Christopher Plantin. And Pieter’s aunt Sara – Plantin’s great-granddaughter – married to Jordaan Luchtmans (1652 – 1708), who, in the year of their wedding – 1683 – started a family firm, serving the Academy by printing treatises, theses, books, atlases and other materials.

True to family traditions, Pieter Musschenbroek proved an experimental physicist ‘pur sang’; inventing the first device storing static ‘electricity’, the high-tech marvel of ingenuity during 18th century. Everywhere in Europe his ‘Leyden Jar’ enthralled wits and scholars; in an era when the word ‘engineering’ acquired new connotations.

In the history of physics it is seldom that theoretical and experimental aspects of that scientific discipline are both present in one leading authority. Musschenbroek is such an exception. As if that wasn’t enough, he authored the first physics text-book in his mother-tongue. Now our thumb-nail sketch of this ‘Man for All Seasons’ is complete.