A Brill Calendar: September 19

Few families have been associated with Leyden and its Unversity longer and more intimately than the van Musschenbroek family.

There van be no doubt about the question as to the most famous van Musschenbroek in academic terms: that title goes to the physicist Pieter (Petrus) van Musschenbroek (Leyden, February 14 1692 – Leyden, 19 September 1761). His textbooks were generally known and studied in Europe until the 19th century; distributed and sold by his in-laws, the Luchtmans publishing dynasty on the Rapenburg canal, Europe’s ‘Bibliopolis’.

Pieter’s mother, Sara, prided herself on being the great-granddaughter of Plantijn himself, the Moses of typography in the Low Countries. And Pieter’s early experiments with electricity gave name to the ‘Leyden Bottle’. In the history of science and technology the nature and importance of physical experimentation as it originated in the 17th and 18th centuries is seldom fully appreciated. It is clear that the Van Musschenbroeks could hardly complain about lack of social success, but the invention and producing of new instruments – as well as the improvement of existing ones – created in Leyden a specific and peculiar subculture, in which traditional scholarly attainments were often reach for inquisitive and enterprising youngsters.

Many of the Van Musschenbroeks could be called ‘artisans’ in the original sense of the word; but after all has been said and done, they have founded the tradition to allow experimentation, via trial – and – error, on Leyden’s long voyage to the physics of the age of Lorentz, Zeeman and Onnes.