Pieter van Musschenbroek

Pieter van Musschenbroek was a Dutch scientist credited with the invention of a pioneering capacitor design in the Leyden jar in 1746. He was a professor in Duisburg, Utrecht, and Leiden, specializing in physics, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and astronomy. His pioneering work on the buckling of compressed struts made him one of the first scientists to provide detailed descriptions of testing machines for tension, compression, and flexure testing in 1729. An early example of a problem in dynamic plasticity his described in the 1739 paper.