"My whole body was shaken as though by a thunderbolt."
Pieter Van Musschenbroek,physicist
In 1745 the Dutch physicist Pietervan Musschenbroek (1692-1791) took a sealed glass vial partially filled with water, passed a conducting wire through a cork at one end and attached it to a nearby Wimshurst friction machine, which generated a static charge. The glass jar, called a Leyden Jar in honor of the inventor's home town and university, absorbed the charge, demonstrating for the first time that electricity could be produced and stored successfully and then discharged through the exposed wire to any grounded object. Musschenbroek tested the device by holding the jar in one hand and touching the charged, exposed wire with the other. He received such a shock that he swore not even a promise of the entire French nation could persuade him to do so again.
The Leyden jar created a sensation within the worldwide scientific community. The American inventor Benjamin Franklin called it "Musschenbroek's wonderful bottle." A year later the English physician William Watson, using a modified Leyden jar, successfully transmitted an electric spark along a wire stretched across the River Thames. The precise nature and makeup of electricity proved elusive until the discovery of the electron by J.J. Thompson in 1897.
Though cumbersome and grossly inefficient by modern standards, this forerunner of the modern capacitor represented the eighteenth century's single most significant advance in the understanding and harnessing of electricity. It facilitated a greater understanding of the nature of conductivity and led to a more mathematical approach in the study of the attraction of electrified bodies.
