Credited to The Netherlands. The German cleric Ewald Georg von Kleist made the same discovery independently in Pomerania on October 11, 1745, a few months before the Leiden experiment. Musschenbroek was the one who made it known, and the device took its name from Leiden.
How it began
Pieter van Musschenbroek, born in 1692 into a family of instrument makers, was professor at Leiden. Shortly before January 20, 1746, he found a way to store electricity in a bottle. A lawyer colleague discovered, painfully, that the jar charged and discharged when it was held in the hand. On January 20 Musschenbroek wrote an excited letter about what he called a terrible experiment to René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur in Paris.
How it works
In the Leiden experiment a glass bottle was half filled with water and a metal rod with a knob was put into it. The knob was held against the prime conductor of an electrostatic generator, which charged the water. A person holding the jar in one hand who then touched the knob with the other received a severe shock. Later jars were covered with tin foil, with a metal sphere on top. The glass separates two conductors, which is the arrangement of a capacitor.
How it spread
On April 20, 1746, the abbé Nollet read Musschenbroek's letter to the Paris Academy of Sciences and repeated the experiment successfully. Later that year he published a book on electricity with illustrations of it. Nollet is said to have coined the name Leyden jar, although his printed paper speaks of the Leiden experiment. The news set off a wave of electrical experiments across Europe.
Who pushed back
Musschenbroek was not the first. Ewald Georg von Kleist in Pomerania had made the same discovery independently on October 11, 1745, and the Linda Hall Library states plainly that Musschenbroek did not invent the jar but was preceded by Kleist. It was Musschenbroek's letter to Paris, however, that made the effect known, and the name that stuck was that of the Dutch university town.
What lasted
The Leyden jar was the first device that could accumulate electric charge and hold it until it was discharged, which makes it the ancestor of the modern capacitor. Jars were joined in groups to store more charge; a set of four from the early 1800s survives in a collection at Harvard University. Leiden University lists the invention among the notable achievements of its history and describes the capacitor as a cheap, reusable way to store electrical energy.
