page_title: List of Dutch inventions and innovations
section_title: Leyden jar (first practical capacitor) (1745–1746)
hierarchical_section_title: List of Dutch inventions and innovations / Inventions and innovations / Scientific instruments / Leyden jar (first practical capacitor) (1745–1746)
caption_attribution_description: English: A 'battery' of four Leyden jars connected in parallel, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. The Leyden jars are an early type that had water inside the jar to serve as one of the plates. The semicircular scale attached to the central output teminal is a pith ball electrometer (Henly electrometer) that gives a rough measure of the charge. Nederlands: Leidse flessen, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, eigen foto, december 2003. Polski: Butelka lejdejska
context_page_description: The Netherlands and its people have made numerous contributions to the world's civilization in art, science, technology and engineering, economics and finance, cartography and geography, exploration and navigation, law and jurisprudence, thought and philosophy, medicine. and agriculture. The following list is composed of objects, unknown lands, breakthrough ideas/concepts, principles, phenomena, processes, methods, techniques, styles etc., that were discovered or invented by people from the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking people from the former Southern Netherlands. Until the fall of Antwerp, the Dutch and Flemish were generally seen as one people.
context_section_description: A Leyden jar, or Leiden jar, is a device that "stores" static electricity between two electrodes on the inside and outside of a glass jar. It was the original form of a capacitor (originally known as a "condenser"). It was invented independently by German cleric Ewald Georg von Kleist on 11 October 1745 and by Dutch scientist Pieter van Musschenbroek of Leiden (Leyden) in 1745–1746. The invention was named for the city. The Leyden jar was used to conduct many early experiments in electricity, and its discovery was of fundamental importance in the study of electricity. Previously, researchers had to resort to insulated conductors of large dimensions to store a charge. The Leyden jar provided a much more compact alternative. Like many early electrical devices, there was no particular use for the Leyden jar at first, other than to allow scientists to do a greater variety of electrical experiments. Benjamin Franklin, for example, used a Leyden jar to store electricity from lightning in his famous kite experiment in 1752. By doing so he proved that lightning was really electricity.
  The idea for the Leyden jar was discovered independently by two parties: German scientist and jurist Ewald Georg von Kleist, and Dutchmen Pieter van Musschenbroek and Andreas Cunaeus. These scientists developed the Leyden jar while working under a theory of electricity that saw electricity as a fluid, and hoped to develop the jar to "capture" this fluid. In 1744 von Kleist lined a glass jar with silver foil, and charged the foil with a friction machine. Kleist was convinced that a substantial electric charge could be collected when he received a significant shock from the device. The effects of this "Kleistian jar" were independently discovered around the same time by Dutch scientists Pieter van Musschenbroek and Cunaeus at the University of Leiden. Van Musschenbroek communicated on it with the French scientific community where it was called the Leyden jar.
caption: A battery of four water-filled Leyden jars, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. The Leyden jar was the first device capable of storing an electric charge.
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