He was a professor in Duisburg, Utrecht, and Leiden, where he held positions in mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and astronomy.

Pieter van Musschenbroek was born on 14 March 1692 in Leiden, Holland, Dutch Republic.

[6] Musschenbroek belonged to the tradition of Dutch thinkers who popularised the ontological argument of God's design.

[8] Musschenbroek's Elementa Physica (1726) played an important part in the transmission of Isaac Newton's ideas in physics to Europe.

Musschenbroek and his student Andreas Cunaeus discovered that the energy could be stored, in work that also involved Jean-Nicolas-Sébastien Allamand as collaborator.

[11] The apparatus was a glass jar filled with water into which a brass rod had been placed; and the stored energy could be released only by completing an external circuit between the brass rod and another conductor, originally a hand, placed in contact with the outside of the jar.

[12] Soon afterwards, it transpired that a German scientist, Ewald Georg von Kleist, had independently constructed a similar device in late 1745, shortly before Musschenbroek.