Edme Mariotte (1620–1684) was a French scientist who after overseeing the piping design for the fountains at the Palais de Versailles, became very interested in the bending strength of beams. He investigated experimentally the fracture load of wooden rods & beams, finding that Galileo’s similar theories gave exaggerated or inaccurate values though well intended.
Discovering linear elastic law around the same time as Robert Hooke, he developed his own theory of elastic rods & beams under bending. He probably was the first who proposed a failure criterion stating that fracture occurs when the elongation of a rod under tension exceeds a certain limit.
The image below is of Mariotte’s tensile and bending test setup. This essentially spearheaded destructive testing as a science.