Timeline of classical mechanics

Updated on Oct 04, 2024

Edit

Comment

Timeline of classical mechanics:

Early mechanics

4th century BC - Aristotle founds the system of Aristotelian physics

260 BC - Archimedes mathematically works out the principle of the lever and discovers the principle of buoyancy

60 AD - Hero of Alexandria writes Metrica, Mechanics, and Pneumatics

1021 - Al-Biruni realizes that acceleration is connected with non-uniform motion

1000-1030 - Alhazen and Avicenna develop the concepts of inertia and momentum

1100-1138 - Avempace develops the concept of a reaction force

1100-1165 - Hibat Allah Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdaadi discovers that force is proportional to acceleration rather than speed, a fundamental law in classical mechanics

1121 - Al-Khazini publishes The Book of the Balance of Wisdom, in which he develops the concepts of gravitational potential energy and gravity at-a-distance

1340-1358 - Jean Buridan develops the theory of impetus

1490 - Leonardo da Vinci describes capillary action

1500-1528 - Al-Birjandi develops the theory of "circular inertia" to explain Earth's rotation

1581 - Galileo Galilei notices the timekeeping property of the pendulum

1589 - Galileo Galilei uses balls rolling on inclined planes to show that different weights fall with the same acceleration

1638 - Galileo Galilei publishes Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

1658 - Christiaan Huygens experimentally discovers that balls placed anywhere inside an inverted cycloid reach the lowest point of the cycloid in the same time and thereby experimentally shows that the cycloid is the tautochrone

1668 - John Wallis suggests the law of conservation of momentum

1676-1689 - Gottfried Leibniz develops the concept of vis viva, a limited theory of conservation of energy

Formation of classical mechanics (sometimes referred to as Newtonian mechanics)

1687 - Isaac Newton publishes his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he formulates Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation

1690 - James Bernoulli shows that the cycloid is the solution to the tautochrone problem

1691 - Johann Bernoulli shows that a chain freely suspended from two points will form a catenary

1691 - James Bernoulli shows that the catenary curve has the lowest center of gravity of any chain hung from two fixed points

1696 - Johann Bernoulli shows that the cycloid is the solution to the brachistochrone problem

1714 - Brook Taylor derives the fundamental frequency of a stretched vibrating string in terms of its tension and mass per unit length by solving an ordinary differential equation

1733 - Daniel Bernoulli derives the fundamental frequency and harmonics of a hanging chain by solving an ordinary differential equation

1734 - Daniel Bernoulli solves the ordinary differential equation for the vibrations of an elastic bar clamped at one end

1738 - Daniel Bernoulli examines fluid flow in Hydrodynamica

1739 - Leonhard Euler solves the ordinary differential equation for a forced harmonic oscillator and notices the resonance phenomenon

1742 - Colin Maclaurin discovers his uniformly rotating self-gravitating spheroids

1743 - Jean le Rond d'Alembert publishes his "Traite de Dynamique", in which he introduces the concept of generalized forces for accelerating systems and systems with constraints

1747 - Pierre Louis Maupertuis applies minimum principles to mechanics

1759 - Leonhard Euler solves the partial differential equation for the vibration of a rectangular drum

1764 - Leonhard Euler examines the partial differential equation for the vibration of a circular drum and finds one of the Bessel function solutions

1776 - John Smeaton publishes a paper on experiments relating power, work, momentum and kinetic energy, and supporting the conservation of energy

1788 - Joseph Louis Lagrange presents Lagrange's equations of motion in Mécanique Analytique

1789 - Antoine Lavoisier states the law of conservation of mass

1813 - Peter Ewart supports the idea of the conservation of energy in his paper On the measure of moving force

1821 - William Hamilton begins his analysis of Hamilton's characteristic function

1834 - Carl Jacobi discovers his uniformly rotating self-gravitating ellipsoids

1834 - John Russell observes a nondecaying solitary water wave (soliton) in the Union Canal near Edinburgh and uses a water tank to study the dependence of solitary water wave velocities on wave amplitude and water depth

1835 - William Hamilton states Hamilton's canonical equations of motion

1835 - Gaspard Coriolis examines theoretically the mechanical efficiency of waterwheels, and deduces the Coriolis effect.

1841 - Julius Robert von Mayer, an amateur scientist, writes a paper on the conservation of energy but his lack of academic training leads to its rejection.

1842 - Christian Doppler proposes the Doppler effect

1847 - Hermann von Helmholtz formally states the law of conservation of energy

1851 - Léon Foucault shows the Earth's rotation with a huge pendulum (Foucault pendulum)

1902 - James Jeans finds the length scale required for gravitational perturbations to grow in a static nearly homogeneous medium

References

Timeline of classical mechanics Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA

Contents

Early mechanics

Formation of classical mechanics (sometimes referred to as Newtonian mechanics)

References