Timeline of classical mechanics:

Early history

• 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
• 1000-1030 - Ab? Rayh?n al-B?r?n? introduces experimental scientific methods in statics and dynamics, and unifies them into the science of mechanics; he also combines the fields of hydrostatics with dynamics to create the field of hydrodynamics,^[1] and realizes that acceleration is connected with non-uniform motion^[2]
• 1000-1030 - Alhazen^[3][4] and Avicenna^[5][6] develop the concepts of inertia and momentum
• 1100-1138 - Avempace develops the concept of a reaction force^[7]

(cf. Abel B. Franco (October 2003). "Avempace, Projectile Motion, and Impetus Theory", Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (4), p. 521-546 [543].)

• 1100-1165 - Hibat Allah Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdaadi discovers that force is proportional to acceleration rather than velocity, a fundamental law in classical mechanics^[8]

(cf. Abel B. Franco (October 2003). "Avempace, Projectile Motion, and Impetus Theory", Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (4), p. 521-546 [528].)

• 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^[9]
• 1201-1274 - Nas?r al-D?n al-T?s? described an early yet incomplete theory of the conservation of mass, noting that a body of matter is able to change, but is not able to disappear^[10]
• 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^[11]
• 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 - Christian 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 isochrone
• 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

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 isochrone 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 that any chain hung from two fixed points can have
• 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 differental 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
• 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