Timeline of Classical Mechanics - Newtonian Mechanics

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 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
• 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