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 in side an inverted cycloid reach the lowest point of the cycloid in the same time and thereby experimentally shows that the cycloid is the isochrone
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