A Brief History of Dynamics (see recommendations in the reading list)

384BC-322BC: Aristotle
310BC-230BC: Aristarchus of Samos proposed the Heliocentric theory.
190BC-120BC: Hipparchus of Rhodes measured the angular height of the star Alpha Virginis above the ecliptic and compared it with 150-yr-old Babylonian observations. From the change of 2 degrees, he deduced that the Earth's axis precesses at 47 arc-seconds per year. He also made detailed observations of the moon and estimated the earth-moon distance with similar accuracy.
150AD: Ptolemy knocks heliocentricity on the head because it violates Aristotle's ideas. Building on Hipparchus's work, he wrote a detailed mathematical theory of the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets.
1564-1642: Galileo
1546-1601: Tycho Brahe
1571-1630: Johannes Kepler
1629-1695: Christiaan Huygens [In 1656 he patented the first pendulum clock and applied it to longitude determination.]
1643-1727 (1669-1687): Newton (Lucasian Professor in Cambridge)
1693-1776: John Harrison. Master clockmaker.

1736-1813: Lagrange. Had 10 younger siblings only one of whom survived infancy. His father, a military man, wasted his earnings; Lagrange viewed this as good fortune: "Had I been rich, I might never have known Mathematics". He founded the Turin Academy of Sciences.
1729.: Laplace born. "The Newton of France." He published from 1766-1817. Among his many achievements, he put the (gamma-1)/gamma into the speed of sound.
1762: Lagrange Method of Variations
1766: Lagrange moved to Berlin (where Euler had been). Won prizes for work on moon, Jupiter, 3-body problem and comets. Wrote "Analytical Mechanics", which contained no diagrams.
1775: Nevil Maskelyne and Schiehallion, famous gravitating mountain, now owned in part by the John Muir Trust (Help to buy it!)
1787: Lagrange moved to Paris and became depressed.
1787: publication commences of "Celestial Mechanics", Laplace's peak. Biot assisted with the galleys.
: Laplace is president of board of Longitudes. Went into politics where he was useless. Was replaced by Bonaparte.
1812: Laplace's work on probability published. (Generating functions; inference)
1889, 1892: Poincaré. Poincaré was first to consider the possibility of chaos in a deterministic system, in his work on planetary orbits. Little interest was shown in this work until the modern study of chaotic dynamics began in 1963.