Several thinkers described ideas related to gravity long before Isaac Newton, but none formulated the modern law of universal gravitation the way Newton did. Newton was the first to give a precise mathematical law showing that the same force pulling an apple down also keeps the Moon in orbit.

Quick Scoop: Core Idea

  • Ancient philosophers in Greece, India, and the Islamic world all noticed that objects fall and tried to explain why.
  • Figures like Aristotle, Democritus, and later scholars such as Brahmagupta and Bhāskara II wrote about weight, attraction, and bodies tending toward the Earth, but without Newton’s exact law.
  • Newton’s key step (late 1600s) was turning this into a universal, quantitative law that worked for both falling objects and planetary motion.

Before Newton: Ancient Ideas

Many early thinkers recognized that things fall toward the ground and tried to explain it.

  • Aristotle (4th century BCE) said heavy objects naturally move toward the center of the universe (which he identified with Earth) and that heavier bodies fall faster.
  • Democritus (5th–4th century BCE) proposed atomism and suggested atoms move and collide under a kind of ordering force that some historians see as a rough precursor to gravity.
  • These ideas were qualitative and philosophical, not precise physical laws.

Indian and Islamic Contributions

Later scholars in India and the Islamic world developed more explicit notions of attraction.

  • Texts attributed to Indian mathematicians and astronomers such as Brahmagupta (7th century) and Bhāskara II (12th century) describe Earth attracting objects and celestial bodies, sometimes using terms like “attractive force,” though without Newton’s full universal inverse‑square law.
  • Islamic scholars like Ibn al-Haytham and others studied motion, optics, and celestial phenomena, laying groundwork for later European physics.

Some modern writers and forums argue that Bhāskara II or Brahmagupta “discovered gravity before Newton,” but mainstream historians generally see these as important conceptual steps, not yet a completed universal gravitational theory.

What Newton Did Differently

Newton’s work in the late 17th century changed gravity from a qualitative idea into a predictive physical law.

  • He proposed that every mass attracts every other mass with a force depending on their masses and the inverse square of the distance between them (the law of universal gravitation).
  • He showed that this single law explains both:
    • Falling bodies on Earth.
    • Planetary orbits and the motion of the Moon.

So, to the question “who discovered gravity first before Newton?” the historically careful answer is:

  • Humans have known that things fall—and speculated about forces of attraction—for thousands of years.
  • Several thinkers, including Aristotle, Democritus, Brahmagupta, and Bhāskara II, described ideas related to gravitational attraction before Newton.
  • Newton, however, is credited with discovering and formulating the modern law of universal gravitation , which no one had done before him.

TL;DR: Many ancient scholars talked about falling bodies and attraction, but Newton was the first to turn this into a universal mathematical law of gravity, which is why history credits him with the discovery.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.