November 1783,
John Michell published a paper on ‘dark stars’.
This was kind of a preamble to the concept of black holes & interestingly, was based on Newton’s corpuscular theory of light and the slowing down of light due to gravity!
See this article for details:
Part of the original paper (the beginning) is reproduced below :
The first few lines of Michell’s 24-page paper elaborate on his idea. As you may observe, he makes a remarkable connection between the velocity of light and the measures related to stars (distance, magnitude, etc.)
