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The literature on the history of kinematics is extensive. I limit myself to a few remarks. In the period 1962–64, Pascal Dupont wrote four excellent articles on the history of planar instantaneous kinematics. And in the period 1974–75, H. Nolle published three papers on the history of linkage coupler curve synthesis. In 2007, Francis Moon wrote an excellent book on Franz Reuleaux. See the bibliography in this book. In particular, the Springer book series History of Mechanism and Machine Science edited by Marco Ceccarelli contains numerous contributions on aspects of the field or individuals who have made significant contributions.
A book that attempts to give an overview of the entire field did not yet exist. When I was finishing this book, I discovered that in 2009 Alberto A. Martínez published a book entitled Kinematics, The Lost Origins of Einstein’s Relativity. That book is also devoted to the history of kinematics. Martínez describes kinematics as an initially neglected or even rejected science that was brought to the fore by Ampère. He is primarily interested in the role of kinematical ideas in the background of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Although there is overlap here and there with the present book, the two books are very different, both in terms of content and method. In fact, Martínez concentrates on the nineteenth century, while half of this book deals with the period before that. Apart from Einstein’s 1905 paper, Martínez generally avoids theorems and proofs. This book focuses on just that and follows the mathematical chronology as closely as possible. In Martínez’s book, the chapters represent a variety of distinct approaches to the development of kinematics in the nineteenth century.
This book contains many mathematical arguments from very different periods in history. An attempt has been made to follow the original reasoning as much as possible. This implies the presence of considerable differences in method and precision of argumentation and has inevitably led to variation in style