Which English natural philosopher proposed "dark stars" in 1783?

John Michell proposed the idea of “dark stars” in 1783.

Michell was an English natural philosopher, clergyman, astronomer, geologist, and Fellow of the Royal Society. In a paper read on 27 November 1783, he applied Newton’s corpuscular theory of light to an extreme gravitational object. He reasoned that a sufficiently massive and compact star could have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light, preventing its light from reaching distant observers.

Michell suggested that such objects might be detected indirectly by observing the motion of a visible companion star orbiting an invisible one. That proposal resembles the modern method of finding black holes in binary systems, although Michell’s physics treated light as particles and predates Einstein’s general relativity by more than a century.

The paper was published in 1784 and the idea later faded from attention. Pierre-Simon Laplace proposed a similar concept in the 1790s. Michell also made important contributions to seismology, magnetism, statistics, and measuring Earth’s mass, so his “dark star” was only one part of an unusually broad scientific career.