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One of the earliest references comes from John Michell in 1783, who, in a letter published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1784), suggested that a sufficiently massive object could exert such a strong gravitational pull that light would not escape—effectively predicting the concept of a "dark star," an early analogue of a black hole.

Another key figure was Pierre-Simon Laplace, who, in the first editions of Exposition du Système du Monde (1796), independently proposed the existence of such massive celestial bodies that could trap light. However, he later removed this idea from later editions, possibly due to skepticism over the corpuscular theory of light.

The first real attempt to quantify how much gravity might bend light was made by Henry Cavendish (circa 1783–1784). Though unpublished at the time, his notes (discovered in 1921) contained the first calculations of the bending of light under Newtonian gravity. Later, in 1801, Johann Georg von Soldner formally published a paper calculating the deflection angle of light passing near the Sun under Newtonian mechanics, obtaining a result (~0.85 arcseconds) that was later found to be half of what general relativity predicted.

These early discussions framed gravitational lensing in a purely Newtonian context, treating light as a particle affected by gravitational attraction.