The first recorded experiments describing the phenomena made popular by Newton's cradle appear to be those conducted by Edme Mariotte around 1670. He was quoted in Newton's Principia, along with Wren, Wallis, and Huygens, as having conducted pioneering experiments on the collisions of pendulum balls. Each of these authors concluded that momentum (then described as the “quantity of motion”) is conserved when one ball collides with another.