In about 50 BCE, the Roman philosopher Lucretius proposed that apparently static macroscopic bodies were composed on a small scale of rapidly moving atoms all bouncing off each other. This Epicurean atomistic point of view was rarely considered in the subsequent centuries, when Aristotlean ideas were dominant.
In 1738 Daniel Bernoulli published Hydrodynamica, which laid the basis for the kinetic theory of gases.  In this work, Bernoulli posited the argument, that gases consist of great numbers of molecules moving in all directions, that their impact on a surface causes the pressure of the gas, and that their average kinetic energy determines the temperature of the gas. The theory was not immediately accepted, in part because conservation of energy had not yet been established, and it was not obvious to physicists how the collisions between molecules could be perfectly elastic.
Other pioneers of the kinetic theory, whose work was also largely neglected by their contemporaries, were Mikhail Lomonosov (1747), Georges-Louis Le Sage (ca. 1780, published 1818), John Herapath (1816) and John James Waterston (1843), which connected their research with the development of mechanical explanations of gravitation. In 1856 August Krönig created a simple gas-kinetic model, which only considered the translational motion of the particles.
In 1857 Rudolf Clausius developed a similar, but more sophisticated version of the theory, which included translational and, contrary to Krönig, also rotational and vibrational molecular motions. In this same work he introduced the concept of mean free path of a particle. In 1859, after reading a paper about the diffusion of molecules by  Clausius, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell formulated the Maxwell distribution of molecular velocities, which gave the proportion of molecules having a certain velocity in a specific range. This was the first-ever statistical law in physics. Maxwell also gave the first mechanical argument that molecular collisions entail an equalization of temperatures and hence a tendency towards equilibrium. In his 1873 thirteen page article Molecules, Maxwell states: "we are told that an atom is a material point, invested and surrounded by potential forces and that when flying molecules strike against a solid body in constant succession it causes what is called pressure of air and other gases."
In 1871, Ludwig Boltzmann generalized Maxwell's achievement and formulated the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. The logarithmic connection between entropy and probability was also first stated by Boltzmann.
At the beginning of the 20th century, atoms were considered by many physicists to be purely hypothetical constructs, rather than real objects. An important turning point was Albert Einsteins (1905) and Marian Smoluchowskis (1906) papers on Brownian motion, which succeeded in making certain accurate quantitative predictions based on the kinetic theory.
Following the development of the Boltzmann equation, a framework for its use in developing transport equations was developed independently by David Enskog and Sydney Chapman in 1917 and 1916. The framework provided a route to prediction of the transport properties of dilute gases, and became known as Chapman–Enskog theory. The framework was gradually expanded throughout the following century, eventually becoming a route to prediction of transport properties in real, dense gases.