The first recorded observation of capillary action was by Leonardo da Vinci.  A former student of Galileo, Niccolò Aggiunti, was said to have investigated capillary action.  In 1660, capillary action was still a novelty to the Irish chemist Robert Boyle, when he reported that "some inquisitive French Men" had observed that when a capillary tube was dipped into water, the water would ascend to "some height in the Pipe".  Boyle then reported an experiment in which he dipped a capillary tube into red wine and then subjected the tube to a partial vacuum.  He found that the vacuum had no observable influence on the height of the liquid in the capillary, so the behavior of liquids in capillary tubes was due to some phenomenon different from that which governed mercury barometers.
Others soon followed Boyle's lead.  Some (e.g., Honoré Fabri, Jacob Bernoulli) thought that liquids rose in capillaries because air could not enter capillaries as easily as liquids, so the air pressure was lower inside capillaries.  Others (e.g., Isaac Vossius, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Louis Carré, Francis Hauksbee, Josia Weitbrecht) thought that the particles of liquid were attracted to each other and to the walls of the capillary.
Although experimental studies continued during the 18th century, a successful quantitative treatment of capillary action was not attained until 1805 by two investigators:  Thomas Young of the United Kingdom and Pierre-Simon Laplace of France.  They derived the Young–Laplace equation of capillary action.  By 1830, the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss had determined the boundary conditions governing capillary action (i.e., the conditions at the liquid-solid interface).  In 1871, the British physicist Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) determined the effect of the meniscus on a liquid's vapor pressure—a relation known as the Kelvin equation.  German physicist Franz Ernst Neumann (1798–1895) subsequently determined the interaction between two immiscible liquids.
Albert Einsteins first paper, which was submitted to Annalen der Physik' in 1900, was on capillarity.