As early as 1754, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) speculated about the possibility of cavitation. In 1859, the English mathematician William Henry Besant (1828–1917) published a solution to the problem of the dynamics of the collapse of a spherical cavity in a fluid, which had been presented by the Anglo-Irish mathematician George Stokes (1819–1903) as one of the Cambridge [University] Senate-house problems and riders for the year 1847. In 1894, Irish fluid dynamicist Osborne Reynolds (1842–1912) studied the formation and collapse of vapor bubbles in boiling liquids and in constricted tubes.
The term cavitation first appeared in 1895 in a paper by John Isaac Thornycroft (1843–1928) and Sydney Walker Barnaby (1855–1925)—son of Sir Nathaniel Barnaby (1829 – 1915), who had been Chief Constructor of the Royal Navy—to whom it had been suggested by the British engineer Robert Edmund Froude (1846–1924), third son of the English hydrodynamicist William Froude (1810–1879).  Early experimental studies of cavitation were conducted in 1894-5 by Thornycroft and Barnaby and by the Anglo-Irish engineer Charles Algernon Parsons (1854-1931), who constructed a stroboscopic apparatus to study the phenomenon.  Thornycroft and Barnaby were the first researchers to observe cavitation on the back sides of propeller blades.
In 1917, the British physicist Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919) extended Besants work, publishing a mathematical model of cavitation in an incompressible fluid (ignoring surface tension and viscosity), in which he also determined the pressure in the fluid.  The mathematical models of cavitation which were developed by British engineer Stanley Smith Cook (1875–1952) and by Lord Rayleigh revealed that collapsing bubbles of vapor could generate very high pressures, which were capable of causing the damage that had been observed on ships propellers.  Experimental evidence of cavitation causing such high pressures was initially collected in 1952 by Mark Harrison (a fluid dynamicist and acoustician at the U.S. Navy's David Taylor Model Basin at Carderock, Maryland, USA) who used acoustic methods and in 1956 by Wernfried Güth (a physicist and acoustician of Göttigen University, Germany) who used optical Schlieren photography.
In 1944, Soviet scientists Mark Iosifovich Kornfeld (1908–1993) and L. Suvorov of the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute (now:  the Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia) proposed that during cavitation, bubbles in the vicinity of a solid surface do not collapse symmetrically; instead, a dimple forms on the bubble at a point opposite the solid surface and this dimple evolves into a jet of liquid.  This jet of liquid damages the solid surface.  This hypothesis was supported in 1951 by theoretical studies by Maurice Rattray Jr., a doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology.  Kornfeld and Suvorov's hypothesis was confirmed experimentally in 1961 by Charles F. Naudé and Albert T. Ellis, fluid dynamicists at the California Institute of Technology.
A series of experimental investigations of the propagation of strong shock wave (SW) in a liquid with gas bubbles, which made it possible to establish the basic laws governing the process, the mechanism for the transformation of the energy of the SW, attenuation of the SW, and the formation of the structure, and experiments on the analysis of the attenuation of waves in bubble screens with different acoustic properties were begun by pioneer works of Soviet scientist prof.V.F. Minin at the Institute of Hydrodynamics (Novosibirsk, Russia) in 1957–1960, who examined also the first convenient model of a screen - a sequence of alternating flat one-dimensional liquid and gas layers. In an experimental investigations of the dynamics of the form of pulsating gaseous cavities and interaction of SW with bubble clouds in 1957–1960 V.F. Minin discovered that under the action of SW a bubble collapses asymmetrically with the formation of a cumulative jet, which forms in the process of collapse and causes fragmentation of the bubble.