Wilhelm Eduard Weber
At the end of the 19th century, many tried to combine Newton's force law with the established laws of electrodynamics (like those of Wilhelm Eduard Weber, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann) in order to explain the anomalous perihelion precession of Mercury. In 1890, Maurice Lévy succeeded in doing so by combining the laws of Weber and Riemann, whereby the speed of gravity is equal to the speed of light. In another attempt, Paul Gerber (1898) succeeded in deriving the correct formula for the perihelion shift (which was identical to the formula later used by Albert Einstein). These hypotheses were rejected because of the outdated laws they were based on, being superseded by those of James Clerk Maxwell.