Inertia
Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, as proposed in his 1905 paper entitled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" was built on the understanding of inertia and inertial reference frames developed by Galileo and Newton. While this revolutionary theory did significantly change the meaning of many Newtonian concepts such as mass, energy, and distance, Einstein's concept of inertia remained unchanged from Newton's original meaning (in fact, the entire theory was based on Newton's definition of inertia). However, this resulted in a limitation inherent in special relativity: the principle of relativity could only apply to reference frames that were "inertial" in nature (meaning when no acceleration was present). In an attempt to address this limitation, Einstein proceeded to develop his general theory of relativity ("The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity," 1916), which ultimately provided a unified theory for both "inertial" and "noninertial" (accelerated) reference frames. However, in order to accomplish this, in general relativity, Einstein found it necessary to redefine several fundamental concepts (such as gravity) in terms of a new concept of "curvature" of space-time, instead of the more traditional system of forces understood by Newton.
Acceleration (special relativity)
Concerning the historical development, relativistic equations containing accelerations can already be found in the early years of relativity, as summarized in early textbooks by Max von Laue (1911, 1921) or Wolfgang Pauli (1921). For instance, equations of motion and acceleration transformations were developed in the papers of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1899, 1904), Henri Poincaré (1905), Albert Einstein (1905), Max Planck (1906), and four-acceleration, proper acceleration, hyperbolic motion, accelerating reference frames, Born rigidity, have been analyzed by Einstein (1907), Hermann Minkowski (1907, 1908), Max Born (1909), Gustav Herglotz (1909), Arnold Sommerfeld (1910), von Laue (1911), Friedrich Kottler (1912, 1914), see section on history.