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.
History of special relativity
There were some attempts to derive the Lorentz transformation without the postulate of the constancy of the speed of light. Vladimir Ignatowski (1910) for example used for this purpose (a) the principle of relativity, (b) homogeneity and isotropy of space, and (c) the requirement of reciprocity. Philipp Frank and Hermann Rothe (1911) argued that this derivation is incomplete and needs additional assumptions. Their own calculation was based on the assumptions that: (a) the Lorentz transformation forms a homogeneous linear group, (b) when changing frames, only the sign of the relative speed changes, (c) length contraction solely depends on the relative speed. However, according to Pauli and Miller such models were insufficient to identify the invariant speed in their transformation with the speed of light — for example, Ignatowski was forced to seek recourse in electrodynamics to include the speed of light. So Pauli and others argued that both postulates are needed to derive the Lorentz transformation. However, until today, others continued the attempts to derive special relativity without the light postulate.