Force
Sir Isaac Newton described the motion of all objects using the concepts of inertia and force, and in doing so he found they obey certain conservation laws. In 1687, Newton published his thesis "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica". In this work Newton set out three laws of motion that to this day are the way forces are described in physics.
Analogical models
The earliest such analogy is due to James Clerk Maxwell who, in 1873, associated mechanical force with electrical voltage. This analogy became so widespread that sources of voltage are still today referred to as electromotive force. The power conjugate of voltage is electric current which, in the Maxwell analogy, maps to mechanical velocity. Electrical impedance is the ratio of voltage and current, so by analogy, mechanical impedance is the ratio of force and velocity. The concept of impedance can be extended to other domains, for instance in acoustics and fluid flow it is the ratio of pressure to rate of flow. In general, impedance is the ratio of an "effort" variable and the "flow" variable that results. For this reason, the Maxwell analogy is often referred to as the impedance analogy, although the concept of impedance was not conceived until 1886 by Oliver Heaviside, some time after Maxwell's death.