Christian Huygens (1629-1695) in 1678 proposed it in his Traité de la lumière as a device for explaining the propagation of light in ether.
According to Huygens, the propagation of light along a luminous beam takes place in the same way: each particle of ether undergoes a shift that is momentary and imperceptible but sufficient to transmit the particle of ether to the next one and immediately return to its position at rest. Since this propagation takes place along all beams coming out of luminous bodies, the impulses form spherical waves that spread out around the single points of the source. The same device is used to explain the propagation of sound analogically.