The early history of solitons or solitary waves began in August 1834 when the Victorian Engineer John Scott Russell observed a solitary wave travelling along a Scottish canal. The definitive theory was not published until 1895 by Korteweg and de Vries, working in Amsterdam. The subject was reborn in Plasma Physics in 1958 with the discovery, by J. H. Adlam and the author, of solitary waves in a collisionless plasma containing a magnetic field. In 1965 Zabusky and Kruskal found, by numerical investigation, that such waves retain their identity after colliding. This particle-like behaviour led these authors to introduce the term soliton to replace the term solitary wave.
J. E. Allen (Sun,) studied this question.