The proposal’s most prominent sponsor was Albert Einstein. In the
early years of his work on general relativity, he believed that his theory
implemented the proposal, although he completely lost this belief in his
later years. Nonetheless, the future of the proposal was guaranteed by the
vigorous support of an Einstein who rapidly rose to celebrity status both
inside and outside the scientific community. Einstein did not claim the
proposal as his own invention. From the earliest moments, he attributed
it to Ernst Mach and in 1918 gave a field theoretic formulation of the
proposal its now standard name of “Mach’s Principle.’