Isaac Newton
Early Years
The great English scientist Isaac Newton was born in the little village of
Woolthorpe, not far from the old university town of Cambridge, on December
25, 1642. His father, a farmer, died before his son’s birth. Little Isaac
was left to the care of his mother, uncle and grandmother who sent him to
school.
In his early years young Isaac shone more as one who could make things
with his hands than a scholar. His neighbors watched him making various
things and thought ho would probably become a well-known clock maker. There
was ground for thinking thus became he had already made a clock of a kind
which his neighbors had never heard of before. It worked by water. Besides
the water-clock, Isaac also made a sundial. His grandmother was never at a
loss to know the hour; for the water-clock could tell it in the house, and
the sundial outside. It is said that the sundial is still at Woolthorpe, on
a wall of the house where Newton lived.
When he grew older, however, he took a considerable interest in
mathematics.
Though Isaac Newton never lost his manual skill his ability as a
mathematician and a physicist was the most important in his life. According
to Newton himself, his first physical experiment was carried out in 1658,
when he was sixteen years old. Wishing to find out the strength of the wind
during a storm, he jumped against and before the wind and by the length of
his jump he could judge the strength of the wind. Thus, even in his boyish
sports, he was searching out the secrets of nature and could find out
difficult things in simple ways. His brain was always busy observing
different phenomena of nature.
[pic] Earth mass
Not far from his grandmother’s home there was a windmill. When the
windmill was not working he examined the mechanism and when the windmill
worked he watched the process of its work. Then he made a model of the
windmill; every part of the mill and its machinery was complete.
If Isaac was left to himself, he was either making something’s or studying
some book. At night he looked up at the stars, and wondered if they were
worlds like our own, and how great their distance from the earth was. There
were a lot of questions in his mind but nobody was able to answer them.
When Isaac was fourteen years old, his mother took her son from school to
help her on the farm at Woolthorpe, where she lived with three other
children – Isaac’s brother and two sisters. For more than two years he
worked on the farm and then his mother sent him back again to school to
prepare for the University.
On June 5, 1551, Newton entered the University of Cambridge where he
studied mathematics. Soon he became famous having made a number of
important contributions to mathematics by the time he was twenty-one.
When Newton was twenty-two years old he began studying the theory of
gravitation. In 1665, while on a visit in his negative village, he saw an
apple fall from a tree and began wondering what force made the apple fall.
Probably this was influenced by his knowledge of Galileo’s experiment from
the Tower of Pisa.
[pic] Moon
The Problem of Gravitation
We know that the moon makes a circle round the earth in about every twenty-
eight days. We know also that our earth and other planets move around the
sun. Does it not seem probable that the earth pulls the moon, and it moves
in its orbit under the influence of the earth’s gravitation? Perhaps also
the sun pulls the earth and the other planets.
It was over such possibilities that young Isaac Newton was thinking in the
solitude of his Lincolnshire home when the Great Plague raged in London and
he, along with other students, was sent home from Cambridge because of this
plague. In that quiet period of almost two years he finished considering
his discoveries which had perhaps the most far-reaching effect in the whole
history of science: the method of fluxions, decomposition of light and the
law of gravitation.
As a young man at Cambridge Newton had read with great interest the
writings of Galileo, he knew the geometry of Descartes, and he had already
partly worked out the methods of calculus, which he called the method of
fluxions. So when he began to think “of gravity extending to the orb of the
moon”, as he wrote, he immediately put this idea to the test of
calculation.
When Newton first began his calculations the available information of the
earth’s radius and of the moon’s distance were not accurate. The relative