Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1642. His family were farmers in a place called Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire.
Child inventor
When Isaac Newton was a boy, he was very quiet and didn’t like playing with the other children in the village. Instead, he loved to make things and created his own sundials, a water clock and models. His sundials can be seen today at Woolsthorpe.
Off to University ...
Isaac Newton went to Cambridge University, where he later became a Professor of Mathematics and stayed for many years.
Escaping a plague and avoiding an apple
Due to the plague in 1665, Newton left Cambridge for a while and returned to the farm. While he was there, he noticed an apple falling from a tree to the ground. He wondered why objects always dropped to the ground, regardless of their size. He also considered that it might be the same force pulling the apple to the ground as the force that kept the moon revolving in orbit around the earth. This is known as Universal Gravitation.
Interesting investigations
Around this time, Newton started to experiment with lenses and the nature of light. By investigating prisms, he discovered that it was possible to bend light and also that white light is a mixture of the colours of the rainbow. This led him to believe that light is made up of a stream of tiny particles. Using this knowledge, he made the first reflecting telescope.
A tremendous telescope!
Until this time, telescopes had contained glass lenses that allowed light to shine through them. This produced a blurred image with rainbow colours. On Newton’s telescope, light bounced off a curved mirror, rather than travel through a lens, leaving a clear image.
Now, about that apple ...
In 1684, Edmond Halley, the Astronomer, asked Newton for help to find the force that caused planets to move in a particular orbit.
Thinking back to the apple falling from the tree, Newton explained that he already knew why, but as it was so many years before, he had to work out his proof again.
With Halley’s assistance, Newton then produced one of the greatest scientific works ever written, Philsophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, more commonly known as Principia. In English, this means ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’. It set out the laws of motion, which explained gravity and the movement of the planets.
A brilliant life
Sir Isaac Newton was knighted in 1705 and died in 1727 when he was 85 years old. He never married and was apparently extremely absent minded throughout his life.
Apart from his work with gravity and light, Newton was interested in religion and chemistry. He was also in charge of the Royal Mint.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey and his monument can be seen today.
