Home to a famous apple tree
By Hamish Johnston
In 1666 a young Isaac Newton was waiting out the plague in his mother’s garden in Lincolnshire when an apple fell from a tree. Newton wondered why such bodies always moved downwards, rather than sideways or upwards – and the theory of universal gravitation was born.
Or so goes the most famous anecdote in the history of physics…a story that Newton himself appears to have repeated often in later life, but never wrote down.
Now you can read the earliest known account of this tale, written by William Stukeley who was a friend of the great physicist.
Stukeley’s Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life is available on the Royal Society’s Turning the Pages gallery of manuscripts – created to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the society. Both Newton and Stukeley were Fellows of the Royal Society.
The site offers the manuscript in three different formats but I was only able to view the most basic version – if you have the same luck, just left-click on a page for large and very readable version. The apple story can be found on pages 42–43 of the work.