Isaac Newton(1642-1727)
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| Godfrey Kneller's 1689 portrait of Isaac Newton(age 46) |
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, in the small English town of Woolsthorpe. His father, a farmer died shortly before Isaac was born. When the boy was 3 years old, his mother remarried and moved to another town. Isaac stayed on at the farm with his grandmother. He was sent to the King's School in the nearby town of Grantham at the age of 12.
During his student days, Isaac was a poor student at first. He cared little for schoolwork, preferring to paint, write in notebooks, make kites or invent toys. He made no friends. Silent and dreamy, he was at the bottom of his class. Oddly, It was a savage kick by a bully that caused Newton's great mind to awaken. the dreamy boy flew into rage and beat the other boy thoroughly. Isaac was determined to beat the bully in schoolwork as well. Soon Isaac was at the head of his class.
When an idea got into Newton's head he could think of nothing else. Once, during a storm, his mother sent him to shut the barn doors to keep them from being torn off. Half an hour later she went to see what was keeping the boy so long. He had forgotten all about the barn doors. They were ripped of their hinges, and Newton was jumping again and again from an open window to the ground. Each time, he marked the spot here he landed. Newton was trying to measure the force of the wind. When the gusts were strong, his jumps werelonger when the wind was weaker.
When he was 18 years old, Newton went to Trinity College in Cambridge University. He quickly proved to his teachers that he was no ordinary student. He read all the books he could get especially those on mathematics and physics. These interested him the most
In 1665, when Newton when Newton was only 22 years old, he worked out a mathemathics formula that has been used ever since. Today it is called the binomial theorem.
One day in 1665 Newton was sitting in a garden, thing about the moon. While he was wondering about the force that kept the moon moving around the Earth, he saw an apple fall from a tree. This set him thinking about falling objects. Why did they fall down and not up? The same force that made the apple fall downward must also be attracting the moon and helping to keep it in orbit.
While at Woolsthorpe, Newton began experimenting with light. He succeeded in showing that a beam of light is made up of bands of colours from red to violet. He called these bands the spectrum.
Newton's book "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy appeared in 1687. It was written in Latin, the language in which most scientific books were written at that time. Many scientists think it is the most important scientific book ever written.
Isaac Newton died in1727. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, among the great men of England.. His statue stands today in the hall of Trinity College, Cambridge University.
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