Sir Isaac Newton, by Richard Coppin
A portrait of Sir Isaac Newton by Sir Godfrey Kneller.
Strange to think that for someone who went on to become a giant of modern science,
the baby Isaac Newton should have been born so tiny; premature babies often failed to
survive in the England of 1642 and even though, according to his recently widowed
mother, her newborn could easily have fitted into a quart mug, he nevertheless
managed to gain weight. We can only imagine what it would have been like for her at
Woolsthorpe Manor house, going through labour on Christmas Day of that year having
no husband with whom to share the event; Isaac Newton Senior having died just twelve
weeks before his son’s arrival. Eventually Hannah Ayscough remarried, this time to a
churchman; the Reverend Barnabas Smith. Off she went to live with him, leaving the
three-year old Isaac to live with her own mother at the manor; his Grandmother
Margery. Isaac held a firm dislike for this new father figure and seething anger towards
his mother for marrying him in the first place. That said, it must have been quite an
idyllic childhood; roaming around the Manor house at Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth,
especially in the autumn, when fruit began to fall from the apple tree there.
Woolsthorpe Manor; the birthplace of Isaac Newton.
Isaac’s life changed however when he turned twelve and set about his serious
education at Grantham’s King’s School in the room that has now become the school
library, the ancient building which backs on to Church Street. The notion of a regular
bus service between Grantham and Woolsthorpe would have tested even Isaac’s fertile
imagination; such a wild concept being so far off into the future, some two hundred and
fifty years or thereabouts. With such a meaningful distance between home and school it
was decided to arrange a lodging room for him in the town; a chemist’s shop in fact, run
by a man called Clarke. The place chosen was on the site of a building now located on
the opposite side of the road from where Boyes shop operates today. A blue plaque
unveiled by the Grantham Civic Society marks the spot. It’s an intriguing thought that in
most probability, the young Isaac would have run along the High Street to Vine Street
then via Swingegate to school. Whenever next you chance to stroll along that route you
can almost be sure that you are following in the footsteps of the boy who would go on to
become one of the greatest scientists in history. For the boy Isaac however, school life
was not the panacea he might have expected; he would have regularly run the gauntlet
of one particular bully who delighted in picking on the awkward child. In the end Isaac
had had enough and gave the blighter a thorough thrashing, swiftly bringing the bullying
to an abrupt end. More misery came in the shape of having to learn Latin and Ancient
Greek. All this school work only served to get in the way of his hobby for making toys;
windmills and sundials for example, not to mention a penchant for carving his name into
a windowsill. His academic performance plummeted as a result. However, after the
incident with the bully, Isaac decided to beat him in class too, rising ever higher up the
rankings until he reached the top of the class. That done, he went back to his toy-
making inventions only to begin backsliding again. With no more ado, he knuckled down
once more and topped the class yet again. This undulating approach to school appears
to have exemplified a trait in his early character.
An illustration of the oldest part of the King’s School by Richard Coppin, where Isaac Newton was taught as a boy.
Events beyond his control however had taken place in his family with his misfortunate
mother having become widowed a second time. With practicalities in her mind she
decided to terminate his education and see about training her son in the ways of
farming; the manor being at the centre of agricultural life there. It was a decision he
loathed; it’s likely that all he could see stretching before him was a life lacking in
everything he believed was important to him. As it happened, Henry Stokes, master at
the King’s School had seen something exceptional in the young lad and so he worked
on his mother to persuade him to go to back to school.
Eventually his talent as a scholar was noticed by his uncle, the reverend William
Ayscough an alumni of Cambridge University. Through his recommendation the way
was paved for the nineteen year old Isaac to enter into the same university as an
undergraduate in the year 1661, finally graduating with a bachelor’s degree four years
later in 1665. The following year the university was shut down as Bubonic Plague swept
over the land. It must have been a frightening time to live through. Our own experience
of the Covid pandemic gives us a workable benchmark by which to measure the
national fear at that time. Isaac left the highly populated and contagious city to flee back
home to Woolsthorpe, a move that undoubtedly went some way to saving his life. By the
time news came through to Isaac’s rural backwater that great swathes London had
been destroyed by fire, it must have seemed to a largely superstitious population that
the end of the world had arrived.
As people continued to die by the thousand from the pestilence, Isaac, now relatively
safe in the Lincolnshire countryside took to messing about with light. In his bedroom he
rigged up the curtains so that a thin beam of sunlight could pass on to the far wall.
When he interrupted this beam with a glass prism, he was excited to discover a
fabulous range of colours were being projected there instead. Today, we take it for
granted that all the colours of the rainbow are a product of light but in Newton’s time
such an idea was a matter for debate. This simple experiment concluded in his mind
that colour was indeed a result of light. He invented a name for it; he called it a
spectrum. He was even able to use a lens and another prism to revert the spectrum
back into white light again. With such thoughts about colour occupying his thinking, he
came to realise that our perception of colour is dependent on what properties an object
has in its makeup to change white light into something else. It meant that in reality,
objects don’t have an actual colour at all; it was only their composition that changes the
light frequency reaching our eyes. This idea became known as the Newton Theory of
colour.
It was also during this time, as autumn shrouded the countryside in mists, that he was
able to witness the falling of the fruit from an old apple tree in the garden of
Woolsthorpe Manor. Seeing it drop and bounce on the grassy surface beneath the tree
set in his genius mind ideas that would eventually go on to change the understanding of
the mutual attraction of matter, and so, in much the same way that he came up with the
word ‘spectrum’, he coined a name for this attraction as well; the name he made up for
it was ‘gravity’. Of course, people knew that objects fell to earth if they were dropped,
but Newton was the first to accurately assign mathematical principles to such an action.
Without his robust theories, the success of the mission navigation for the moon landings
could not have been made possible.
The site of the famous apple tree; the inspiration for Newton’s theories on what he called gravity.
With his love of playing around with things, the notion of light continued to capture his
febrile imagination, particularly when it came to the subject of telescopes. In those days,
huge astronomical telescopes supported by giant gantries were built from a collection of
lenses set inside very long tubes; known as refracting telescopes. This arrangement
came with a problem however, especially in the very big devices, in that their lenses
would act somewhat like prisms and disperse the light into colours, thereby disturbing
the image the astronomers wanted to study. This is known as chromatic aberration. He
realised that to get round this problem a radically new approach was needed. The big
telescopes in those times had a very big lens in the front to capture as much of the light from planets and stars as possible; called an objective lens. He was convinced that it
was vital to do away with this and capture all the light with a large curved mirror, a
difficult enough task that required the careful grinding of highly reflective speculum
metal. He measured the quality of such polishing with a phenomenon that had greatly
interested him. He noticed that a reflective spherical surface would display interference
rings when placed near a flat reflective surface. If the grinding was to his satisfaction,
the rings would be uniform and concentric. It was a very clever way of making sure that
each mirror had reached a state of virtual perfection. This mirror was then placed at the
bottom of a wide eight-inch tube at the top of which was a tiny flat mirror set at precisely
forty-five degrees that reflected the light at ninety degrees, sending it out through a hole
in the side of the tube where a small eyepiece lens was waiting to focus on the distant
object being viewed. The view of heavenly bodies when this was tried out showed no
signs of chromatic aberration at all; more than that the image was far superior to
anything else that existed at the time. This was not the first time a reflecting telescope
had been considered as a notion; such a thing had initially been proposed by James
Gregory, a Scottish mathematician. Newton was able to make a number of crucial
improvements to Gregory’s thumbnail sketch to invent what is now universally considered the world’s very first reflector, changing forever how astronomers would
choose to explore the heavens. For this reason, it’s still called a ‘Newtonian’. Today, the
Hubble and the James Webb telescope in Earth orbit out in space use his
groundbreaking design today.
Newton’s original groundbreaking invention the reflecting telescope (left) now kept on display by the Royal Society of London. The Hubble space telescope (right) shows just how similar it is to Newton’s invention.
In adulthood Newton went on to achieve a kind of greatness that is hard to overstate.
Upon displaying his reflecting telescope to Royal Society and gaining their admiration
he felt compelled to publish his findings in a volume, called; ‘Opticks’. His work on his
own theory of gravitation and the motion and orbits of planets brought about another
volume; the much vaunted ‘Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematics’; printed
entirely in the language of science at that time; Latin. It was a work which built upon the
laws of orbits which Johannes Kepler had formed.
The ‘Principia’ as it is generally referred to. The 1687 first edition, owned by Newton belongs to
Cambridge University Library, peppered with handwritten notes for what would become the second
edition
Amongst other discoveries in the matter of gravity, he calculated that the acceleration of
the Earth’s gravitational force is thirty-two feet per second squared. Later, in the
twentieth century, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM)
standardised the system of ‘force’. In 1946 they adopted this unit as the force required
to accelerate a one kilogram of mass to one meter per second squared. The name they
chose for this universally agreed unit was called ‘One Newton’.
Isaac Newton also worked on a brand new branch of mathematics called calculus
fighting the rival mathematician Gottfried Leibniz; each claiming priority for their
discoveries. Newton’s theories for this appeared in notes and letters rather than in a
published work. Calculus is the mathematics concerning aspects of rates of change. It
would help calculate for example when a hard billiard ball rolling on a hard, flat surface
would eventually come to a dead stop. In normal calculations, if its velocity were halved
after the first minute of travel and halved every minute thereafter, the ball would never
mathematically stop; the accumulating halves never ever amounting to absolute zero.
Calculus, developed by Newton provided the first equations required to calculate when
the ball’s stop would happen, a mathematical discipline that helps to work out the orbital
velocities of planets and spacecrafts. Newton became the President of the Royal
Society from 1703 to 1727. He also served as Warder of the Royal Mint from 1696 until
1699, becoming the Master of the mint between 1699 and 1727. During this period he
was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. Upon being asked, towards the end of his life,
how he had been able to grasp so much new scientific understandings, his humble
answer gave a nod towards all the other great men who had gone before him, saying; “If
I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Newton, the premature baby who could have fitted into a quart mug, spent the last
years of his life with his niece and her husband at Cranbury Park near Winchester. On
Monday, 31 st March 1727 he took to his bed and slipped quietly away leaving behind
him a legacy most of us could only dream of.
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