Newton’s apple: The real story
We’ve all heard the story. A young Isaac Newton is sitting beneath an apple tree contemplating the mysterious universe. Suddenly – boink! -an apple hits him on the head. “Aha!” he shouts, or perhaps, “Eureka!” In a flash he understands that the very same force that brought the apple crashing toward the ground also keeps the moon falling toward the Earth and the Earth falling toward the sun: gravity.
Or something like that. The apocryphal story is one of the most famous in the history of science and now you can see for yourself what Newton actually said. Squirreled away in the archives of London’s Royal Society was a manuscript containing the truth about the apple.
It is the manuscript for what would become a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Lifewritten by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton’s first biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:
“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees…he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…”
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The Royal Society has made the manuscript available today for the first time in a fully interactive digital form on their website at royalsociety.org/turning-the-pages. The digital release is occurring on the same day as the publication of Seeing Further (HarperPress, £25), an illustrated history of the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson, which marks the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary this year.
So it turns out the apple story is true – for the most part. The apple may not have hit Newton in the head, but I’ll still picture it that way. Meanwhile, three and a half centuries and an Albert Einstein later, physicists still don’t really understand gravity. We’re gonna need a bigger apple.
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Legend has it that a young Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when he was bonked on the head by a falling piece of fruit, a 17th-century “aha moment” that prompted him to suddenly come up with his law of gravity. In reality, things didn’t go down quite like that. Newton, the son of a farmer, was born in 1642 near Grantham, England, and entered Cambridge University in 1661. Four years later, following an outbreak of the bubonic plague, the school temporarily closed, forcing Newton to move back to his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor. It was during this period at Woolsthorpe (Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667) that he was in the orchard there and witnessed an apple drop from a tree. There’s no evidence to suggest the fruit actually landed on his head, but Newton’s observation caused him to ponder why apples always fall straight to the ground (rather than sideways or upward) and helped inspired him to eventually develop his law of universal gravitation. In 1687, Newton first published this principle, which states that every body in the universe is attracted to every other body with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, in his landmark work the “Principia,” which also features his three laws of motion.
In 1726, Newton shared the apple anecdote with William Stukeley, who included it in a biography, “Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life,” published in 1752. According to Stukeley, “After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some apple trees… he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind…. occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.”
The esteemed mathematician and physicist died in 1727 and was buried at Westminster Abbey. His famous apple tree continues to grow at Woolsthorpe Manor.
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Newton’s Apple Tree in Lincolnshire
The story of Sir Isaac Newton and the falling apple is one of the most famous anecdotes in science. The young Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree in his garden when a fruit fell on his head, and in a sudden stroke of brilliant insight, he came up with the theory of gravity. The story is most likely embellished—at least the part where the apple hits Newton’s head—but there is also some truth to it.
The first written account of the apple falling incident appears on the notes of John Conduitt, who was Newton’s assistant at the Royal Mint and husband to Newton’s niece. In 1726, the year of Newton’s death, John Conduitt described the event:
In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in Lincolnshire. Whilst he was pensively meandering in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from a tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but that this power must extend much further than was usually thought. Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself & if so, that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition.
The tree from which the famous apple is said to have fallen, in the grounds of Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, in Lincolnshire, England. Photo credit: Dun.can/Flickr
Newton appears to have himself perpetuated the apple tree story when he spoke about his discovery to several acquaintances. In another memoir on Newton’s life, published in 1752, writer William Stukeley wrote about a conversation he had with Newton:
We went into the garden, and drank thea under the shade of some apple trees, only he, and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. «Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,» thought he to himself: occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.
«Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the earths centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. And the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center? If matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.»
The year when this incident is said to have occurred, Newton was staying at Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham in Lincolnshire. Woolsthorpe Manor is the birthplace and was the family home of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton returned here in 1666 when Cambridge University closed due to the plague, and here he performed many of his most famous experiments, most notably his work on light and optics.
Although Newton did not specify exactly where he observed the apple fall, there was one apple tree growing in the Manor’s garden and naturally, it was assumed that this was the famed tree.
The tree has been taken care of since the 1750’s by generations of the Woolerton family. In 1816, a storm blew the tree down, but major portion of the tree was left and it re-rooted. The tree still remains and is taken care of by the National Trust.
Grafts from Newton’s apple tree has been distributed and cultivated across the United Kingdom and beyond. There is one specimen—a descendent of the original tree—growing in the garden in the Physics Department in the University of York. Another grows outside the main gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, below the room Newton lived in when he studied there. You can also find one growing at the Bariloche Institute, in Bariloche, Argentina.
Woolsthorpe Manor. Photo credit: Mike Fay/Flickr
A descendant of Newton’s apple tree at Trinity College, Cambridge. Photo credit: Sam Rae/Flickr
A plaque under a descendant of Newton’s apple tree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. Photo credit: Mathieu Thouvenin/Flickr
A descendant of Newton’s apple tree at Goobang, New South Wales, Australia. Photo credit: Corrie Barklimore/Flickr
A descendant of Newton’s apple tree in Teddington, London, England. Photo credit: John Blower/Flickr
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How Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree Spread Across the World
Clones and descendants of the famed tree grow on 6 continents.
NIST Newton Apple Tree
Woolsthorpe Manor
Lincolnshire
At Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, England, the ancestral home of Sir Isaac Newton, sketches drawn by the revolutionary physicist, mathematician, and astronomer still adorn the house’s walls. Outside, a gnarled apple tree has been growing for centuries.
A genetically identical tree is growing at Newton’s alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge. Several more grow at Parkes Observatory in Australia, and another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Descendants and clones of the Woolsthorpe Manor tree dot college campuses and research centers on every continent, except Antarctica. I myself took long college naps under one such tree at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Newton’s Apple Tree,” the plaque read, like many others across the globe. “Grown From An Apple From The Estate of Sir Isaac Newton, Lincolnshire, England.”
Newton’s apple tree holds a special place in the annals of science. In 1665, the just-graduated Newton fled to his family home to avoid a plague outbreak. After observing an apple fall from the then-young tree, Newton considered what force could pull objects in a straight line towards the earth. It was the first step towards his theory of gravity, which he would publish in 1687.
Newton was only 23 when he saw the apple fall. ClassicStock / Alamy Stock Photo
The story is widely believed to be false, like the myth of a child George Washington chopping down a cherry tree with a little axe. But Newton himself said his theory arose from seeing a falling apple while he stayed at Woolsthorpe. In physicist R.G. Keesing’s exhaustive history of Newton’s apple tree, he records sources (from the writer Voltaire to Newton’s niece) relating the tale of the apple tree. Newton may have embellished his story. But due to multiple sources of the tale, Keesing writes, there’s little doubt that there’s a seed of truth to it.
Which tree exactly inspired the theory of gravity? Keesing examined the apple tree still standing in the garden at Woolsthorpe Manor. Regular sketches of Woolsthorpe Manor after Newton’s death continuously show an apple tree in the same spot as the current tree. With no other aged apple trees recorded as growing in the garden, before or after Newton, the Woolsthorpe Manor tree is now widely considered “the one.”
The tree has led a long, interesting life. Likely planted around 1650, it partially collapsed after a storm in 1816. While it re-rooted itself, Newton’s fame and that of his apple tree were increasingly mythologized. Part of the fallen tree was made into a chair, and chunks of the wood were taken as souvenirs. Living wood was also taken and propagated elsewhere. One shoot was taken to nearby Belton Park in 1820. The Fruit Research Station in East Malling took part of that tree in the 1930s. From there, the tree spread across the world, as universities, observatories, particle accelerators, botanical gardens, and research centers clamored for a Newton tree of their own.
The most likely “Gravity Tree” is still going strong. duncanh1/(CC BY 2.0)
These institutions receive a piece of history—not delicious fruit. Whether the trees are clones made by grafting or descendants grown from seeds, they are Flower of Kent trees, a variety that is rare today. Their fruit is green-red and big, but the texture is mealy and the flavor undistinguished. Mostly, it was used for cooking.
Getting a Newton tree can be hard. East Malling still is the main source, but getting trees over borders can be difficult. Fears about invasive pests and plant diseases can hold up plant deliveries for inspections or even quarantine. Worse, Newton trees are sometimes proven to be inauthentic. In 2016, the National Research Council in Canada discovered that their prized Newton trees were neither original nor Flower of Kent. Uncovering the truth felt like “killing Bambi’s mother,” joked the NRC’s secretary-general Dick Bourgeois-Doyle. York University in Toronto quickly offered the council offspring of their Newton trees, which are growing there today.
The greatest apple-tree sagas, though, come from people trying to grow a tree far from Newton’s temperate, shady garden. One hopeful grower was the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India. Statues of famous thinkers—Albert Einstein, Galileo, and Aryabhata, a 6th-century Indian mathematician and astronomer—decorate an inner courtyard of the campus. A statue of Newton is there too, beneath a banyan tree. According to IUCAA director Somak Raychaudhury, the visual incongruence of Newton beneath a banyan rather than an apple tree spurred a past director to act.
Starting in 1994, then-director Jayant V. Narlikar received Woolsthorpe tree descendants at the Centre. But a combination of long post office delays and the Pune heat meant successive trees withered over and over. Finally, in 1997, they rooted two apple trees in the courtyard. Raychaudhury remembers the enthusiasm. “Everybody thought that it would be a wonderful thing” to grow the trees, he says, especially since so much astronomy is rooted in Newton’s thinking. Like the tale of Adam and Eve, he says, “the origin of physics also has an apple.”
A fruiting Flower of Kent at the IUCAA in Pune, India, before it died. Courtesy of the IUCAA Library Collection
The trees lived like kings for a while. Raychaudhury’s wife Aleika McAllister, who is from Vermont (“she grew up with apple trees”) volunteered to maintain them, and the Centre built canopies to shade them from the sun. One tree even bore fruit, which the academics sliced up and shared. Raychaudhury found the moment meaningful and symbolic, even though he thinks the apple story is “probably apocryphal.”
IUCAA’s Newton trees lived for a decade. But then they withered again. Raychaudhury believes Pune’s increasing heat, due to the city’s booming population and pollution, was the culprit. “Today, it was 105 degrees,” he says. “Twenty years ago, when this was being done, it wasn’t this hot.”
Yet Raychaudhury wants to grow the apple trees again. The IUCAA is currently experimenting with making Flower of Kent hardier, one idea being to graft a Newton tree shoot onto Indian apple trees. It’s almost a trend: Institutions that have lost their Newton trees, whether due to drought or disease, usually plant new ones in even greater numbers. Some universities and research centers now have tiny groves of Newton trees. Raychaudhury thinks that with the increased heat, that might not be possible in Pune. Yet, due to the tree’s symbolic meaning, they’re going to try. Countless others who work in fields touched by Newton—and live in places far from England—feel the same. Mathematics and physics are often seen as dry. But the worldwide love of Newton’s apple tree is almost romantic.
It’s ironic that a fruit tree is so influential to Newton’s legacy, since one reason why Newton received a higher education was that his mother thought he would be hopeless as a farmer. Instead, he pioneered optics and calculus. He set down the three laws of motion, essential for calculating the movement of earth and of the planets. He invented the reflecting telescope, and his work paved the way for astronomers today. Perhaps it’s fitting that seeds from Newton’s tree even visited the International Space Station in 2016, making it one of history’s most well-traveled trees.
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