A Brief History of Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree
Growing in a courtyard garden in the Physics Department here in the University of York we have a grafted cutting from an ancient apple tree which still survives in Newton’s garden at Woolsthorpe Manor, his birthplace in Lincolnshire. This is the tree from which it is reputed that Newton saw an apple fall in the late summer of 1666 and which caused him to speculate upon the nature of gravitation. Our tree was given to us by Kew Gardens in 1976.
The account of Isaac Newton’s discovering the principle of universal gravitation by observing the fall of an apple is very well known and usually dismissed as apocryphal. However little can be further from the truth for Newton gave this account of his discovery to several acquaintances which include Voltaire (French philosopher and essayist), John Conduitt (his assistant at the Royal Mint) Catherine Barton (his niece) William Stewkeley (friend and antiquarian), Christopher Dawson (a student at Cambridge) amongst others. The first written account appears in notes on Newton’s life collected by John Conduitt in 1726 the year of Newton’s death. It states that;
he first thought of his system of gravitation which he hit upon by observing an apple fall from a tree
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The incident occurring in the late summer of 1666.
In other accounts it is stated that Newton was sitting in his garden at Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham in Lincolnshire when the incident occurred.
The first account of their being a specific tree in his garden from which Newton saw the apple fall appears in the book ‘A History of the Town and Soak of Grantham’ by Edmund Turnor FRS (1806) in which there appears the footnote on p160:
The tree is still remaining and is showed to strangers.
His brother the, Rev. Charles Turnor, drew the accompanying picture of the tree in 1820 showing its position with respect to the manor house.
Although Newton did not specify from which tree he observed the apple fall it turned out that it was the only apple tree growing in his garden and thus it selected itself.
This was first mentioned by Sir David Brewster when he visited the house in 1830, the account of which was given by George Forbes (Professor of Physics University of Glasgow)
The tree had been cared for since the 1750’s by generations of the Woolerton family, who were tenant farmers who lived in the house from 1733 to 1947. Despite all their efforts to prop the aged tree up, it blew down in a storm in 1816. Some branches were removed but the major portion of the tree was left and re-rooted. The surprising fact is that this tree is still growing at Woolsthorpe Manor today and now must be over 350 years old.
Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree is now on its third set of roots but still provides a good crop of apples each summer. Its appearance in 1998 is shown in the above photograph.
Our Newton Apple Tree Pedigree:
The apple is the extremely rare variety ‘Flower of Kent’ which was first mentioned in the fifteenth century. The tree we have growing here in The Physics Department was provided for us by Kew Gardens in 1976. It came from the Cambridge Botanical Gardens who obtained it from the Fruit Research Station at East Malling in Kent. They obtained their stock from a tree at Belton Park in Lincolnshire in the 1930’s which had been propagated there from Newton’s garden at Woolsthorpe Manor by the Rev Charles Turnor about the year 1820.
Dr Richard Keesing, Department of Physics, University of York
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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: 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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SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S APPLE-TREE
from Historic Ninepins: A Book of Curiosities (1869)
by John Timbs
[p.315] About the life of Newton what a number of misstatements and fallacies cling to this day, notwithstanding the vigilance of his biographers. Some of these are but idle tales of wonder; others are prompted by baser motives. The tree which, by the falling of its fruit, suggested to Newton the idea of Gravity, is of paramount interest. It appears that, in the autumn of 1665, Newton left his college at Cambridge for his paternal home at Woolsthorpe. “When sitting alone in the garden,” says Sir David Brewster, “and speculating on the power of Gravity, it occurred to him, that as the same power by which the apple fell to the ground was not sensibly diminished at the greatest distance from the centre of the earth to which we can reach, neither at the summits of the loftiest spires, nor on the tops of the highest mountains, it might extend to the moon and retain her in her orbit, in the same manner as it bends into a curve a stone or a cannon-ball when projected in a straight line from the surface of the earth.” (Life of Newton, vol. i. p. 26.) Sir David Brewster notes, that neither Pemberton nor Whiston, who received from Newton himself his first ideas of gravity, records this story of the falling apple. It was mentioned, however, to Voltaire by Catherine Barton, Newton’s niece; and to Mr. Green by Sir Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society. Sir David Brewster saw the reputed apple-tree in 1814, and brought away a portion of one of its roots.
Professor de Morgan, however, questions whether the fruit was an apple, and maintains that the anecdote rests upon very slight authority. The story of the dog Diamond, who threw down a lighted candle, which consumed some papers, the almost finished labour of some years, is given by M. Biot as a true story; and he characterizes the accident as having deprived the sciences for ever of the fruit of so much of Newton’s labours. Dr. Newton* remarks, that Sir Isaac never had an communion with dogs or cats; and Sir David Brewster adds, that the view which M. Biot has taken of the idle story of the dog Diamond, charged with fire-raising among Newton’s manuscripts, and of the influence of this accident upon the mind of their author, is utterly [p.316] incomprehensible. The fiction, however, was turned to account in giving colour to M. Biot’s misrepresentation.
Whatever may have been the misstatements respecting Newton, they are exceeded in enormity by the attempt made in 1867, by M. Chasles, the French mathematician, on the authority of a series of documents purporting to be letters written by Newton and some of his most famous contemporaries; and including in particular a correspondence which is supposed to have passed between him and Pascal, the celebrated French mathematician and divine. Their effect is to show that Newton was indebted to that illustrious man, and other French philosophers, for many of the ideas on which his fame depends. It is not denied, as we understand, that Newton was the first to publish, as well as to develope, that marvellous induction which is the foundation of half our knowledge about the universe. What is asserted is that he was led to it under the inspiration of Pascal, whose mathematical genius, as is well known, was equal to his theological learning. It is this assertion which crumbles to pieces on the first touch of the facts adduced. No explanation was given by M. Chasles, of the source whence the papers were derived. They were compared with Newton’s letters in the possession of the Royal Society, at Burlington House, and their falsity was conclusive. Next, in a volume of extracts, compiled by a certain Pierre Desmaiseaux, three out of the five alleged specimens of Newton’s handwriting were verbatim copies of isolated passages occurring in the French translation of three letters originally written by Newton in English. In other words, Newton, who could not even read French without a dictionary, had been made by the fabricator to repeat in French to one correspondent, word for word, the identical expressions which he really used elsewhere in writing to another correspondent in English.
In the autumn of 1867, Sir David Brewster read to the British Association, the following observations, tending to show that this was a gigantic fraud— the greatest ever attempted in the world as connected with science and literature. ¶
“1. The correspondence was founded on the assumption that Newton was a precocious genius, having written on the infinitesimal calculus, &c., at the age of eleven, whereas he was then at school, and knew nothing of mathematics, occupying himself only with water-wheels and other boyish amusements. ¶
2. There is no evidence that Pascal and Newton had any correspondence. Having examined the whole of Newton’s papers in the possession of the Earl of Portsmouth, he never found any letter or paper in which Pascal was mentioned. ¶
3. The letters from Hannah Ayscough, Newton’s mother, bear his signature, although she was a married woman, and could have signed Hannah Smith. ¶
4. The letters of Pascal have been found by M. Fauquere to be another hand, and the signature not that of Pascal. ¶
5. The letters of Newton are not in his hand, and some of them bear a signature which he never used. One of them is signed ‘Newton,’ as if he had been a member of the Peerage, and many of them ‘J. Newton,’ a sign which he never used. ¶
6. An experiment with coffee is mentioned in one of the letters of Pascal, whereas coffee was at that time unknown in France. ¶
7. All Newton’s letters are in French, a language in which [p.317] he never wrote. All his letters to the celebrated French mathematician, Vangnon, are in Latin, and Newton himself has stated that he could not read French Without a dictionary. ¶
8. The style and sentiments in Newton’s letters are such as he never could have used. He expresses ‘eternal’ gratitude to Pascal, a word which no Englishman ever uses. ¶
9. According to the correspondence, M. Desmaiseaux got access to Newton’s papers after his death, and carried off a great many papers. Now, it is certain that Mr. Conduitt, Newton’s nephew, arranged and examined all Newton’s papers, in order to obtain materials for a life of him, and having failed to find a competent person to write, he undertook it himself, and obtained by persons then alive all the information that existed respecting Newton’s early life and studies. There could be no doubt, therefore, that the letters of Newton and Pascal were forgeries calculated and intended to transfer to Pascal the glory of the discovery of the law of gravitation which was due to Newton.” ¶
One hundred and thirty years had elapsed since the death of the great Newton, when (in 1858) the men of Lincolnshire raised in Grantham, the birthplace of their illustrious townsman, a statue to his memory. We grow impatient to place the effigies of a great soldier upon some lofty column, or of a showy political leader upon some ornate pedestal; but we suffer generation after generation to pass away ere we mark the place which gave birth to our most profound interpreter of the book of nature. “Happy,” says an eloquent contemporary, “not only in his surpassing genius, but in the time of his birth, he conquered a universe where others may be justly proud to win a province. For all time he must in some sense remain thus alone. An equal or even a brighter genius, should such arise in the course of time, can never cast his greatness into shade; for never again can so sublime a problem be presented to the intellect of man as the great secret of the material universe which Newton was born to solve.” Frankly as the pre-eminence of the English discoverer was admitted by men like La Grange, who followed in his track, there is a tinge of noble envy in the saying which Lord Brougham quotes from the French philosopher. “ Newton,” said La Grange, “was not only the greatest but the most fortunate genius that ever existed; because there can only once be found a system of the universe to be established.” His good fortune, indeed, secures him from all future rivalry to the end of time, as amply as his matchless insight gave him the supremacy over all the explorers of nature who had lived before him.
Halley writes of Newton’s Principia: “It may be justly said that so many and so valuable philosophical truths as are herein discovered and put past dispute, were never yet owing to the capacity and industry of any one man.” “The importance and generality of the discoveries,” says Laplace, “and the immense number of original and profound views, which have been the germ of the most brilliant theories of the philosophers of this (18th) century, and all presented with much elegance, will insure to the work on the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy a pre-eminence above all the other productions of human genius.”
[* Dr. Humphrey Newton of Grantham, who was Isaac Newton’s assistant and amanuensis. —Webmaster]
Carl Sagan: In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) . (more by Sagan)
Albert Einstein: I used to wonder how it comes about that the electron is negative. Negative-positive—these are perfectly symmetric in physics. There is no reason whatever to prefer one to the other. Then why is the electron negative? I thought about this for a long time and at last all I could think was “It won the fight!” . (more by Einstein)
Richard Feynman: It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can’t go on without the facts . if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly. . (more by Feynman)
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