Isaok Newton

ISAAC NEWTON

The discoverer of the law of gravitation

The great English scientist Isaac Newton was born in the little village of Woolthorpe, not far from the old university town of Cambridge, on December 25, 1642. His father, a farmer, died before his son_s birth. Little Isaac was left to the care of his mother, uncle and grandmother who sent him to school.

His neighbors watched him making various things and thought he would probably become a well-known clock maker. They tthought thus because he had already made a clock which his neighbors had never heard of before. It worked by water. Isaac also made a sundial. The water clock could tell the hour in the house and the sundial outside.

When he grew older he took a considerable interest in mathematics.

Though Isaac never lost his manual skill his ability as a mathematician and a physicist was the most important in his life. His first physical experiment was carried out iin 1658, when he was sixteen years old. Wishing to find out the strength of the wind during a storm, he jumped against and before the wind and by the length of his jump he could judge the strength of tthe wind. Thus he was searching out the secrets of nature and could find out difficult things in simple ways.

When Isaac was fourteen years old, his mother took him from school to help her on the farm at Woolthorpe, where she lived with three other children – Isaac_s brother and two his sisters. After two years working on the farm his mother sent him again to school to prepare for the University.

On June 5, 1661, Newton entered the University of Cambridge where he studied mathematics. He became famous when he made a number of important contributions to mathematics by the time he was twenty-one.

Then he began studying the theory of gravitation. In 1665, when he saw an aapple fall from a tree he began wondering what force made the apple fall.

Isaac was thinking about the earth_s gravitation when the Great Plague raged in London and he was sent home from Cambridge because of this plague. In that quiet period of almost two years he finished considering his discoveries which had perhaps the most far-reaching effect in the whole history of science: the method of fluxions, decomposition of light and the law of gravitation.

As a young mman at Cambridge Newton had read with great interest the writings of Galileo, he knew the geometry of Descartes, and he had already partly worked out the methods of calculus, which he called the method of fluxions. So then he began to think „of gravity extending to the orb of the moon“, as he wrote, he immediately put this idea to the test of calculation.

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