NEWTON

Sir Isaac Newton was born, according to the Old Style Julian Calendar in use in England until 1751, on Christmas Day, 1642 (or January 4, 1643, according to the New Style Gregorian Calendar) to Hannah Newton, nče Ayscough, who had married Newton's father, in April, 1642. Newton's father died three months before his son's birth. Isaac Newton lived to be nearly eighty five years old.

Newton was born nearly three months following the death of his father. When Newton was three years old, his mother remarried the wealthy, sixty-three year old Reverend Barnabas Smith, the Rector in the nearby village of North Witham. Newton's mother left young Isaac in the care of his maternal grandmother in Grantham. She returned to continue his upbringing at Woolsthorpe Manor in 1653 when her second husband died leaving her considerably well off.His mother intended Newton to become a farmer but his lack of interest and the encouragement of John Stokes, Master of the Grantham grammar school (where Newton carved his initials into all of his desks), as well as that of his uncle, William Ayscough (Rector of Burton Coggles and a Cambridge M.A.) ledi to his eventual admission to his uncle's college, Trinity College, Cambridge, as a sub-sizar on June 5, 1661. As a boy in Grantham, Newton had been "insufferable" to his servants and found it difficult to get along with his fellow grammar school pupils. As a sub-sizar, he bought his own food and paid a reduced fee in return for domestic service, an economy which appears unnecessary in view of his mother's wealth. Seeking sanctuary in solitude, Newton experienced, in the summer of 1662, some sort of religious crisis which led him to record guiltily, in Sheltonian shorthand, his many sins, such as his threat to "burne" his mother and step-father.

Newton's undergraduate studies as a "solitary scholar" in modern natural philosophers such as Descartes lay outside the general curriculum which was still heavily influenced by the Medieval tradition. In mathematics, the young autodidact began Euclid but quickly abandoned it as "trifling" in favor of Schooten's second Latin edition of Descartes's Geometrie. Examined by Isaac Barrow upon his election to a scholarship in Trinity College in 1664, Newton was found deficient in his knowledge of classical geometry but was elected to the scholarship anyway.

Surviving undergraduate notebooks devoted to natural philosophy show that Newton read both Ancients--there are notes in Greek on Aristotle's Organon and Ethics as well as from contemporary Aristotelian commentators such as Daniel Stahl, Eustachius, and Gerard Vossius--and, again idiosyncratically beyond the standard curriculum, Moderns--such as Charleton, Digby, Kepler, Galileo, and Henry More (another native of Grantham whom Newton met, for the first time, in Cambridge)--before taking his B.A. The notes on these modern natural philosophers are organized in a notebook with the title "Questiones Quaedam philosophicae" and reveal, in a general way, his interest in modern natural philosophy.
His election to a scholarship in 1664 removed from him the menial drudgery of serving as a sizar and insured him four years of supported study with the possibility of remaining indefinitely should he win a Fellowship. He commenced B.A. in January, 1665, just as the epidemic of Black Death was starting in London. By the summer of 1665, the epidemic had greatly intensified in population centers throughout England vectored by rats. The loss of life was great. In 1665, parish Bills of Mortality in greater London, which consisted of almost a half million people in 130 parishes, 97 within the ancient/medieval wall of The City, show 68,596 plague deaths between December, 1694, and December, 1695, i.e., approximately 15% of the population.
When the plague closed Cambridge University down on August 7, 1665, all the scholars dispersed to the countryside, many in groups with their tutors to continue their studies. As a newly commenced B.A., Newton, the independent autodidact, returned to his mother's home, Woolsthorpe, to study alone. He stayed there from August, 1665, until March, 1666, when he returned to Trinity College where he remained for three months. He departed again for Woolsthorpe in June, 1666, where he remained until April, 1667, when he finally resumed his full time studies in Cambridge.
Manuel (Portrait, p. 78) follows the hagiographical tradition in attributing to the twenty-three year old scholar, in 1666, breakthrough discoveries in optics, mathematics, and mechanics analogous to other great events in 1666 such as England's naval victory over the Dutch and to London's cauterizing emergence from the Great Fire which were commemorated in Dryden's "Annus Mirabiles: The Year of Wonders, 1666." Newton provides a more adequate chronology: 
          In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the Method of
          approximating series & the Rule for reducing any
          dignity of Binomial into such a series.  The same year
          in May {i.e., while he was still in Cambridge} I found
          the method of Tangents of Gregory & Slusius, & in 
          November {i.e., while he was at Woolsthorpe} had the
          direct method of fluxions & the next year in January
          had the Theory of Colours & in May following {i.e.,
          while he was briefly back in Cambridge} I had entrance  
          into ye inverse method of fluxions.  And the same year
          I began to think of gravity extending to ye orb of the
          Moon & (having found out how to estimate the force with
          wch [a] globe revolving within a sphere presses the
          surface of the sphere) from Keplers rule of the
          periodical times of the Planets being in sesquialterate
          proportion of their distances from the center of their
          Orbs must [be]  reciprocally as the squares of their
          distances from the centers about wch they revolve:  &
          thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon
          in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of
          the earth, & found them answer pretty nearly.  All this
          was in the two plague years of 1665-1666.  For in those
          days I was in the prime age for invention & minded
          Mathematicks & Philosophy more than at any time since.
Westfall appropriately emphasizes the "anni mirabiles" of 1664-6 and the development of Newton's thought: 
          If we focus our attention on the record of his studies,
          the plague and Woolsthorpe fade in importance in
          comparison to the continuity of growth.  1666 was no
          more mirables than 1665 and 1664.  The miracle lay in
          the incredible program of study undertaken in private
          and prosecuted alone by a young man who thereby
          assimilated the achievement of a century and placed
          himself at the forefront of European mathematics and
          science.  (Never at Rest, pp. 143-4.)
Once the basic chronology is clear and a continuity with his previous work is established, the fact remains that Newton had two great years after taking his B.A. The general outline of his work may be discernible in his undergraduate notebooks but, in his work from the plague years, it emerges distinctly. From his remarks above, it is clear that Newton discovered (if he did not prove) the binomial theorem, which enables mathematicians to expand equations with the sum of two functions raised to a power into a series of terms according to a simple rule, and the glimmerings of the calculus (fluxions.) During this period, too, Newton made huge strides in optics. He performed his famous prism experiments which let to his theory of the heterogeneity of white light and, eventually, to the manufacture of the reflecting telescope. If Newton had done nothing else in his life but fabricate the first reflecting telescope, he would still be justly famous. Finally, and most importantly, Newton attempted to visualize, and then to calculate, the moon's rate of fall as if it were proportional to the strength of the same gravitational force which governed the rate of fall of bodies (such as falling apples) on the surface of the earth. He theorized that the moon's rate of fall was inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the earth's center. Galileo, who died the year in which Newton was born, had simply assumed that the forces which govern bodies falling on the earth uniformly applied beyond the sphere of the moon, but Newton intuitively applied the principle of the uniformity of nature to motion equations and found them to answer empirical observations "pretty nearly." John Conduitt, along with William Stukeley, recorded conversations with the elderly Newton in which the aging scholar described the source of this intuition. In Conduitt's version, while Newton: 
          was musing in a garden it came into his thought that 
          the power of gravity (wch brought an apple from the 
          tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain 
          distance from the earth but that this power must 
          extend much further....
According to Stukeley, this intuition "was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood." (Gjertsen, Newton Handbook, p. 29.) The development of the calculus, which finally enabled him to treat the earth's large globe as if it attracted the moon only from the center, Flamsteed's accurate lunar observations, and Picard's more accurate determination of the earth's radius later enabled him to make them answer even more exactly.
In October, 1667, Newton was elected to a Minor Fellowship at Trinity College. The following March, 1668, he was elected to a Major Fellowship. In October, 1669, he succeeded Isaac Barrow as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Also, in 1669, he first described the reflecting telescope in which light does not pass through glass but is reflected off its surface (eliminating both absorption and chromatic refraction.) In December, 1671, he sent a functional reflecting telescope to the Royal Society to which he was elected on January 11, 1672. He immediately began to send them his research essays containing his optical discoveries and an account of his new telescope which were published in the Philosophical Transactions and which made him famous even while they precipitated a protracted and awkward dispute with the irascible optical researcher and natural philosopher, Robert Hooke, who asserted that most of Newton's prism experiments, which demonstrated the heterogeneity of light (if not its corpuscularity, a theory also held at that time by Newton), and the reflecting telescope were already known to Hooke. In 1667, when he succeeded Henry Oldenbourg as Secretary of the Royal Society, Hooke continued to attack Newton by publicly challenging Newton's admitted "fancy," elicited from Newton by Hooke as part of a supposedly private correspondence, about the motion of a body falling to a diurnally rotating earth. Newton wrongly proposed a spiral path. Before the Royal Society, Hooke challenged Newton's privately suggested "fancy" and correctly proposed an "excentrical elliptoid" as the path for such a falling body. Newton's correspondence with Hooke tapered off after 1680 as a consequence of their previous encounters. Hooke attempted to have his "contribution" to the mechanics of the Principia acknowledged when the book was being readied for publication which provoked Newton's absolute fury. After the publication of the Principia (1687), Newton and Hooke ignored one another. Newton submitted no further papers to the Philosophical Transactions during Hooke's tenure as Secretary. The "years of silence" ended with Hooke's death in 1703 when Newton stood for election to the Presidency of the Royal Society obtaining twenty- four votes of the thirty members who cast ballots. In February, 1704, Newton published his Opticks which summarized the conclusions of the optical experiments of the 1660's and papers published in the Philosophical Transactions in the 1670's.
The manuscript record shows that Newton devoted much study, in the late 1660's and the very early years of the following decade, to alchemy. Early in the 1670's, Newton also pursued the Truth in theology. Whether Newton's theological doctrine of Arianism precedes or follows Newton's voluntaristic theory of the dominion of God (I think it more likely that they are logically connected and, hence, emerge together) both emerge early. Faced with the necessity of entering the Anglican priesthood in order to retain his Fellowship at Trinity College, in the early 1670's Newton began an intensive study of theology and of the history of the early church.
Newton's studies in the early 70's rendered him incapable of submitting to ordination in the Church of England which would have required him to subscribe to the 39 Articles (including its by then loathsomely idolatrous Trinitarian creed.) Having read himself into a heretical crisis, Newton expected that, at the least, he would lose income. In January, 1675, Newton wrote Oldenbourg requesting that the Royal Society release him from the payment of dues: 
          For ye time draws near yt I am to part wth my 
          Fellowship, & as my incomes contract, I find it will be 
          convenient that I contract my expenses.
At the eleventh hour, by a somewhat mysterious Royal dispensation exempting in perpetuity holders of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics from the necessity of entering the church, Newton, who had held the Lucasian Chair since 1669, was enabled to remain in the university as a silent anti-Trinitarian heretic.
In 1679, Newton's mother died and he spent much of the year in Woolsthorpe. In November, he began to correspond with Hooke on planetary motion but stopped in January, 1680. In December, 1680, and throughout 1681, he made several observations of comets and corresponded with Flamsteed about the nature of cometary motion with Flamsteed who had been appointed the Astronomer Royal in 1675. Flamsteed rejected the standard view that comets pass through the solar system in a straight line never to return. Flamsteed proposed that the cometary sightings in 1680-1 were in fact all of one comet moving, first, inward toward the sun and, then, receding from it (without going around it) on a curved trajectory caused by magnetic force. Newton, in contrast, more orthodoxly believed that he had seen two comets moving rectilinearly--one inbound and one outbound. Not until September, 1685, as the result of much analysis, did he concede to Flamsteed that the comet of 1680-1 was one comet moving on a parabolic curve. By the time he composed Book III of the Principia, he had utilized the observed data from the comet of 1680-1 to illustrate that acomet, like a planet, moved in a (radically) elliptical orbit because of gravitational force inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the sun's center.
In August, 1684, Halley visited Newton in Cambridge and asked him a question, which had been recently discussed in London by Halley, Wren, and Hooke, about the nature of a planet's movement assuming a force between them which weakened in proportion to the square of its distance. Newton, relying upon his work from the plague years, immediately replied, "in ellipses," thereby precipitating the tumultuous and tortured train of events which culminated in the defining event of the Scientific Revolution, the publication, on July 5, 1687, of the Principia. Halley urged Newton to return to the problem of planetary motion armed with Picard's more accurate figure for the radius of the earth and with the insight that the different parts of a spherical body generally exerted attractive force as if it all originated from the sphere's center. Newton revisited his earlier calculations, which had answered observed data in the 1660's "pretty nearly," with great success. Newton showed how the laws of projectile motion and the law of universal gravitation explained all the observed motion of planets, satellites, comets, or apples. The book catapulted Newton into the first rank of scientists and its genuine greatness is the source of the hagiographical tradition of Newton as the greatest hero of the Scientific Revolution in general and English science in particular and has caused generations of poets to celebrate Newton's genius. To choose one example, Byron, in Don Juan (Canto X) writes of Newton: 
          And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,
          Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple.
On November 5, 1688, William of Orange landed in Torbay. On December 23, 1688, King James II abdicated the English throne and, having sent his Queen and infant son ahead, landed at a small fishing village near Calais on Christmas Day, 1688. The Interregnum lasted until February 12, 1689, when Lord Halifax, on behalf of the Lords and Commons who were able to meet in London, and reinforced by the magistracy of London, offered the crown to William and Mary. The forty-six year old Newton was elected by the Senate of Cambridge University to represent the University in Parliament on January 15, 1689, in part because of his protracted opposition two years previously to the admission of Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, to the University without requiring him to take the required oath of allegiance to the Church of England. In May, 1687, Newton and other university officials had argued bravely and successfully against the opening of Cambridge to Catholics before Judge Jeffreys, King James' infamous political enforcer. Newton did not stand for re-election to the Parliament of 1690 but ran, again successfully, for one of the two University seats late in 1701. Again, he did not stand for re-election to the next Parliament. He ran a final time in 1705 at the urging of his political patron Charles Montague, who had become the Earl of Halifax in 1700. According to one tradition, his knighthood from Queen Anne on April 16, 1705, was meant to promote his candidacy and was actively promoted by Halifax. (Prior to receiving his knighthood, Newton submitted his genealogy to the College of Heralds. Several copies in his own hand exist in various libraries. In the copy in Jerusalem, he placed his parent's marriage in 1639 despite the documentary records which clearly show that his parents married in 1642, seven months prior to his birth.) Newton, aged sixty three, lost the election for one of the University's two parliamentary seats decisively in 1705.
Around September, 1693, Newton suffered some sort of nervous breakdown whose cause, nature, and duration are not known but which is readily evidenced in his correspondence. In September, Newton wrote to Samuel Pepys and attempted to "withdraw" from Pepys' "acquaintance." He also wrote to John Locke whom he accused of being a "Hobbist" and of attempting "to embroil" Newton "with woemen." The affair seems to have been short-lived. By October he had mended his fences with both men. To Locke he explained, on October 15, that: 
          The last winter by sleeping too often by my fire I got 
          an ill habit of sleeping and a distemper wch this 
          summer has been epidemical put me further out of order, 
          so that when I wrote to you I had not slept an hour a 
          night for a fortnight together and for 5 nights 
          together not a wink.
Westfall has debunked recent speculations that Newton's mental "distemper" was caused by his prolonged exposure to mercury vapors and compounds in his chemical experiments noting that other symptoms commonly associated with mercury poisoning, such as tremors, loss of teeth, and irreversibility, are absent in Newton's case. Westfall also has challenged Biot's innovation according to which this episode marks the end of Newton's career as a creative natural philosopher and his turn to theological researches. Neither fancy is true although Westfall acknowledges that Newton "devoted the remaining thirty-four years of his life to reworking the results of earlier endeavours." (Never at Rest, pp. 537-40.)
In 1696, Newton left Cambridge for London when his former pupil, close friend, and political patron, Charles Montague, then Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, secured his appointment as Warden of the Mint. Montague left office in 1699 but, despite the loss of his ministerial patron, Newton succeeded Thomas Neale as the Master of the Mint in February, 1700, following Neale's death. Newton was quite active as Master of the Mint and oversaw several reforms of the coinage. In January, 1701, William Whiston began to lecture in Cambridge as Newton's deputy "with the full profits" of Newton's chair. When Newton finally resigned the Lucasian Chair later that year, he made sure that Whiston would be his successor by recommending him to the heads of all the colleges in Cambridge.
Newton moved to London in 1696 but the capitol became his true intellectual center on November 30, 1703, when he was elected President of the Royal Society, Hooke having died the preceding March. Manuel strikingly describes Newton in the last twenty four years of his life as "the autocrat of science." (Portrait, pp. 264-91.)
As President of the Royal Society between 1703 and his death in 1727, Newton oversaw many matters including the publication of the first English edition of his Opticks (1704) and the first Latin edition, with seven addition queries (1706.) He also oversaw the second edition of the Principia (1713) with its famous "General Scholium" and his revisions to the section on the "Rules of Reasoning."
On March 6, 1712, a committee was set up by the Royal Society to examine Leibniz's claim (in a letter read before the Society, with Newton presiding as President, on March 22, 1711) to have been the first to discover the calculus. On April 24, 1712, the committee's report, entitled Commercium epistolicum, was read to the Royal Society. It was published in January, 1713. The report unequivocally upheld Newton's claim to priority, offered documentary evidence in the form of work dating back to the 1660's, and escalated what had been merely a "priority" dispute by suggesting that Leibniz had been apprised of Newton's discovery of the "Method of Fluxions" by correspondence prior to Leibniz's so-called "discovery" of his similar "Differential Method." Though distancing himself publicly from this dispute by setting up an official committee of the Royal Society (composed of Newton's own supporters) to examine the facts of the case, Newton drafted the bulk of this committee's official report. Leibniz died in November 1716, with Newton having orchestrated the definitive opinion of his era, if not for ours when more impartial scholars have established that the two men discovered the calculus independently and nearly contemporaneously.
As President of the Royal Society, Newton continued to have a strained relationship with John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, with whom Newton quarreled regarding the publication of Flamsteed's carefully maintained record of star observations. In 1710, Newton, as President of the Royal Society, had himself appointed as a "constant Visitor" to Flamsteed's Royal Observatory in Greenwich, in effect Flamsteed's supervisor. He then appropriated Flamsteed's celestial observations and turned them over to Halley for publication. The rancorous tone of their relationship is preserved in Flamsteed's record of a meeting with Sir Isaac, Sir Hans Sloane (Newton's successor as President of the Royal Society), and Richard Mead in October, 1711. Flamsteed complained that his catalog, "which he had spent 35 yeares in composeing," had been printed by Halley against his wishes and without his knowledge thereby robbing him of the fruit of his long labors. Flamsteed writes that: 
          at this he [Newton] fired & cald me all the ill names 
          Puppy &c. that he could think of. All I returnd was I 
          put him in mind of his passion desired him to govern it 
          & keep his temper.  this made him rage worse, & he told 
          me how much I had receaved from ye Govermt in 36 yeares 
          I had served.  I asked what he had done for ye 500lb 
          per Annum yt he had receaved ever since he setled in 
          London.  this made him calmer but finding him goeing to 
          burst out againe I onely told him:  my Catalogue half
          finished was delivered into his hands on his own 
          request sealed up.  he could not deny it but said Dr 
          Arbuthnot had procured ye Queens order for opening it.  
          This I am persuaded was false, or it was got after it 
          had been opened.  I sayd nothing to him in return but 
          with a little more spirit then I had hitherto shewd 
          told them, that God (who was seldom spoke of with due 
          Reverence in that Meeting) had hitherto prospered all
          my labours & I doubted not would do so to an happy 
          conclusion, took my leave & left them.
Westfall judges the whole "dismal chronicle" to reveal Newton's "closet tyranny." (Never at Rest, p. 692.) There are other examples. While they were having coffee with some friends at Child's Coffee House in St. Paul's Churchyard in 1720, Halley asked Whiston, who had been ejected from the Lucasian Chair in 1710 for openly espousing "heretical" anti-trinitarian theology, why Whiston was not a member of the Royal Society. Whiston replied that: 
          they durst not choose an Heretick.  Upon which Dr. 
          Halley said to Sir Hans Sloane, that if he would 
          propose me, he would second it:  which was done
          accordingly....  When Sir Isaac Newton, the president 
          heard this, he was greatly concern'd; and, by what I 
          then learn'd, closeted some of the members, in order to 
          get clear of me; and told them, that if I was chosen a 
          member, he would not be president.  Where upon, by a 
          pretence of a deficiency in the form of proceeding, the 
          proposal was dropped....if the reader desires to know
          the reason of Sir Isaac Newton's unwillingness to have 
          me a member, he must take notice, that as his making me 
          first his deputy, and giving me the full profits of the 
          place, brought me to be a candidate, as his 
          recommendation of me to the heads of the colleges in 
          Cambridge, made me his successor; so did I enjoy a 
          large portion of his favour for twenty years together.  
          But he then perceiving that I could not do as his other 
          darling friends did, that is, learn of him, without 
          contradicting him, he could not, in his old age, bear 
          such contradiction; and so he was afraid of me the last 
          thirteen years of his life.... He was of the most 
          fearful, cautious, and suspicious temper, that I ever
          knew.  (Cited in James E. Force, William Whiston:  
          Honest Newtonian [1985], pp. 23-4.)
On May 19, Lord Halifax (Charles Montague), Newton's political patron, died. In 1717, Catherine Barton, Newton's niece and, according to Voltaire, Halifax's mistress, married John Conduitt for whom Newton secured an appointment at the Mint and who succeeded Newton as Master in 1727 One man named Westfall  recounts Voltaire's story of his London visit in the 1720's (first published by Voltaire in 1757) in which Voltaire writes: 
          I thought in my youth that Newton made his fortune by 
          his merit.  I supposed that the Court and the City of 
          London named him Master of the Mint by acclamation.  No 
          such thing.  Isaac Newton has a very charming niece,
          Madame Conduitt, who made a conquest of the minister 
          Halifax.  Fluxions and gravitation would have been of 
          no use without a pretty niece.
Westfall examines the tangled skein of evidence surrounding this allegation and concludes that it seems to be dubious but that we lack the necessary data to pass final judgement. (Never at Rest, p. 596.)
In 1717, the second English edition of the Opticks, with eight new queries, was published; the second Latin edition appeared in 1719, the year of Flamsteed's death. A third English edition of the Opticks was published in 1721. In 1726, a third edition of the Principia was published. In 1728, after Newton's death in 1727, all the following works appeared: The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended; the Short Chronicle; The System of the World; Optical Lectures; and Universal Arithmetic, De mundi systemate.
In the Memorandum of John Conduitt's conversation with Newton dated March 7, 1725, Conduitt records that Newton, after considering various physical means to "recruit" new quantities of motion into the closed, and degrading, dynamical system of the world, hinted that he had arrived at the view that comets were generally provident mechanisms of God which achieved this necessary end. At the conclusion to the Conduitt Memorandum, Conduitt states that he brought up with Newton the second edition of the Principia where, in 1713, Newton had first discussed the possibility of the replenishment of fixed stars by the impact of a comet. Conduitt writes that he told Newton that: 
          ...I [Conduitt] thought he [Newton] owned there what 
          wee had been talking about--viz. that the Comet would 
          drop into the sun, & that fixed stars were recruited & 
          replenished by Comets when they dropt in to them, &
          consequently the sun would be recruited too & asked 
          him, why he would not own as freely what he thought of 
          the Sun as well as what he thought of the fixed stars--
          he said that concerned us more, & laughing added he had 
          said enough for people to know his meaning....
Newton died early in the morning on March 20, 1727, at the age of eighty four. To the end, he refused, privately in the presence only of the Conduitts, to receive the sacraments of the Church of England.                            
 
 

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