By Nyang’au Araka

One of the top scientists that even non-scientists have heard of is Isaac Newton.

Born in 1643, Newton was a brilliant architect of the universe’s most fundamental laws, a man whose curiosity and intellect rewrote the rules of science.

The most famous discoveries of the philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, was the mysteries of motion and gravity, which brought an understanding how the cosmos operates with elegant precision.

Today, we look at some things that are not so much known about Newton, yet they in a way inspired his discoveries:

1. His unhappy childhood helped shape his secretive personality.

He was born prematurely and his father had died.

When Newton was three, his mother wed a wealthy clergyman, Barnabas Smith, who didn’t want a stepson.

Newton’s mother went to live with her new husband in another village, leaving behind her young son in the care of his grandparents.

The experience of being abandoned by his mother scarred Newton and likely played a role in shaping his solitary, untrusting nature.  

2. Newton’s mother wanted him to be a farmer.

At age 12, Newton was enrolled in a school in Grantham, where he boarded at the home of the local apothecary because the daily walk from Woolsthorpe Manor was too long.

At age 15 or 16, he was ordered to quit school by his mother (then widowed for a second time) and return to Woolsthorpe Manor to become a farmer.

The teen was uninterested in the job and fared poorly at it.

Eventually, Newton’s mother was persuaded by her son’s former headmaster in Grantham (where, incidentally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was born in 1925) to allow him to return to school.  

3. The Black Death inadvertently set the stage for one of his most famous insights.

 While sitting in the garden there one day, he saw an apple fall from a tree, providing him with the inspiration to eventually formulate his law of universal gravitation.  

In 2010, a NASA astronaut carried a piece of the ancient apple tree aboard the space shuttle Atlantis for a mission to the International Space Station.

Today, the original apple tree continues to grow at Woolsthorpe Manor.

4. As a professor at Cambridge, his lectures were poorly attended.

In 1669, Newton, then 26, was appointed the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, one of the world’s oldest universities, whose origins date to 1209.

Although he remained at Cambridge for nearly 30 years, Newton showed little interest in teaching or in his students, and his lectures were sparsely attended; frequently, no one showed up at all.

Newton’s attention was centered on his own research.

5. Newton ran the Royal Mint and had forgers executed.

In 1696, Newton was named to the job of warden of the Royal Mint, which was responsible for producing England’s currency.

He left Cambridge, his long-time home, and moved to his nation’s capital city, where the mint was located in the Tower of London.

He also was focused on investigating counterfeiters, and as a result became acquainted with the city’s seedy underbelly as he personally tracked down and interviewed suspected criminals, receiving death threats along the way.

A number of forgers he went after were sent to the gallows.

6. He had a serious interest in alchemy.

Newton spent much of his adult life pursuing another interest, alchemy, whose goals included finding the philosopher’s stone, a substance that allegedly could turn ordinary metals like lead and iron into gold.

He was secretive about his alchemical experiments and recorded some of his research in code.

Among his other research projects, Newton analyzed the Bible in an attempt to find secret messages about how the universe works.

7. Newton served in Parliament—quietly.

From 1689 to 1690, Newton was a Member of Parliament, representing Cambridge University.

Newton’s contributions to Parliament apparently were limited, though; he reportedly spoke only once, when he asked an usher to close a window because it was chilly.  

8. He had fierce rivalries.

 Among those with whom he feuded was German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz; the two men had a bitter battle over who invented calculus.

Newton developed a version of calculus in the 1660s but didn’t publish his work at the time.  

9. Newton was knighted.

In 1705, Newton was knighted by Queen Anne.

By that time, he’d become wealthy after inheriting his mother’s property following her death in 1679 and also had published two major works, 1687’s “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (commonly called the “Principia”) and 1704’s “Opticks.”

After the celebrated scientist died at age 84 in March 1727, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the resting place of English monarchs as well as such notable non-royals as Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and explorer David Livingstone.

Adapted from https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-isaac-newton on November 12th, 2024.