Newton was born in 1643, and was the smallest baby in the world. He went to school when very young, but does not appear to have done any work till one day the top-boy kicked him violently in the stomach for daring to get his sums right. Then Newton began to work, not with any idea of becoming the greatest of mathematicians, but simply because he resented being kicked in the stomach, and determined to get the better of his tormentor. His spare time was spent in making ingenious little contrivances, water-clocks, paper lamps attached to kites with which to frighten the villagers, a ‘wind-mill’ turned by a pet mouse with a string tied to its tail. When he left school he was tried on the farm, but it was no use. Newton was always behind a hedge inventing some new automatic toy, while the pigs wallowed in clover, and the cows trampled down the corn. So he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and there his serious studies began.

His first discoveries were on the subject of light, about which very little was then known. On darkening his room and allowing a circular beam of sunlight to pass through a hole in the shutter, and thence through a triangular glass prism, he found that an oblong patch of light was cast on the screen five times as long as the hole in the shutter. Moreover, it was no longer white, but made up of all the colours of the rainbow—violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red—always ranged in the same order. He soon came to the conclusion that white is not a separate colour, but is made up of all the colours of the ‘spectrum’.

He next invented the reflecting telescope, forerunner of all the vast instruments by means of which the wonders of the sky have been investigated.

He then turned his great mind to the problem of finding out what light really is, and, though his theory has been given up for a better, it was the best that had been suggested up to that time. He also found out that light travels at the rate of nearly 200,000 miles a second.

Meanwhile the Plague broke out at Cambridge, making it necessary for him to retire into the country. It was in the garden of his country house that the fall of an apple is supposed to have suggested to Newton the theory of gravitation.

Scientists had for a long time been familiar with the fact that the earth is a colossal magnet, drawing everything upon its surface in the direction of its centre; but it was Newton who conceived the idea—and whether it was the falling apple that suggested it or no is unimportant—that the influence extended as far as the moon, and, if this could be established, to the stars throughout space. Was it not possible that the moon, trying to shoot off at a tangent, was continually pulled back by the earth, and so kept ‘falling’ round it? Newton tried experiments, applying laws already discovered, and found that the theory would not work. Undiscouraged he put the whole problem aside till more facts should have been discovered. It was not till 1682 that more accurate measurements of the earth gave Newton fresh data to go upon. Again he applied his theory, and this time he began to see that his problem was ‘coming out’—that the moon would fall just the right distance, 15 feet per minute. As he neared the end of his calculations he became so agitated that he could not go on: a friend had to finish it for him. And it was right. He had established the fact that not only is the moon subject to the law of gravitation, but that the whole universe is slung together in one stupendous system.

It is this grand discovery, and the wonderful invention of the calculus, that establish Newton’s claim to immortal honour. As says the inscription in Westminster Abbey: “The vigour of his mind was almost supernatural”.