Famous Men of Science Part 2

At twelve, he was sent to the public school at Grantham, where he showed little taste for study, and managed easily to stand at the foot of his cla.s.s. When he was the last in the lowermost form but one, the boy next above him, as they were going to school, gave Isaac a kick, which occasioned severe pain. Stirred with wrath, Isaac challenged the other boy to a fight. For this purpose, they repaired to a neighboring churchyard, where young Newton, though much the smaller and weaker of the two, pounded his antagonist till he was glad to come to any terms of submission.

He resolved now that this boy should no longer stand above him in scholarship, and with a new ambition and energy born of his insult, he soon rose to the highest place in the school. It was not idleness, probably, that made Newton a poor scholar, but his mind was absorbed with making saws, hammers, hatchets, and other tools.

He made a windmill and placed it on the top of his home, the wind putting it in motion. When there was no wind, a novel expedient was resorted to. A mouse, which was called "the miller," was trained to turn the windmill by walking on a tread wheel, with some corn just beyond his reach! All through life, he was exceedingly kind to animals, and could never tolerate shooting or hunting for sport. He objected to one of his nephews, when praised in his presence, "that he loved killing of birds,"

and this was sufficient to win his disesteem. It is probable, therefore, that the little mouse was kindly cared for by the young experimenter.

He also made a water clock, about four feet high, with a dial-plate at the top, with figures of the hours. The index was turned by a piece of wood, which either fell or rose by water dropping. Every morning the lad supplied his clock with the proper amount of water.

Besides these, he invented a four-wheeled carriage, which was moved with a handle by the person who sat in it. For his boy friends, he made lanterns of "crimpled paper" with a candle inside, to light them to school in the dark winter mornings, and paper kites of the best form and proportion. In dark nights he tied the lanterns to the tails of his kites, and ignorant people sometimes mistook them for comets!

On the manor-house at Woolsthorpe he carved sun-dials, which were visible a century later. He was a "sober, silent, and thinking lad," who was always hammering in his room, or making drawings with his pen and pencil, designing with charcoal on his walls, birds, animals, ships, and mathematical diagrams.

Mrs. Newton, the mother, had married again, after a singular courtship.

"Mr. Smith, a neighboring clergyman, who had a very good estate, had lived a bachelor till he was pretty old, and, one of his parishioners advising him to marry, he said he did not know where to meet with a good wife. The man answered, 'The widow Newton is an extraordinary good woman.' 'But,' said Mr. Smith, 'how do I know she will have me, and I don't care to ask and be denied; but if you will go and ask her, I will pay you for your day's work.'

"He went accordingly. Her answer was, she would be advised by her brother Ayscough, upon which Mr. Smith sent the same person to Mr.

Ayscough on the same errand, who, upon consulting with his sister, treated with Mr. Smith, who gave her son Isaac a parcel of land, one of the terms insisted upon by the widow if she married him."

Though for a time she was thus removed from Isaac, leaving him with his grandmother, on the death of Rev. Mr. Smith, she returned to the manor-house.

When Isaac had reached his fifteenth year, his mother, not seeming to think of any profession for her mechanical son, decided to make of him a farmer and grazier. On Sat.u.r.days, the market day at Grantham, she would send him with grain and other agricultural produce, in the care of an old and trusty servant. The boy had no taste for selling produce, and would hasten to the attic in the house of Mr. Clark, an apothecary, with whom he had boarded while at school, and there spend his hours in reading old books, till the time came for him to go home, the servant meantime having sold the vegetables.

Sometimes, however, the lad would not go as far as Grantham, but, seating himself beside a hedge along the road, would read some favorite author till the servant returned. When his mother sent him to watch the cattle, they enjoyed a neighbor's corn-field, while he enjoyed a book or whittled out water-wheels. It did not seem intentional disobedience toward a mother of whom he was very fond, but complete absorption in some other pursuit.

When he was sixteen he was greatly interested in finding the proper form of a body which would offer the least resistance when moving in a fluid.

In a severe storm, to test the force of the gale, he jumped first in the direction in which the wind blew, and then in opposition to the wind, and after measuring the length of the leap in both directions, and comparing it with the length to which he could jump in a perfectly calm day, he was enabled to compute the force of the storm.

His mother soon found that her boy would not make a successful farmer, and sent him back to school at Grantham, to prepare for Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered when he was nineteen.

It is probable that the time spent at Grantham was a happy time; for young Newton there met and, it is said, loved Miss Storey, sister of Dr.

Storey, a physician near Colsterworth, and daughter of the apothecary's second wife. She was two or three years younger than Newton, a girl of attractive face and unusual talents. As his income as a Fellow was small, after leaving college, they did not marry, though his interest in her continued unabated through life. Though she was twice married, he never paid a visit to Woolsthorpe without going to see her, and liberally relieved her from little pecuniary embarra.s.sments, when his own circ.u.mstances had become easy. How the world loves constancy; an affection which knows no change! That he would have been happier in those quiet years of study, even in his poverty, had he married, is probable; but that the world gained by his undivided devotion to science, is equally probable.

On July 8, 1661, Newton entered college, and soon, through the study of Descartes' Geometry, showed his skill in higher mathematics. And now began an almost unexampled development of mind.

At twenty-two, he was studying a comet so closely, and the circles and halo round the moon, that he impaired his health by sitting up late at night. In 1665, May 20, when he was twenty-three, he committed to writing his first discovery of fluxions--"the infinitely small increase or decrease of a variable or flowing quant.i.ty in a certain infinitely small and constant period of time."

The same year, when the college had been dismissed on account of the plague in Cambridge, Newton made his immortal discovery of the Attraction of Gravitation. While sitting alone in his garden at Woolsthorpe, and observing an apple fall to the ground, it occurred to him that as the same power by which the apple fell was not sensibly diminished at the summits of the loftiest spires, nor on the tops of the highest mountains, it might extend to the moon, about which he had been studying, and retain her in her orbit. If to the moon, why not to the planets?

The tree from which the apple fell was so much decayed in 1820, that it was cut down, but the wood was carefully preserved by Mr. Turnor of Stoke Rocheford.

In the beginning of the following year, 1666, when Newton was twenty-four, he purchased a prism, in order to make some experiments on Descartes' theory of colors. He made a hole in his window shutter, darkened the room, and admitted a ray of the sunlight. On the opposite wall he saw the solar or prismatic spectrum, an elongated image of the sun, about five times as long as it was broad, and consisting of _seven_ different colors; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

White light was thus discovered to be of a compound nature; a mixture of all the colors. He said, "Whiteness is the usual color of light; for light is a confused aggregate of rays endued with all sorts of colors, as they are promiscuously darted from the various parts of luminous bodies." If any one color predominates, the light will incline to that color, as the yellow flame of a candle. Heretofore, there had been all sorts of conjectures about the nature and origin of colors. Descartes believed them to be a modification of light, depending on the direct or rotary motion of its particles. But Newton showed by many experiments that color is a property of light, or innate in light itself. We speak of a thing as red because it reflects red, and absorbs all the other colors. The green leaf stops or absorbs the red, blue, and violet rays of the white light, and reflects and transmits only those which compose its green.

He also found that the red rays are refracted or turned out of their course least of all the colors, and violet most, thereby discovering the different refrangibility of the rays of light; "a discovery which has had the most extensive applications to every branch of science, and, what is very rare in the history of inventions, one to which no other person has made the slightest claim."

His beautiful experiments with rings resulted in his Scale of Colors, of great value in optical research.

In 1668, when Newton was twenty-six, he constructed a small reflecting telescope, and soon a larger one, which he sent to the Royal Society; and was made a member of that body, in 1671. Two years previously he had been appointed to the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge.

He was now, at twenty-seven, spoken of as a man of "unparalleled genius." He had discovered the compound nature of white light, the attraction of gravity, fluxions, and made the first reflecting telescope ever directed toward the heavens, though one had been invented previously, by James Gregory, of Aberdeen. The boy who had thought of a mouse to turn his windmill had thought out some of the sublimest things in nature, and was henceforward to rank as one of the few masterminds of science. Newton's doctrine of colors met with the most bitter opposition. At last, he became so tired of the controversy, that he wrote Leibnitz, "I was so persecuted with discussions arising out of my theory of light, that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so substantial a blessing as my quiet to run after a shadow." To another he wrote, "I see I have made myself a slave to philosophy; but if I get free of Mr. Linus's business, I will resolutely bid adieu to it eternally, excepting what I do for my private satisfaction, or leave to come out after me; for I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new, or to become a slave to defend it."

Newton was also troubled pecuniarily at this time, and asked to be excused from the weekly payments to the Royal Society, thereby resigning his membership. He even meditated the study of law, as his income was so limited. Strange that so many of the great things of this life are wrought out by those who are in sorrow or privation.

But amid all the opposition to his discoveries and his poverty, the unparalleled devotion to study was continued. When he was weary of other branches, he said "he refreshed himself with history and chronology."

Years afterward he published the "Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms amended, to which is prefixed a short chronicle, from the first memory of things in Europe, to the Conquest of Persia, by Alexander the Great." Says a gentleman who was with him for years, "I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime, either in riding out to take the air, walking, boating, or any other exercise whatever, thinking all hours lost that were not spent in his studies, to which he kept so close that he seldom left his chamber except at term time, when he read in the schools, as being Lucasia.n.u.s Professor, where so few went to hear him, and fewer that understood him, that oftentimes he did in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls....

"So intent, so serious upon his studies that he ate very sparingly, nay, ofttimes he has forgot to eat at all, so that, going into his chamber, I have found his mess untouched, of which when I have reminded him he would reply, 'Have I?' and then making to the table, would eat a bit or two standing, for I cannot say I ever saw him sit at table by himself.

At some seldom entertainments the masters of colleges were chiefly his guests.

"He very rarely went to bed till two or three of the clock, sometimes not till five or six, lying about four or five hours, especially at spring and fall of the leaf, at which times he used to employ about six weeks in his elaboratory, the fire scarcely going out either night or day, he sitting up one night, and I another, till he had finished his chemical experiments, in the performances of which he was the most accurate, strict, exact...."

When his most intense studies were carried on, "he learned to go to bed at twelve, finding by experience that if he exceeded that hour but a little, it did him more harm in his health than a whole day's study."

"He very rarely went to dine in the hall, except on some public days, and then if he has not been minded, would go very carelessly, with shoes down at heels, stockings untied, surplice on, and his head scarcely combed.... At some seldom times when he designed to dine in the hall, he would turn to the left hand and go out into the street, when making a stop when he found his mistake, would hastily turn back, and then sometimes, instead of going into the hall, would return to his chamber again.... In his chamber he walked so very much that you might have thought him to be educated at Athens, among the Aristotelian sect."

So absent-minded was he, the story is told of him, that going home to Colsterworth, he led his horse up a hill. When he designed to remount, the animal had slipped the bridle and gone away unperceived, though Newton held the bridle in his hand all the time. He would often sit down on his bedside after he rose, and remain there for hours without dressing, so completely absorbed was he in his thought. How few in all this world have been so devoted to science! And yet how many expect success without this devotion!

The same gentleman writes of Newton, "His carriage was very meek, sedate, and humble, never seemingly angry, of profound thought, his countenance mild, pleasant, and comely. I cannot say I ever saw him laugh but once."

In 1687, when Newton was forty-five, his _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_ was published. "The _Principia_ consists of three books. The First Book, besides the definition and axioms, or laws of motion, with which it begins, consists of fourteen sections, in the first of which the author explains the method of prime and ultimate ratios used in his investigations, and which is similar to the method of fluxions. The other sections treat of centripetal forces, and motions in fixed and movable orbits.

"The Second Book consists of nine sections, and treats of bodies moving in resisting media, or oscillating as pendulums.

"The Third Book consists of five sections, on the Causes of the System of the World, on the Quant.i.ty of Lunar Errors, on the Quant.i.ty of the Tides, on the Precession of the Equinoxes, and on Comets."

The great principle of the _Principia_ is universal gravitation, "That every particle of matter in the universe is attracted by or gravitates to every other particle of matter, with a force inversely proportional to the squares of their distances." By the laws of gravity, Newton was enabled to calculate the quant.i.ty of matter in the sun, and in all the planets, and even to determine their density, results which Adam Smith said "were above the reach of human reason and experience." He ascertained that the weight of the same body would be twenty-three times greater at the surface of the sun than at the surface of the earth, and that the density of the earth was four times greater than that of the sun. He found the true figure of the earth; he explained the phenomena of the tides.

Of the "Principia," Sir David Brewster says, in his able life of Sir Isaac Newton, it is "a work which will be memorable not only in the annals of one science or of one country, but which will form an epoch in the history of the world, and will ever be regarded as the brightest page in the records of human reason,--a work, may we not add, which would be read with delight in every planet of our system,--in every system of the universe. What a glorious privilege was it to have been the author of the 'Principia'!

"There was but one earth upon whose form, and tides, and movements, the philosopher could exercise his genius,--one moon whose perturbations and inequalities and actions he could study,--one sun whose controlling force and apparent motions he could calculate and determine,--one system of planets whose mutual disturbances could tax his highest reason,--one system of comets whose eccentric paths he could explore and rectify,--and one universe of stars to whose binary and multiple combinations he could extend the law of terrestrial gravity.

"To have been the chosen sage summoned to the study of that earth, these systems, and that universe, the favored lawgiver to worlds unnumbered, the high priest in the temple of boundless s.p.a.ce,--was a privilege that could be granted but one member of the human family;--and to have executed the last was an achievement which, in its magnitude, can be measured only by the infinite in s.p.a.ce, and in the duration of its triumphs by the infinite in time. That sage,--that lawgiver,--that high priest was Newton."

The "Principia" created the greatest interest throughout Europe, but met with violent opposition. While Laplace said it would take "pre-eminence above all the other productions of human genius," the majority could not believe that great planets were suspended in empty s.p.a.ce, and retained in their orbits by an invisible power in the sun.

When Newton presented copies to the heads of colleges, some of them, Dr.

Babington of Trinity among the number, said, "they might study seven years before they understood anything of it."

In 1687, Newton's method of fluxions was first published, twenty years after its invention, and then because the friends of Leibnitz, the author of the "Differential Calculus," claimed priority of discovery.

The quarrel aroused the scientific world, embittered the silent mathematician, and impaired his health.

In 1689, when he was forty-seven, he was chosen member of parliament, and represented Cambridge University in the House of Commons for thirteen months. He took no active part in the debates, but was of course respected for his wonderful mind.

This same year, his beloved mother died. Anxiously he had watched through whole nights by her bedside, seeking in all ways to keep her from leaving him alone in the world.

He was now nearly fifty. His life had been laborious, with an insufficient income. His friends, John Locke among the number, tried to obtain various positions for him, but failed. They recommended him for provost of King's College, but the position could not be obtained because he had not taken priest's orders.

Seemingly unappreciated, worn with his incessant brain work, his appet.i.te failing, and unable to sleep, with neither mother nor wife to comfort him, the sensitive organization of the great man became overstrained, and mind and body were unfitted for work. It is stated that his ill health was in part consequent upon the burning of some ma.n.u.scripts on optics, by a lighted candle on the table among his papers.