Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…' It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. 'e told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. 'After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees,' Stukeley wrote.
The text of Stukeley's Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life has long been available online, but the Royal Society opened up digital access to the handwritten manuscript itself Sunday. The legend of Newton's inspiration coming from a falling apple is often dismissed as apocryphal, but the great physicist's memoirs would seem to indicate otherwise.Ī biography written by William Stukeley, one of Newton's contemporaries, relates the apple story as Newton himself told it to Stukeley. Among the countless achievements of Isaac Newton, any number of which would have made him a houseold name on their own, his articulation of the force of gravity in the late 17th century surely ranks near the top.
