We’ve all heard a version of the story of how Isaac Newton discovered gravity. It usually goes something like “Isaac Newton discovered gravity while he was sitting under an apple tree and an apple fell on his head.” It definitely sounds made up, like the “George Washington chopping down the cherry tree” story, which is definitely a myth. Yet according to Newton and his biographers, that is pretty much how it happened.
In 1665, Newton was studying at Cambridge University when an outbreak of bubonic plague forced him to quarantine at his parents’ farm. There, Newton observed an apple falling to the ground and began to wonder why objects always fall downward, and not in another direction. The apple probably didn’t fall on his head, though.
Historians are even confident that they’ve identified the specific tree Newton observed, a Flower of Kent apple tree at Woolsthorpe Manor. The tree was likely planted in 1650 and partially collapsed in a storm in 1816. But the tree recovered, and pieces of it have been used to grow more “Newton trees.” The original tree still stands today, and its descendants can be found on six continents.
