Biography | Isaac Newton — The Plague Years in This House, When Gravity and Light Came Clear

When the Great Plague closed Cambridge in the summer of 1665, Isaac Newton, twenty-two and not yet a fellow, came home to this farmhouse. He made two long stays here between then and the spring of 1667. Later he told William Stukeley and John Conduitt that a falling apple in the orchard started him thinking why bodies fall straight down, and whether the same pull might reach the Moon. He did not write the anecdote himself. The label annus mirabilis is later historians' language. In a memorandum of his own he said only that in those days he had been in the prime of his age for invention. The tree now fenced in the orchard is a Flower of Kent that dendrochronology dates to his lifetime. It blew down in 1820 and grew again from the roots. Inside, the upper room shown as Newton's Chamber looks out on that tree. National Trust interpretation places his prism work at this window. The optics story is messier than the plaque version. His decisive prism experiments continued after he returned to Trinity in 1667, the year he was elected a fellow. What did happen here was concentrated invention: early fluxions, the decomposition of white light, and the first outline of universal gravitation, written down before he was twenty-four. The house is a National Trust property. The original fabric is still the place to stand. Photo: Hel-hama, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons