Inventor - Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton

Born: December 25, 1642 in Lincolnshire England

Died: March 31, 1727, age 84 in Middlesex, Great Britain

Parents:

Isaac Newton, b. 1606 - d. 1642, he died 3 months beforehis only child was born

Hannah Ayscough Newton, 1623-1679 -remarried in 1645 to Reverend Barnabas Smith and had three children. She was a widow again in 1653.

Siblings:

Mary Smith Pilkington (1647-1695), Benjamin Smith (1651-?), Hannah Smith (1652-1695).

Sir Isaac Newton, 1642-1727

Isaac Newton was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author. But he was also an inventor. He was a thinker but a very poor student in school. Instead he devoted his mind to inventing devices or improving on existing inventions. In his youth, he invented a small working windmill, a clock that operatedby the force of dropping water, and a sundial.

Newton was a cat person. He loved his cats but didn't like to be interrupted when they wanted attention.  He invented the pet door so his cats could come and go without disturbing him. There's only one reference that he invented the pet door and no proof.

When he tackled the science of gravity and motion, he gave all his time and effort. The story goes that he was sitting in his garden drinking a cup of tea, and saw an apple fall from a tree.  The story about the apple hitting him on the head seems to have been a fallacy. He realized the force that pulled the apple from the t ree was the same force used in outer space that keeps the planets in orbit. His discoveries lay idle for about 20 years and in 1684, English astronomer Edmond Hailey asked for his help in explaining the motion of planets aound the sun.  When Hailey saw that Newton had already worked out the mathematics of the motion of the planets, he put his work aside to urge Newton to publish his discoveries.The laws of gravity were published  in The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687, now considered one of the greatest contributions to science.

In 1704, Newton published his discoveries in optics and explained why object appear to be colored and laid out the foundation for spectrum analysis.  He invented the reflecting telescope and was the first person to see Jupiter's moons. 

He invented calculus which explained motion in mathematical terms. He was on the faculty of Trinity College, part of Cambridge University, and was a typical absent-minded professor.  He never married. He left Trinity in 1701 and spent last years in Parliament and as President of the Royal Society.  He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. 

While working as a warden at the Royal Mint, he put out a recall for all English coins, had them melted down and remade into a much higher quality and harder to counterfeit currency.  It left the whole country without coin currency for a full year.  The new design has milled edges which is still in use today in coin currency all over the world.

He was always willing to make time for other scientists and authors. Albert Einstein praised him by saying that Isaac Newton's discoveries helped him to advance his work.

Newton was so revered in England that he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the highest honor in Great Britain. 

Three Isaac Newton Laws:  

- Every object moves in a straight line unless acted upon by a force. 

- The accerlation of an object is directly proportinate to the net force exerted and inversely proportionate to the object's mass.  

- For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction