The Earliest Account of Newton and the Apple

In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge... to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (wch brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition but being absent from books & taking the common estimate in use among Geographers & our seamen before Norwood had measured the earth, that 60 English miles were contained in one degree of latitude on the surface of the Earth his computation did not agree with his theory & inclined him then to entertain a notion that together with the force of gravity there might be a mixture of that force wch the moon would have if it was carried along in a vortex.

Notes:

Includes the fact that he extended the force pulling the apple to the ground up to the moon.

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Memorandum of a conversation with Newton in August 1726

Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Westfall , Richard S. and Conduitt, John (1983-04-29), Memorandum of a conversation with Newton in August 1726, Cambridge Univ Pr, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Retrieved on 2012-02-08

Source Material [books.google.com]

Folksonomies: