Isaac Newton: From Woolsthorpe to the Pinnacle of Science and Politics

Name: Isaac Newton: His life and Work - Simon Schaffer 1983
Uploaded: 2026-02-03T10:40:18.261734+00:00
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Description: Summary and key takeaways on Isaac Newton: From Woolsthorpe to the Pinnacle of Science and Politics, covering Early Life and Family Background Born on 25

Imperial College London

Feb 03, 2026

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Early Life and Family Background

Born on 25 December 1642 in Woolsthorpe‑by‑Grantham, Lincolnshire.
Weak, sickly child; not christened until 1 January 1643.
Father died before his birth; mother Hannah Ayscough remarried Barnabas Smith, a local landowner.
The family’s income rose to over £700 a year by the 1650s, placing them among England’s wealthiest land‑owning families and enabling Newton to attend the King’s School, Grantham.

Education at Cambridge

Entered Trinity College, Cambridge in July 1661 at age 18.
Lived as a sub‑sizar (poor scholar) and supported himself by doing chores for wealthier students.
Exposed to the new continental philosophy by buying works of Descartes and Dutch geometers at local fairs.

The Annus Mirabilis (1665‑1667)

The Great Plague forced Cambridge to close; Newton returned to Woolsthorpe.
In this two‑year isolation he produced groundbreaking work on:
Optics (prism experiments and the nature of colour)
Mathematics (early calculus)
Mechanics (laws of motion)
The famous apple story is a later myth; Newton himself recounted it at age 80 to illustrate his early creative burst.

The Reflecting Telescope and Optics

By 1669 Newton built a reflecting telescope, eliminating the need for massive aerial telescopes.
Sent a model to the Royal Society; the Society’s secretary Henry Oldenburg demanded a paper, prompting Newton’s first published scientific work (1672) on the spectrum of colours.
His Opticks (published posthumously in 1704) set a lasting standard for experimental methodology.

The Principia and the Law of Gravity

In 1684 Edmund Halley visited Cambridge, learned of Newton’s solution to the planetary‑motion problem, and urged publication.
Newton delivered a series of lectures (1684) and, with Halley’s financial support, published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687.
The work unified celestial and terrestrial mechanics under a single inverse‑square gravitational force, confirming Kepler’s laws and establishing a mathematical description of God’s governing principle.

Political Career and the Royal Mint

Newton’s academic advancement relied heavily on patronage (e.g., Isaac Barrow) and political negotiation.
He resisted the imposition of Catholic fellows at Cambridge during the Glorious Revolution.
Elected MP for the University of Cambridge in 1689.
In 1696, through the patronage of Charles Montague, he became Warden (later Master) of the Royal Mint, where he reformed the English currency, prosecuted counterfeiters, and oversaw the Great Recoinage.

Alchemy, Theology, and Chronology

From the late 1660s onward Newton pursued alchemical experiments in a garden laboratory at Trinity.
His alchemical studies informed his belief that active forces could be impressed upon matter by God—a view that underpinned his concepts of gravity and other forces.
He also wrote extensively on biblical chronology and the history of the Church, though these works remained unpublished during his life.

Legacy

Knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 and appointed President of the Royal Society in 1703, Newton dominated English natural philosophy.
Engaged in a lifelong priority dispute with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the invention of calculus.
Died in 1727; buried in Westminster Abbey as a national hero, symbolising the triumph of rational science and the divine order it revealed.

Key Themes - Newton was not an isolated genius; his achievements were deeply intertwined with the social, religious, and political fabric of 17th‑century England. - His work on optics, mechanics, and gravitation established the methodological foundations of modern experimental science. - Political savvy and patronage were essential to his career, enabling him to translate scientific fame into national influence.

Isaac Newton’s genius flourished at the intersection of personal curiosity, rigorous experimentation, and the political‑religious currents of his time, making him both a scientific revolutionary and a pivotal figure in England’s public life.

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Principia Mathematica Isaac Newton Paperback Recommended

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Newton's Opticks Book

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[Music]
this is wool's thought manner in
southern Lincolnshire Isaac Newton was
born here on Christmas day in
1642 he was a weak and sickly child he
later said that when he was born he
could have fitted into a court pot and
in fact he wasn't christened for a whole
week until the 1st of January
1643 his father Isaac senior had died
before his birth and his mother Hannah
acoff now a widow soon married the local
landowner Barnabas Smith the family's
wealth increased steadily during the
1650s until at the end of the 1950s they
had risen to obtain an annual income of
more than £700 a year making them one of
the Thousand wealthiest landowning
families in England they were wealthy
enough in fact to send the young Isaac
to the local school King's School
Grandam where Isaac Newton was a
distinguished but rather lonely and
solitary pupil there are stories about
his Technical and mechanical ability
about his constructing a model Windmill
and and so on but these are clearly
myths which serve to illustrate the
young genius's skill in science and
technology in the event he studied at at
at Grantham in the classics notably
Latin and Greek and by the end of the
1650s he was ready like many of his
class to go to the university at
Cambridge where he went in the summer of
1661 clearly therefore Newton was the
product of a very typical mid- 17th
century environment
his family's income and his own income
derived from land and from the rents
from that land and it wasn't until he
left Lincolnshire to go to Cambridge in
1661 that he was ready to begin a
properly Scholastic
career this is Trinity College Cambridge
Isaac Newton arrived here at the age of
18 in July 1661 and he was to spend more
than 35 years of his life within its
walls the function of Trinity College
and the other colleges of the University
of Cambridge was to train young men for
government service and for the church
and to this end their students were
instructed in the conventional
Scholastic curriculum which had
pertained here for more than 400 years
Newton himself lived a rather secluded
life whilst an undergraduate he was a
sub cizar that is to say a poor scholar
paying his way by doing services for
wealthier students students and for the
fellows but it was also during those
very early years in Trinity that Newton
first came into contact with the latest
developments of the new philosophy which
was being produced in England France and
Holland at this time he would buy books
of dayart and of the geometers from
Holland at the local book fair and he
studied them in private in his room when
the University was closed for almost 18
months during the Great Plague which
began in the summer of 1665 Newton
returned to his family home in wols
Thorp and it was there that many of the
most important developments of his
intellectual career began when he
returned he was elected a fellow and
ultimately in
1669 became the second Lucasian
professor of mathematics in the
University of
Cambridge when the Great plague broke
out in 1665 Cambridge University closed
and Isaac Newton returned here to his
family home in westhorp it was during
the two years he spent here from
1665 until the spring of 1667 that most
of the important research projects of
his scientific career began those on
Optics on mathematics and on the
mechanics of moving
bodies these years are described as
Newton's anos mirabilis and he later
said said that it was then that he was
in the prime of his invention it was
also at this stage that the story about
the Apple falling and inspiring Newton
with the idea of gravity is supposed to
have taken place in fact it's now clear
that that story was a myth it was told
by Newton when he was 80 years old to a
friend to explain his original creative
burst but in fact the work of those
years particularly the the research he
performed on the Spectrum and the papers
he wrote on the calculus became
important resources in the scientific
research he conducted through the second
half of the 1660s and on into the 1670s
when he was working in Trinity College
Cambridge Newton's career in Trinity
College was dominated by problems of
power and patronage he achieved his
position as mathematics professor
because of the patronage of one man
Isaac Barrow his predecessor Barrow was
impressed by the young Trinity fellow's
mathematical skill in commenting on a
recent mathematics book and when Isaac
Barrow wished to move down to London to
continue his work as a priest he
directly appointed Newton his successor
similarly a few years later when it
became clear that in order to continue
as a fellow of Trinity College Newton
himself would have to become a priest
Newton traveled down to London to
petition the king's ministers for a
special Act which would release him from
the UN from his obligation to take holy
orders these kinds of political
negotiation came to dominate Newton's
life during the 1670s and 1680s towards
the end of the 1680s while he was
becoming extremely famous in other
fields Newton went with a delegation
from the University to see King James
and judge Jeff to resist the imposition
of Catholics as members of the
University and finally in 1689 Isaac
Newton was elected Member of Parliament
for the University of Cambridge in the
first Parliament that met in London
after the Glorious Revolution so we can
see that for Isaac Newton Cambridge was
as much a political and practical
problem as it was a Haven for his own
private
work most of Isaac Newton's career at
Trinity College was spent in private
contemplation even though he was
professor of mathem adcs he often as the
saying was lectured to the bare walls
often too his lectures were written and
deposited in the University library but
never actually delivered at all most of
the time therefore he was locked inside
his own study doing research on areas of
natural philosophy Alchemy and chemistry
and his own crucially important work on
the history of religion and on
chronology it was these areas of
Investigation which dominated Newton's
life he was insensitive of criticism he
was often unwilling to communicate his
own results when he did intervene for
the first time publicly in a scientific
debate it it was under extreme pressure
from the secretary of the Royal Society
Henry aldenberg Newton had sent down to
London a copy of a reflecting telescope
which he had invented at the end of the
1660s the Royal Society was extremely
impressed by this budding optician and
demanded more Newton sent a paper on the
theory with which he designed that
telescope and was then drawn into an
extremely extended controversy which
lasted for more than four years the
controversy involved men of the caliber
of Christian hyans and Robert Hook and
Newton was unwilling to continue that
controversy once it he had terminated it
in
1675 he'd learned his lesson and for the
rest of his life he tried to live in
solitude pursuing his own experimental
and theoretical researches first of all
in the privacy of his rooms here at
Trinity and later when he left the
college forever in
1696 in
London in the summer of 1684 the young
Secretary of the Royal Society Edmund
Halley paid Newton a visit in Cambridge
hi wished to discuss with Newton the
famous problem of planetary motion this
was a problem which had haunted
astronomers throughout
history Newton was able to tell hiy when
H reached Cambridge that he had been
working on the problem for a number of
years and that he had reached a
completely satisfactory solution to the
crucial problem of the relationship
between the shape of the planetary orbit
and the force which would attract the
planet towards the sun hie was
astonished by this news and encouraged
Newton to publish his results
immediately Newton was unwilling to do
this because as we've seen he was
unwilling to re-enter any further
controversy which the with the
scientists in
London however he Incorporated his
solution into a series of lectures which
he delivered in Cambridge during
1684 and under Hal's further
encouragement and at Hal's own personal
expense Newton was able to publish the
three volumes of his great book the
mathematical principles of natural
Philosophy by 1687 under the aaces of
the Royal Society and with the name of
the president of the Royal Society
Samuel peeps rather conspicuously placed
on the
cover with the publication of the
prinkipia Newton's reputation as a
European scientist was of course
secure but the event of the publication
coincided with an with a crucial
political event within England itself
the Glorious
Revolution during the late 1680s
the King James II had attempted to
impose Catholicism on the nation and in
particular on Cambridge University Isaac
Newton had led the resistance to this
move and after the overthrow of King
James in November 1688 Newton as we've
seen became a member of parliament he
was thus drawn increasingly into the
sphere of public affairs during the
early 1690s his influence on public
Affairs grew the new King William III
looked for a system of legitimation for
the new orange
regime and newtonianism provided this
new
legitimation on the death of Robert Bole
in 1691 a series of lectures were
established in London to be given each
year against quote notorious heathens
atheists infidels and Jews the first
boil lecturer Richard Bentley chaplain
to the bishop of Worcester gave these
lectures by attacking atheists and
radicals on the basis of the new
Newtonian Anglican religion and through
the boil lectures the religion of
Newtonian science was effectively
propagated throughout the English ruling
class in
1696 New Newton himself left
Cambridge he had been searching for a
job in London for over 5 years and his
new Patron Charles montigue the
chancellor of the exer and leading wig
Lord found him a job in charge of the
Royal Mint thus in 1696 Newton left
Cambridge forever and moved down to the
Tower of London where the Royal Mint was
situated and from where Newton ran the
affairs of the currency of the country
with his with his usual rigor and
efficiency he prosecuted coiners and
forgers and Clippers and he was
instrumental in helping the
Reconstruction of the English currency
after the great recoinage of the
1690s Newton was therefore by the end of
the 17th century a crucial figure in the
wig establishment he held a a government
office he had published the prinkipia he
was one of Europe's most famous
scientists during the first two decades
of the 18th century Newton effectively
cashed in all of these advantages he was
knighted by Queen Anne in a ceremony
held in great Court in Trinity College
as an election stunt during the election
of
1705 he became president of the Royal
Society from where as autocrat of
science he grew to dominate the whole
Corpus of English natural philosophy
through the work of his laboratory
assistant at the Royal Society Francis
hawksby Newton introduced the new
experimental philosophy to A Wider
Circle finally in his last years Newton
was heavily involved in a fierce
priority dispute with the German
mathematician and philosopher lib nits
over the priority of the invention of
the calculus these disputes continued
all almost to the very day of Newton's
death but after his death his burial was
a matter of
national celebration and ceremony he was
buried in Westminster Abbey as Vol later
said like a prince who has conveyed
benefit upon his subjects Newton the
national hero the figure who would come
to dominate 18th century science
represented
in his tomb in Westminster Abbey the
apotheosis of British
Science this is Newton's study in woles
thought Manner and it was here in the
Years 1665 to 67 that Newton came while
the University was closed because of the
plague it was in this room many
historians believe that Newton conducted
his experiments on the transmission of
light through a prism to produce what he
called the celebrated phenomenon of
colors these experiments with the prism
were Newton's first public intervention
in the scientific community of England
in the 17th century Newton's earliest
work to gain wide attention in London
was his work in building a reflecting
telescope which he had assembled by the
end of
1669 this was a radical new design which
enabled a massive increase in telescopic
power while making it unnecessary to
construct the gigantic so-called aerial
telescopes which had dominated astronomy
up till then Newton sent a version of
his reflecting telescope to the
Secretary of the of the Royal Society
Henry oldenberg in London and the Royal
Society was so ecstatic
about this new machine that it demanded
further information from Isaac Newton
about the work he was doing on Optics
and so in
1672 he sent the Royal Society his first
paper on the celebrated phenomenon of
colors this first scientific paper of
Newton was also effectively the first
scientific paper ever and the violent
response which which it drew in London
was to contribute to Newton's later fear
of scientific
controversy the arguments that he put
forward in this paper Drew on the
experiments that were that were
performed here at westhorp and also in
his rooms in in Cambridge what those
experiments showed primarily were two
crucial errors in the then existing
theory of light and colors first Newton
showed that light reduced colors not by
a series of
modifications but that light was
inherently made up of differently
colored
particles secondly he investigated the
way in which those particles
nevertheless made light a periodic
phenomenon so-call Newton's
Rings Newton finally published the
results of his experimental work of the
1660s and 1670s in his famous book The
Optics which first appeared in
174 after the death of his great rival
Robert
Hook in the Optics Newton constructed a
model of a new science of colors and
therefore a new kind of experimental
natural philosophy his achievement in
this book was
twofold first of all he'd shown how a
specific kind of matter Theory and a
specific kind of experimental analysis
could penetrate to the heart of one of
the most difficult of all experimental
Sciences secondly he'd shown how this
sophisticated mathematical analysis
could actually be applied to the real
world of
nature for example in his famous crucial
experiment which was redescribed here in
the Optics in 1704 Newton provided a
model of what a crucial experimental
trial should try to do and how it could
discriminate between rival
hypotheses for the next 100 years in
fact the Optics was to be a model of how
experimental science should be conducted
and although experimenters were often
rather Wayward in their interpretation
of what Newton had achieved in this book
nevertheless the Optics became as one
historian has observed an Augustine
Monument a monument of 18th century
method now in Newton's Optical science
he had used a particular model of
mechanics in his prinkipia too he was to
make that model of mechanics the most
powerful model of God's action in the
universe for most 17th century natural
philosophers for example the great
French scientist Renee
deart natural philosophy was a question
question of analyzing the world in terms
of two factors alone matter and
motion all other factors in the natural
world had to be excluded as occult
ancient
Scholastic and
therefore all that scientists could do
was to explain the change in nature in
terms of these two qualities in terms of
particles moving
now what Newton did during the 1670s and
1680s was to analyze and introduce into
the world of mechanics A New Concept the
concept of
force now it's a matter of some
historical debate as to where Newton's
concept of force came
from if we consider for a moment the
work of dayart and his greatest follower
the Dutch scientist Christian Hy
we can see the contrast with what Newton
was doing in dayart for example the
planets move in whirlpools called
vortices pushed around the Sun by impact
mechanisms in Christian hans's Great
Book of the 1670s the horologium
oscillator hyans worked out the laws of
centrifugal force and the motion of
bodies in their orbits but what Newton
did in this rapid burst of creative
activity in the
1680s was to see how the forces that
linked planets with the sun could be
understood not mechanically but
mathematically The crucial intervention
here was to combine a force between the
planet and the sun with the correct
inertial law for the motion of the of
the planet
tangential to the line joining the
planet to the Sun it was this that
Newton used in his first attempted
solution of the ballistic problem in
1684 and this that he placed at the
center of his analysis of planetary
motion in the prinkipia of
1687 so evidently the key to Newtonian
cosmology is the concept of force an
active principle impressed into matter
by God
one important source for Newton's
concept of force and Power in matter was
evidently his long drawn out project on
Alchemy for Newton Alchemy was a secret
knowledge which could penetrate to the
heart of matter its secrets were lost
buried inside the occult treatises of
older writers what Newton felt that he
should do was to extract the kernel of
this alchemical work and to use it to
understand how the relationship between
force and matter was built
up his work on Alchemy began in the late
1660s when a circle of workers in
Cambridge communicated to Newton some
crucial medieval and early Renaissance
alchemical texts Newton immediately
began his work on EXP experimental
Alchemy he constructed a laboratory in
his garden in Trinity College and began
to perform long drawn out experiments
some historians have speculated that it
was because of these experiments that
Newton um became poisoned by Mercury and
Arsenic and had a nervous breakdown in
1693 but this seems a rather far-fetched
idea nevertheless what we do know is
that Alchemy was one of the few
activities which Newton stuck to for
most of his active natural philosophical
career what he leared from this work was
that God could impress active powers in
matter and that the cause of gravity
could be such a power it was dangerous
for religious reasons to suppose that
gravity could survive in matter in other
words that matter was inherently active
it was necessary to show that the
activity of matter came from from God
and the work on Alchemy was an excellent
resource to make this clear obviously
none of this alchemical or chemical work
appeared in the prinkipia but in the
final sections of the Optics entitled
The queries Newton in a speculative
manner inserted an increasingly long
number of comments on the way in which
active principles could live inside
apparently passive inert matter and he
saw here the causes of electricity of
gravity of chemical fer fermentation of
volcanic activity and so on and here we
see the crucial link between Newton's
work on chemistry and his work elsewhere
on Optics and on
mechanics but for his contemporaries for
whom this work on Alchemy was unknown
Newton's greatest achievement was
indubitably his work in rational mean
mechanics and astronomy the apotheosis
of the
prinkipia what was Newton's achievement
well I think we can sum it up in three
headings first of all what Newton had
done was to show that a single guiding
force ruled the
universe that single guiding force was
gravity in the prinkipia he'd shown that
the motion of the Comets of the Moon
of the tides the procession of the
equinoxes and the fall of bodies on
Earth were all due to the same
fundamental action Universal
gravity secondly he'd shown that this
Force could be analyzed mathematically
an excellent example of this strategy of
Newton's is his argument within the body
of the prinkipia about the importance of
Kepler's laws
Kepler was the greatest astronomer of
the early 17th century in his book the
new astronomy he' shown that the planet
Mars orbits the Sun in an ellipse and
that the radius Vector connecting the
planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas
in equal times this was a fundamental
achievement of crucial importance but it
was only with the appearance of the
prinkipia that the full import of
Kepler's analysis
became clear what Newton showed was that
if there was an inverse Square law
linking each planet to the Sun then
Kepler's laws would follow and similarly
if Kepler's laws were true then there
must be an inverse Square law Force
linking each planet to the Sun a
mutually necessary relationship but what
Newton did was far more sophisticated
even than that because by showing that
the force that linked each planet to the
Sun was the same
Force he was able to account not merely
for the regularities that Kepler had
analyzed but for many of the deviations
from those regularities the prinkipia
therefore appeared as a masterpiece of
the command of mathematics over the
natural world and finally and most
importantly the prinkipia revealed the
work of God gravity as we've seen with
its connection with other active
principles was a Divine principle when
Richard Bentley gave his boil lectures
he presented Newtonian gravity as just
such a Divine principle proof that God
was as it were in the driving seat and
so Newtonian physics represents the
Triumph of a certain kind of natural
philosophy and also the Triumph of a
certain kind of
religion Isaac Newton has always been
the image of the heroic scientist the
isolated genius working late and alone
in his study discovering the truths of
the cosmos by a process of inspiration
and hard work or by thinking upon it as
he himself put it and the image we have
of Isaac Newton determines in a sense
the image we have of experimental
science what I've tried to show in this
film is that Newton's work was related
in an extremely intimate way with the
context in which he lived the concerns
of his life his work in astronomy
mechanics the motion of bodies on Optics
were all crucially linked to the
principal interests of natural
philosophers politicians and theologians
of the second half of the 17th century
in
England so in order to understand the
Newtonian achievement with its
revelation of the great creative and
guiding hand of God with its revelation
of the supreme power of mathematical
analysis with its evidence of the first
scientific paper of the rules of
scientific method imposed on three
successive Generations all these aspects
of Newton's work can only be understood
as an integral part of Barack English
society Newton was a man of his time his
interests in showing how God ruled the
cosmos were interests in showing how
Society should be ruled his interests in
navigation or in astronomy
revolutionized man's technical control
over nature and so to see Newton as an
isolated genius is to do Newton a
profound Injustice as a product of his
time he both over became and exemplified
perfectly the the concerns of 17th
century English society and of 17th
century English science
[Music]