Isaac Newton for Kids

On Christmas Day in 1643, in a quiet English farmhouse called Woolsthorpe Manor, a baby boy was born who was so tiny his mother said he could fit inside a quart mug. Nobody thought he would live a week. But he did. His name was Isaac Newton, and he grew up poking, asking, and wondering about everything. His father had died before he was born, and when his mother remarried, she sent young Isaac to live with his grandmother. He was often lonely. So he filled his time with experiments. He built tiny water clocks, windmills you could fit in your pocket, and a paper kite with a candle inside that he flew at night to scare the neighbors.

When Isaac was twelve, he was sent to the grammar school in Grantham. At first he was one of the worst students in the class. Then one day a boy kicked him in the stomach. Isaac decided he wasn't going to lose to that boy at anything — not at fighting and not at school. He started studying harder than anyone, and by the time he left, he was the very top of his class. His uncle noticed how clever he was and helped him get into Trinity College at Cambridge University, even though Isaac had to work as a servant to other students to pay his way.

Then something terrible happened that ended up being lucky for science. A disease called the Great Plague swept through England, and Cambridge closed its doors. Isaac, who was just 23, went home to Woolsthorpe. For nearly two years he stayed in the orchard and the farmhouse with almost nothing to do — except think. In that one short stretch, sometimes called his "year of wonders," Isaac sketched out the idea of gravity, started inventing a brand-new kind of math called calculus, and worked out that sunlight is secretly made of every color of the rainbow. It was the most amazing burst of ideas any single person has ever had. And yes, the famous apple really did fall.

Back at Cambridge, Isaac kept inventing and discovering. He built the world's first reflecting telescope — only six inches long, but better than the giant lens telescopes everyone else used. He shined sunlight through a prism and proved, for the first time, that white light is made of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, all mixed together. He became a professor. And in 1687, after twenty years of careful work, he published a huge Latin book called the Principia. In it, he wrote down three laws of motion that explain how almost everything moves — apples, planets, rockets, even you running across a soccer field.

Newton's ideas made him famous. Later in life he moved to London and ran the Royal Mint, where England's coins were made, and even hunted counterfeiters in disguise. In 1705, Queen Anne knighted him, so people started calling him "Sir Isaac Newton." He died in 1727, at the age of 84, and was buried in Westminster Abbey — the same church where kings and queens are crowned. Today, more than 300 years later, every rocket launch, every roller coaster, and every bouncing ball still follows the rules that the curious boy from Woolsthorpe wrote down. Not bad for a kid who started out asking, "Why does the apple fall?"