Summary
This biographical prose, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, traces the life of Sir Isaac Newton from his birth on Christmas Day in 1642 at Woolsthorpe, England, to his death in 1727 at the age of 85. Born after his father's death, young Isaac was raised by his grandmother while his mother remarried a clergyman and moved to North Witham.
From an early age, Newton displayed extraordinary mechanical ingenuity. He crafted tools and saws by himself and made many curious articles with remarkable skill. His inventions included a water-clock that ran by the dropping of water instead of wheels and weights, a sun-dial (said to still exist at Woolsthorpe), and a fully functional miniature model of a windmill that could actually grind wheat into flour. He even devised a method to measure wind strength by jumping against it and calculating the force from the length of his jump.
When Newton was fourteen, his mother called him back to help on the farm after her second husband's death. However, his passion for learning was so strong that she eventually sent him back to school and then to the University of Cambridge. There, he went on to make groundbreaking discoveries: he was the first to explain the nature of light (what sunlight is composed of), and the famous story of the apple falling on his head led him to discover the force of gravitation that keeps heavenly bodies in their orbits.