Page 41 - The Secret Museum

THE ROYAL SOCIETY IN LONDON began in 1660, when a group of scientists decided it

would be valuable to meet once a week and discuss experiments. Today it is one of
the oldest scientific academies in the world.

Their archive is split between a salt mine in Cheshire – to access anything down
there you have to go in a miner’s lift and put on a hard hat and a basement in its HQ
in London.

I headed downstairs into the basement, which is stuffed with a quarter of a million
manuscripts made up of the musings, publications and letters written by some of the
greatest scientific minds that have ever lived.

Mixed in among the books and writings are 200 objects, including slides of a goat
with the bends (used when working out dive tables), a wonderful doodle on blotting
paper by top scientists and the then prime minister gathered at a meeting about the

Transit of Venus in 1882, tag and a wooden potato masher made by a young Ernest
Rutherford for ten his grandma. I looked a bit confused. ‘Rutherford,’ said Keith
Moore, curator of the Royal Society’s library and archives, ‘split the atom.’
Rutherford is buried in Westminster Abbey, near Sir Isaac Newton.

Pretty much everyone has heard the story about how Newton first described
gravity. He was sitting underneath an apple tree when an apple fell from the tree and
bounced off his head. Newton wondered why. His answer? A thing he called gravity.
Anyone who has looked deeper into the tale comes up against people saying it wasn’t

true.

But Newton knew the value of a good anecdote and told it himself. In the Royal
Society library there is a first-hand account of him describing the event to William
Stukeley, author of Memoirs of Newton’s Life (1752):

After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea
[sic], under the shade of some apple trees; only he, and myself. Amidst other
discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the
notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple always
descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion’d by

the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should it not go
sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre?

So the apple tree really did inspire Newton, even if the apple didn’t fall on his
head. The account is online on the Royal Society’s website if you want to see it.

Just as Newton had never before considered why it was that apples fall to the
ground, even though I had heard the story many times before I’d never wondered
which actual apple tree had inspired him. That was, until I saw several pieces of it
behind the scenes at the Royal Society.

Newton’s fabled apple tree once stood in the garden of his childhood home,
Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. In 1800, the inspirational tree blew over.