Isaac Newton Facts, Contributions, and Secret Mischievous Life: How He Spent His Childhood and Survived the Great Plague

Born on January 4, 1643, one of the most brilliant minds that dictated the course of macrophysics and various fields of sciences was born. Sir Isaac Newton is truly renowned for his numerous conquests in the name of science. Although many knew him for the apple that fell on his head, he lived a bizarre and eventful life.

Isaac's Young and Mischievous Life

Despite being born a few months after his father's untimely death, many believe that it was a sign of favor from up on high. Isaac was a reclusive child that had a reputation for his occasional mischievousness. At one point, he threatened to burn down the house while his mother and stepfather resided, reports IFLScience.

Born in Woolsthrope, Lincolnshire, England, Isaac was born as a farmer's son. He spent most of his early life living with his maternal grandmother after his mother remarried. Isaac's education was interrupted by a failed attempt to become a farmer, like his father, thus attending King's School in Grantham; he later pursued his education at the University of Cambridge's Trinity College in 1661.

During this time, physics taught in the four corners of the classroom was based on Aristotle's and early bright minds' theories on physics principles. He sought more mental stimulation, burying his brow in works by Kepler, Descartes, Euclid, and more. While he studied the classical curriculum at Trinity College, he was engrossed in works by modern philosophers devoting notes to the outside readings he rightfully titled as "Questiones Quaedam Philosophica," which translates to 'Certain Philosophical Questions.

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Newton's Life in the Plague

The Great Plague of London, according to History, laid siege to London numerous times in the 16th and 17th centuries and was most famously active between 1665-1666. It was a pestilence that first arose in the suburbs of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, and rapidly traveled into the cramped neighborhoods of the city. At its peak in September of 1665, the plague slaughtered 8,000 people each week.

The world today is all too familiar with the boredom and restrictions placed in a global pandemic due to the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic. But unlike many who binged watch endless seasons of their favorite shows, Isaac Newton spent his time sticking large objects into his eyeballs until he coined the theory of light, according to the Newton Project UK.

Newton spent his days formulating various theories on calculus, color, and light with his farm as the setting for the age-old falling on an apple that inspired his revolutionary work on gravity as Cambridge was shut down by the Great Plague.

In 1667, Newton returned to Cambridge. After being elected as a minor fellow, he designed his first reflecting telescope in 1668 and subsequently received his Masters of Arts degree. Later, he took over as Cambridge's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and was asked to demonstrate his telescope at the Royal Society of London in 1671.

In 1684, Edmund Halley, an English astronomer, visited that recluse Newton upon learning that he worked out the mathematics behind the elliptical paths of celestial bodies. Halley urged Isaac to compile his notes that later resulted in the 1687 publication of 'Philosphiae Naturalis Prinicipia Mathematica' or the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy that established the 3 known laws of motions and the laws of universal gravity.