A Pandemic and an Apple

Little to nothing was known of germs and bacteria prior to the 17th century. The Bubonic Plague or as it was more commonly named, the Black Death, was a major pandemic that raged through the known world in the Middle Ages from time to time with the people having no knowledge of its origins. Superstition was rife in these times and infection was attributed to a number of things including bad air, evil spirits, poisoned wells, foreigners and sin amongst other things. Populations affected by the plague had little reason to suspect it was transmitted from rats and mice to humans by the bites of fleas. It was incredibly virulent and is now known to have been caused by the fleas being infected with the bacterium Yersinia Pestis.

A Swiss manuscript first recorded the appearance of the Bubonic Plague in 1411. Little was known of its effects at the time but one thing is certain, it never actually went away. It reappeared 800 years later with disastrous effect claiming over 200 million lives in the known world.

Few people realize that the Bubonic Plague can be credited for the discovery of one of the world’s most universal laws; the law of gravity. In 1665, when the Bubonic pandemic descended on England, it forced Cambridge University, known as one of the world's best universities, to close its doors. This left Isaac Newton, then an undergraduate, to return to his home in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, UK. Newton had received his bachelor’s degree in April 1665. His was one of the most remarkable undergraduate careers in the history of university education and it passed virtually unrecognized by the scientific community.

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, a sickly baby and not expected to survive the first few weeks of his life. He was born the same year Galileo Galilei died and three months after his father passed away. Young Newton also lost his mother when she remarried a well-to-do minister, the Reverend Barnabas Smith and he ended up being raised by a grandmother. He was separated from his mother for nine years and this had a major effect on Newton that was to last his whole life.

Even though he was earning a well-deserved reputation as a mathematician, he had developed pronounced psychotic episodes that have been attributed to his early chaotic family life. This ingrained sense of insecurity accompanied Newton all through his life and caused him to be obsessively anxious and irrationally violent when his work was published and he had to defend his results to his peers.

As has been reported, Newton was sitting in his orchard garden and saw an apple fall from a tree. Some proponents of this event claim the apple hit Newton on the head.

However it happened, this minor event provided the inspiration to develop Newton's law of universal gravitation. This young yet-to-be scientist was just twenty-two years old; unremarkable, unrecognized and unknown. He not only discovered the universal law of gravity but changed the face of science.

Apparently, the apple tree is still standing but is the story? According to a letter by Newton and included in a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life written by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton’s first biographers, and published in 1752, the answer is yes. Newton shared the apple story with Stukeley who relayed it as follows:

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea under the shade of some apple trees. He told me he was just in the same place as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, he thought to himself…”

For science and amateur historians, The Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific academy, made the manuscript available in 2010 for the first time in digital form on their website.

Bubonic Plague, while not completely eliminated, it is now controlled by antibiotics with just a handful of deaths attributed to it each year.