Mausoleum for Newton's House - Image from London as it might have been, Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde

The top image image shows a lithograph prepared by George Schalf, an artist, in 1834 in response to a commission from a Mr T. Steele. Mr Steele desired to make a national monument to Sir Isaac Newton who had died over a hundred years before; his plan - to encase Newton's former home and observatory, just off Leicester Square, in a gigantic mausoleum. It would be pyramidal, with a globe at its top. The ideal of encasing the building, which seems to isolate the home from all that surrounds it, is suspected to come from the treatment of a Franciscan chapel at Assisi, shown bottom left. Like this Mr Steele's plan seems to wish to preserve the building from the affects of time and the outside world; it reminds me of the embalming of the Egyptian mummies. I find the the naming of the building as a mausoleum an odd one; mausoleums usually contain tombs: burial places. Maybe Mr Steele believed the essence of Newton was best preserved, not it the usual way - of monuments over graves, but of the place where the given body, the person, has inhabited.
The plans progressed no further than these images; the book which they are presented in quotes someone by the name of Macaulay saying 'to preserve for posterity Newton's house which Macaulay hoped would "continue to be well known as long as our island retains any trace of civilization" ' The building, without still without mausoleum, was demolished in 1913.

The image and information above have been drawn from London as it might have been, Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde, John Murray Ltd, 1984.

Home of Newtons Tree?

Exercise in progress

Icons.org.uk run by cultureonline.gov.uk

'In the back garden of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge is an apple tree. There is another in the University Botanic Gardens. Each is said to be a descendant of the one at Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham that inspired the founder of modern physics to inquire into the nature of gravitation and the laws of motion.'


Massachusetts Institute of Tecnology

'Ed Vetter (S.B. 1942) gave MIT an apple tree that is a direct descendant of the tree under which Isaac Newton sat when he is said to have conceived the theory of gravity. This fall, the beloved tree bore bright, healthy fruit--a sure sign of flourishing and a link between past and present days.'

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/comsite5/bin/pdinventory.pl?pdlanding=1&referid=2930&purchase_type=ITM&item_id=0286-28101788286-28101788

DESCENDANTS of the apple tree that inspired Sir Isaac Newton's laws of gravity are sprouting again in Canada thanks to two Ontario men. It took 10 years and two unsuccessful attempts to get a viable graft from an offspring of Newton's tree, but Bob Prince, a dean of science...

(Article seemingly unavailable (not found 9/05/07). No picture available)

http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/nbc21/Mich03/Mich03-Pages/Image20.html

(Picture entitled 'Newton's apple tree Master's Garden', belonging to the album 'Mich Term 2003' from 'PWF Personal Web Page Server - people.pwf.cam.ac.uk for students at Cambridge. This student also has a funny little blog type set up of their own with a little archive of items: http://www.neilcopland.com. On the page 'Who am I?' the second line states: 'This is what I said a few years back.' Although it is seemingly written from his present.)

York University, Canada. From Profiles; in house magazine.

'LEGEND HAS it that Sir Isaac Newton's initial theories about gravity came about in 1666 while sitting under his famed apple tree. Now that tree has come to York - or at least part of it.

"The trees are genetically traceable to the family home of Isaac Newton and the site of the legendary falling apple," said Robert Prince, Dean of the Faculty of Pure and Applied Science.'

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15520980.500.html

'THE history books say that Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation was inspired by a falling apple. But what happened to the tree? Clones claimed to have been grown from grafts of the great mathematician's apple tree stand in Britain and elsewhere. The time is now ripe to weed out any imposters.
Newton's tree, which grew at Woolsthorpe Manor, his Lincolnshire home, was blown down around 1820, nearly a century after his death.'

Physics and Astonomy Department - University of Nedraska - Lincoln

'Newton's Apple Tree Bears Fruit Nine years after it was planted outside Behlen Laboratory, the cutting from Newton’s famous apple tree has flourished and matured and in fall 2000 produced its first apples.

Lyman and Young took back with them a cutting from the tree (which had to be quarantined as per U.S. Department of Agriculture requirements). It was then grafted onto Nebraska rootstock (so that it would survive Nebraska winters) and was planted on April 4th, 1991 just south of the loading dock of Behlen Lab.'