14 DAY TRIAL // As the story goes, Sir Isaac Newton (born on January 4th, 1643) was inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by an apple falling on his head as he was taking a walk in a garden. It was later revealed that the fruit didn’t touch the scientist at all. However, in its turn, the altered story inspired many, including Apple.
As another story goes, thanks to Newton’s fortunate mishap, Steve Jobs and Ron Wayne designed in 1970 what was to become the original Apple logo. It is available to the left for your viewing pleasure (click to enlarge).
The image (long dropped by the computer maker in favor of the bitten-apple logo) depicts Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree, with the very fruit just waiting to drop.
According to some reports, cartoons are to blame for altering the story suggesting the apple had actually hit Newton's head, making him aware of the force of gravity, on the spot. Admittedly, it’s a nice story – no wonder the world embraced it.
However, it is known from the physicist’s notebooks that he had been grappling with the idea that terrestrial gravity extended in an inverse-square proportion to the Moon before taking his legendary stroll. It took Newton two decades to develop the full-fledged theory. Still, the apple event was indeed a key point in the process, as revealed by John Conduitt, Newton's assistant. He described the event when he wrote about Newton's life. The respective excerpt (courtesy of Wikipedia) can be found below.
"In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in Lincolnshire. Whilst he was pensively meandering in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from a tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but that this power must extend much further than was usually thought. Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself & if so, that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition."
Apple’s love for Newton didn’t stop at the logo. Developed between 1989 and 1998, the “Newton” was an early personal digital assistant hardware/software platform crafted by the company when it still liked to call itself “Apple Computer.” Since the release of Apple's iPhone in 2007, many consider that the Newton was influential in its development. Some even refer to the Newton tablet as the iPhone's grandfather.
