Isaac Newton was born premature, on Christmas Day, so small his mother said he could fit inside a quart pot. His father had died three months before he was born. At three, his mother remarried and left him with his grandmother — he never forgave her for it. At Cambridge he read everything Aristotle wrote, then decided Aristotle was wrong about almost all of it. Then came 1666. The plague had closed the university. Newton went home to Lincolnshire and spent 18 months inventing calculus, working out the theory of gravity, and discovering that white light contains every color. He was 23.
January 4, 1643
383 years ago
What Else Happened on January 4
Julius Caesar suffered his first tactical defeat at the Battle of Ruspina, narrowly escaping total annihilation after Titus Labienus’s cavalry surrounded his ou…
Titus Labienus trapped Julius Caesar’s forces at the Battle of Ruspina, nearly annihilating the future dictator’s army through superior cavalry tactics. This ra…
Ethelred of Wessex clashed with a Danish army at Reading, suffering a defeat that foreshadowed the Viking's growing power. This loss, though a setback, didn't b…
She was sixteen and already a political hurricane. Anna of Brittany, ruling duchess of her independent duchy, drew a line in the sand that would reshape France'…
Sunburned, seasick, and hauling exotic parrots and kidnapped indigenous people, Columbus limped back to Spain with ten weeks of wild stories. His ships were pac…
Charles I didn't come alone. He brought 400 soldiers into the House of Commons on January 4, 1642, looking for five members of Parliament he wanted arrested for…
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