As a 17th century youth in Grantham and Woolsthorpe, his unconventional pastimes meant he would have stood out amongst his peers and society as a whole. He didn't shy away from the unusual; travelling around in a small, four-wheeled cart run by turning a crank and startling his neighbours by attaching a lantern to the tail of a kite at night.
Lincolnshire supported Oliver Cromwell, who remained in power until his death on 3 September 1658, when Newton was 15. That day remained etched in Newton’s memory because it was marked by a great storm. It gave the opportunity to carry out what he recalled as his first experiment: to calculate the speed of the wind. First he measured how far he could jump against the wind or with it at his back, and then compared the results with the length of his leap in calm weather.
His wide reading stimulated him to carry out further experiments. Fascinated by the effect that our physical limitations might have on what we see, he almost blinded himself twice by exploring the effects of squeezing his eye-ball with a large blunt needle and staring directly at the sun with one eye.
Newton’s notebooks reveal the extraordinary diversity of his self-prescribed curriculum: history, mathematics, astrology, phonetics, light, astronomy. A direct contrast to the constrained curriculum of the time.
As he approached his 17th birthday, Newton’s mother decided it was time for him to come back home and run the estate. It was a disastrous nine months. Newton proved incapable of learning how to be a gentleman farmer. Given the task of guarding sheep, he began designing ingenious waterwheels, and failed to notice his flock wandering off.