Harper's Young People, October 11, 1881 / An Illustrated Weekly

ISAAC NEWTON AT THE AGE OF TWELVE.

Sir Isaac Newton is the greatest of modern philosophers and mechanics. When he was born, December 25, 1642, three months after his father's death, he was so small and feeble that no one supposed he would live a day; but the weak infant grew to be a healthy, robust man, who lived until he was eighty-four years old. He began to invent or contrive machines and to show his taste for mechanics in early childhood. He inherited some property from his father, and his mother, who had married a second time, sent him to the best schools, and to the University of Cambridge. At school he soon showed his natural taste; he amused himself with little saws, hatchets, hammers, and different tools, and when his companions were at play spent his time in making machines and toys. He made a wooden clock when he was twelve years old, and the model of a windmill, and in his mill he put a mouse, which he called his miller, and which turned the wheels by running around its cage. He made a water-clock four feet high, and a cart with four wheels, not unlike a velocipede, in which he could drive himself by turning a windlass.
His love of mechanics often interrupted his studies at school, and he was sometimes making clocks and carriages when he ought to have been construing Latin and Greek. But his mind was so active that he easily caught up again with his fellow-scholars, and was always fond of every kind of knowledge. He taught the school-boys how to make paper kites; he made paper lanterns by which to go to school in the dark winter mornings; and sometimes at night he would alarm the whole country round by raising his kites in the air with a paper lantern attached to the tail; they would shine like meteors in the distance, and the country people, at that time very ignorant, would fancy them omens of evil, and celestial lights.
He was never idle for a moment. He learned to draw and sketch; he made little tables and sideboards for the children to play with; he watched the motions of the sun by means of pegs he had fixed in the wall of the house where he lived, and marked every hour.