Overall, agriculture improved. Fields that would have been left fallow were planted with new crops which restored indispensable chemical elements to the soil. At the same time, they supplied winter food for stock. The size and weight of animals for slaughter grew. There was so much stock breeding that it was more economical for a family to buy meat, milk, and eggs, than to maintain its own animals. There was an explosion in the growing of beans, peas, lettuce, asparagus, artichokes, and clover. The demand for food in London and other urban areas made enclosure for crop cultivation even more profitable than for sheep grazing. The government made no more attempts to curtail the enclosure of farm lands. The number of enclosures grew because copyholders were not successful in obtaining the legal security of tenure. But most land was not enclosed.
In 1661 in the county of Essex, the wages for mowing one acre of grass were 1s.10d.; for reaping, shearing, binding one acre of wheat 4s.; and for threshing a quarter of wheat or rye 1s.
Wives participated with their husbands in general agricultural chores and did the dairy work including making cheese. Every householder kept chickens because egg production was cheap, their market price being only 1s. for a hundred. Wives also took care of the gardening work and traditionally kept for their own the cash that came in from garden, dairy, and poultry products. A wife made jellies and preserves when the fruit trees, bushes, and vines were bearing. Imported sugar enabled fruit to be preserved as jam in jars sealed with a layer of mutton fat to make them airtight. She was likely to concoct medications from her herbs. Meat had to be smoked or salted when there was not enough fodder to keep animals alive through the winter. She saw to it that the soap was boiled and the candles molded. She cooked the daily meals, did the washing, produced cloth for the family's use, and sewed the family's clothing.
Women had less work and lower pay than men. Since most cottages had a spinning wheel, spinning work was readily available to wives. In the 1670s, a female weaver or spinner was paid 2-4d. per day. A domestic servant, who was usually female, was paid 40-80s. a year. Men in the trades objected to competition from lower-paid women. Aristocratic ladies actively managed their family's household and estates. The only work available to a high middle- class woman who was waiting to get married was to be a governess in another household or a lady-in-waiting to a gentlewoman. Children often worked; this was recommended so that they were under the direct supervision of their parents rather than getting into mischief in the village. The mother typically mingled severity with gentleness, but the father did not dare to err on the side of leniency. Discipline was by whipping. Children were treated as little adults. The lack of a conception of childhood innocence even extended to the practice of adults to tell bawdy jokes in their presence or play with their children's genitals.
About 1660, the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge was founded by Charles II, who became its patron. It was formed from discussion groups of the new experimental philosophy. It included the Baconians formerly at Oxford and Cambridge, who were ejected at the Restoration, and a group of Gresham professors of geometry and astronomy. The Royal Society met at Gresham College. Its goal was to compare ideas in mathematics and science and identify specific aims of science. It published scientific reports to make its findings generally known. This was a great improvement over the private correspondence among scientists, which was limited by the use of various languages. Charles himself had his own laboratory and dabbled in chemistry and anatomy. Similar societies were formed in many places in the world. Theologicians warned that scientific research was dangerous. But it's advances improved agriculture, manufactures, medicine, surgery, navigation, naval architecture, gunnery, and engineering.
Issac Newton was a genius, who in his childhood designed and built model windmills, water wheels, water clocks, sundials, and kites. He came from a family which had risen from the yeomen ranks to the gentry. For a few years after graduating from Cambridge University in 1665, he secluded himself in the countryside to study. Here, using the work of John Wallis, he formulated the binomial theorem that expands (A+B) raised to the nth exponent power, where n is an integer. He also worked with numbers that had exponents that were fractions, unending decimals, or negative numbers. Certain patterns of numbers, such as the sum of doubling each number in a series as in: 1+2+4+8+…never terminates; the series is infinite. He then developed the notion of a number being the limit of the summation of an infinite converging series of a pattern of numbers, such as the limit of 1+(1/2)+(1/4)+(1/8)…= 2. By considering the state of motion of a mass-point in an infinitely short time under the influence of an external force, he developed rules for finding areas under algebraic curves [integration], such as the hyperbola, and finding tangents to algebraic curves [differentiation], which he recognized as inverse processes. That is, differentiating the integral of a function results in a return to that function.
Newton discovered that colors arose from the separation, rather than a modification, of white light, that is natural sunlight. He did this using a prism to dissect the white light into its spectrum of constituent colors and then using a prism and lens to recombine the colors to reconstitute white light. The spectrum was the same as that of a rainbow. He determined the angle of refraction of each color by beaming white light through a prism, and then through a hole in a board which isolated one color, to another prism. When he discovered that all colors reflect from a mirror at the same angle, he invented and built the reflecting telescope, which used a parabolic concave mirror and a flat mirror instead of a convex lens, thereby eliminating the distortions and rainbow coloring around the edges that resulted from the refraction of different colors at different angles. He deemed a ray of light to consist of a rapidly moving stream of atomic particles, rather than Robert Hooke's pulses or Christian Huygens' waves, because shadows showed a sharp boundary between the light and the absence of light. He reasoned that if light was made up of pulses or waves, it could spread around obstacles or corners as sound seemed to do. He approximated the speed of sound by timing echoes in corridors of various lengths.
Newton was methodical and combined the inductive and deductive methods of inquiry, first making observations, and then generalizing them into a theory, and finally deducing consequences from the theory which could be tested by observation. He carried mathematization of data from experiments as far as possible.
Newton theorized that the same gravity force that pulled an apple down from a tree extended out to the moon to hold it in its orbit around the earth. He saw a connection between these movements by imagining a cannon on a mountain shooting a series of cannonballs parallel to the earth's surface. The first shot has only a tiny charge of explosive, and the cannonball barely makes it out of the muzzle before falling to the ground. The second shot is propelled by a larger charge, and follows a parabolic arc as it falls. The next shots, fired with increasingly more propellant, eventually disappear over the horizon as they fall. Lastly, with enough gunpowder, a speeding cannonball would completely circle the earth without hitting it. By extrapolating from these ever faster projectiles, he opined that the moon was held in its orbit by the same earth force that operated on the projectiles. He correlated the moon's orbit with the measured acceleration of gravity on the surface of the earth. He put various substances with different masses and weights into the shell of a pendulum and observed that the pendulum had the same period [time for one oscillation] and fell at the same rate as free-falling objects. Then he formulated the idea that the ultimate agent of nature was a force acting between bodies rather than a moving body itself. Gravity did not act in proportion to the surfaces of bodies, but in proportion to quantity of matter. Gravity penetrated to the very center of all bodies without diminution by the body. Gravity's force extended to immense distances and decreased in exact proportion to the square of the distance.
Newton opined that an object moves because of external forces on it rather than by forces internal to the object. These are his three laws of motion. 1) He connected the concepts of force and acceleration with a new concept, that of mass. Mass is a quantity intrinsic to an object that determines how it responds to forces, such as the force of gravity. The greater the mass of a body, the stronger the force of gravity on it, and the more difficult it is to get it moving. He found that the acceleration of a body by a force is inversely proportional to its mass, and formulated the equation that force equals mass multiplied by acceleration. So if a force acts on a planet, it produces a change in velocity that is proportional to the force and in the same direction as the force.2) His law of inertia is that any body, persists in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless affected by an outside force. 3) His next law is that when a body A exerts a force on a body B, then B also exerts a force on A which is equal in amount but opposite in direction. This means that forces that operate between different parts of a planet produce no net force upon the whole planet, so that the mass of a planet can be treated as if it is concentrated at a point.