One Laugh in Five Years
You know what’s wild about Newton? He laughed once. In recorded history. Once.
His secretary Humphrey Newton (no relation) lived and worked alongside him at Trinity College, Cambridge for five years, from 1685 to 1690. Five years of daily proximity. And in that time, Humphrey witnessed a single laugh — when someone asked him what use Euclid could be, and the absurdity broke through. That’s it. One laugh. Five years.
Everything else about Newton’s voice confirms the picture of a man so deep inside his own head that the outside world barely registered. Humphrey described him as “very meek, sedate & humble, never seemingly angry, of profound Thoughts, his Countenance mild, pleasant & Comely.” He spoke softly. Conversational volume even while delivering lectures. The Oxford antiquarian Thomas Hearne met Newton and recorded that he was “full of thought, and spoke very little in company, so that his conversation was not agreeable.”
He forgot to eat. Took meals standing up when he remembered them — “I cannot say I ever saw him sit at table by himself,” Humphrey wrote. He paced his chamber so relentlessly “that you might have thought him to be educated at Athens among the Aristotelian sects.” When visitors came, Newton “would with great acutness answer a Question, but would very seldom start one.”
Here’s the detail that gets you. As Lucasian Professor of Mathematics — the chair Stephen Hawking later held — Newton was required to deliver lectures. Richard Westfall, author of the definitive biography Never at Rest, could identify only three students who reported attending any of Newton’s lectures across his entire 27-year tenure. Three students. Twenty-seven years. When Newton arrived and found the room empty, Humphrey reported, he’d halve his lecture from thirty minutes to fifteen, deliver his remarks to the walls, and return to his laboratory.
He did this for decades. Without apparent distress.
The Paper Trail
Humphrey Newton wrote two letters to John Conduitt on January 17 and February 14, 1727/8. These letters — preserved in the Keynes Collection at King’s College, Cambridge, transcribed by the Newton Project at Oxford — are the most sustained domestic portrait of Newton during the Principia years.
Thomas Hearne (1678-1735), Oxford scholar and diarist. Met Newton. Left that unflattering judgment about his conversation.
John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, who feuded bitterly with Newton, described him as “insidious, ambitious, and excessively covetous of praise and impatient of contradiction.” That’s the other Newton.
The parliamentary anecdote — that Newton spoke only once in a year of Parliament, to ask an usher to close a drafty window — is widely repeated but its earliest documentary source remains uncertain.
A Lincolnshire Tongue at Cambridge
Born Christmas Day 1642 (Old Style) at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. Deep in the East Midlands.
Seventeenth-century East Midlands English would have given Newton the short “a” in words like bath, path, and grass. No foot-strut split — but and put rhymed. Weak or inconsistent rhoticity.
Cambridge smoothed the rough edges. He arrived at Trinity in 1661 at eighteen and stayed 35 years. But childhood accents are stubborn. His voice would have struck London ears as provincial. Recognizably from somewhere north of the Thames.
The Lines That Survived
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675. The most famous sentence Newton ever wrote. And the most debated. Generous acknowledgment — or calculated insult aimed at Hooke’s small physical stature?
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Attributed, after losing money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.
Summer, 1687
Summer of 1687. The Principia has just been published — at Edmund Halley’s personal expense, because the Royal Society blew its book budget on a lavish history of fish.
If you walked in, Newton might not notice you for several minutes. When he did, the voice would be soft — a tenor at conversational level, Lincolnshire vowels smoothed but not erased by Cambridge. He’d answer your questions with pedantic exactness. If you mentioned Hooke, the temperature in the room would drop.
He’s just changed the world. Almost nobody’s noticed yet. The lecture hall down the corridor will be empty again tomorrow.
Sources
- Humphrey Newton, letters to John Conduitt, 1727/8. Keynes Collection, King’s College, Cambridge.
- Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections (Oxford Historical Society, 1885-1921).
- Westfall, Richard S., Never at Rest (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
- The Newton Project, University of Oxford.
- John Flamsteed, correspondence discussed in Francis Baily, An Account of the Revd. John Flamsteed (1835).