About newton.org.uk

newton.org.uk had its origins at CERN in the summer of 1994 when I realised the WWW gave me the opportunity to publish material about Newton - something I had wanted to do since 1990. The first pages were made publically available in late September 1994 under the title A page about Sir Isaac Newton, including the Map of Newtonian Places which has survived with few changes. There were also two of the poetic quotations and a page about Trinity College with the full Loggan picture and the portion showing Newton's rooms. At that point I had not found any other pages about Newton and there were only four links to other sites.

Initially I was going to write a biographical sketch of Newton but when I started to find good quality biographies appearing on the web (I think Rouse Ball's was the first I found) I decided to concentrate on the framework of the Bibliography, Chronology, and Places, and rely on a (hopefully) comprehensive list of other WWW pages to supply biographical information.

The site was quickly renamed to Newtonia, which was meant to be similar to the commonly used Newtoniana (cf Victoriana) and to have connotations of material about Newton. (Occasionally I have seen the word Newtonia used elsewhere.) Previous ideas for a name were plays on WWW and W3: NEwwwTON and New3ton - both rejected as soon as I wrote them down.

After 5 years at CERN, I moved the site to Freeserve and then in September 1999, with the cost of .uk domains falling dramatically, I registered the name newton.org.uk and am now intending to renovate the site and broaden its scope considerably, to include more general history of science information and a comprehensive catalogue of links.

I should say something about Newton: the Man which I first came across in early 1995. In this book Richard de Villamil describes how he discovered two inventories of Newton's library, the remnant of the books and the inventory of Newton's estate at his death. Hardly anything is known about this remarkable man who contributed so much to Newtonian studies, as a retired colonel in his eighties. My initial astonishment at this is a large part of my motivation for reproducing the book.

If newton.org.uk were to be dedicated to anything, it would be to Richard Westfall's Never at Rest which began my own "voyage through Newton's strange seas of thought" in 1987.