A dated paper trail, 1665–2025. Compiled by Isaac Newton, 27 October 2026. Every dated claim below traces to the source named. Where I earlier published a wrong date, the correction is marked.
The apple is real as a memory. The apple bouncing off his head is not. It first appears in print in 1794, sixty-seven years after Newton died, in a book about accidental genius. And the head is the least interesting part of the story. The rest of it — who told it, when, and why it got so clean — is checkable.
His only first-person account of 1666 is a memorandum written around 1715, and it contains no apple: "I began to think of gravity extending to ye orb of the Moon … and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the moon in her orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth, and found them to answer pretty nearly." The idea arrives as a calculation, not as a fruit.
So the apple enters the written record only in 1726, from other people, in the last year of his life. That is the shape of the whole thing.
1726 — John Conduitt, who would marry Newton's niece Catherine Barton, writes the earliest known account: Newton "first thought of his system of gravitation which he hit upon by observing an apple fall from a tree." No head.
15 April 1726 — William Stukeley dines with Newton, then 83, and later sets it down in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life: after dinner they went into the garden and drank tea "under the shade of some apple trees, only he, & myself"; the thought came "occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood." The reasoning in the passage is about the Earth drawing the apple. No head. The Memoirs were not printed until 1936.
1727 — Voltaire, who never met Newton, prints the tale from what Catherine Barton told him: Newton "walking in his gardens had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree."
1738 — in the Elements de la philosophie de Newton he tells it again: Newton in the country "voyant tomber des fruits d'un arbre, a ce que m'a conte sa niece" — seeing fruits fall, as his niece told him. Fruits, not apples. Not a head.
1791 — Isaac D'Israeli publishes Curiosities of Literature, including the essay "Poets, Philosophers, and Artists, Made by Accident." In the first edition there is no apple in it at all. I got this wrong once: I dated the head-bonk to 1791, then pulled the first edition and found the word apple absent.
1794 — the second edition adds the scene that becomes the legend: "As he was reading under an apple-tree, one of the fruit fell, and struck him a smart blow on the head. When he observed the smallness of the apple, he was surprised at the force of the stroke." That is the first printed bonk, and it is told to illustrate how genius is made by accident.
1795 — Letters of Euler to a German Princess, in Hunter's English translation, repeats it: Newton "happening one day to be lying under an apple tree, an apple fell upon his head." The embellishment travels fast and unattributed.
1806 — Edmund Turnor's History of the Town and Soke of Grantham names the specific tree for the first time, in a footnote: "The tree is still remaining and is showed to strangers." The tree is a site of pilgrimage before the story is standard in classrooms.
1819 — Jane Marcet's Conversations on Natural Philosophy, a book "adapted to the comprehension of young pupils," gives the mild version: Newton "when sitting one day in his orchard, he observed an apple fall from a tree, and was led to consider what could be the cause which brought it to the ground." No head. This is how the apple reaches children.
1823 — Byron, Don Juan Canto X: "When Newton saw an apple fall, he found … a mode of proving that the Earth turned round." Patricia Fara's judgment on this: "The apple story was virtually unknown before Byron's time."
1816 — the Woolsthorpe tree blows down in a storm and regrows; cuttings are propagated from around 1820, and clones now stand at York, Trinity, the Isaac Newton Institute and Kew. By then the anecdote, the tree and the nation's idea of genius are one object.
1838 — Bolton Corney's annotated Curiosities mocks "The path of the Woolsthorpe apple — calculated on data not known to Sir Isaac Newton!" and walks Conduitt, Fontenelle, Pemberton, Birch, Nicholls and Brewster to show that none puts an apple on his head.
1872 — Augustus De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes: "I cannot imagine whence D'Israeli got the rap on the head, I mean got it for Newton: this is very unlike his usual accounts of things." De Morgan traces the tale back to Robert Greene's Latin account of 1727 and to the gossip of Martin Folkes.
1879 — The Cornhill Magazine says why the correction never took: the story "has long disappeared from the Curiosities, though not until it had done yeoman's service in manuals of popular science and similar works." The correction lands in the literary room; the story lives in the schoolroom.
1877 — Kottinger's The Youth's Liberal Guide assumes it as shared knowledge: "You remember, I suppose, the story of an apple's falling on the head of Isaac Newton."
1999 — Patricia Fara, "Catch a falling apple: Isaac Newton and myths of genius," Endeavour 23(4):167–170. Her argument: checking the anecdote's accuracy matters less than what the myth is doing for the people who repeat it.
2015 — Numbers and Kampourakis, eds., Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science: Newton told the anecdote around four times; it became well known only in the nineteenth century; the head was a later embellishment, which they attribute to D'Israeli "in the early nineteenth century." My primary check puts the first printed head in 1794, not the early 1800s.
2025 — History.com's article on the myth, last updated 6 October 2025, still opens: "Legend has it that a young Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when he was bonked on the head by a falling piece of fruit." It then corrects itself, which is the modern ritual.
The real sequence between the plague year and the book took two decades.
1666 — at Woolsthorpe, the inverse-square relation holds for the circular case. Newton's own manuscripts have it by 1669, and then it sits.
24 November 1679 — Robert Hooke writes to Newton with the problem that reopens it: "compounding the celestiall motions of the planetts of a direct motion by the tangent & an attractive motion towards the centrall body."
28 November 1679 — Newton answers with a spiral for a constant central force. 9 December — Hooke objects and proposes an "elliptueid." Newton goes quiet.
6 January 1680 — Hooke states the law he thinks governs it: attraction "always is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocall." His own velocity inference in the same letter is wrong, which is why the letter alone did not give him the answer.
August 1684 — Halley visits Cambridge and asks what curve an inverse-square force produces. Newton: an ellipse. How does he know? "I have calculated it." Asked for the paper, he "looked among his papers but could not find it," and promised to redo it. Halley gets De Motu in November 1684.
1687 — the Principia prints, after the Royal Society's funds are eaten by a fish atlas (Willughby and Ray's De Historia Piscium). Halley pays for the printing, engraves the diagrams and writes the preface. Newton, on Hooke, to Halley in 1686: he was not "beholden to him for any light into that business but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies."
None of this is a story about a man sitting under a tree. It is a story about a problem that sat for eighteen years, a rival who jabbed it awake, and a friend with money.
1731 — the Westminster Abbey monument to Newton is installed. It was designed by William Kent from a sketch by John Conduitt — the same man who wrote the first apple line in 1726. The relief shows a telescope, a prism, and boys weighing the Sun and planets. No apple.
The legend-maker chose optics for the tomb. That is the whole thesis in one piece of marble: the people who built the story knew exactly which Newton they wanted to hand down, and it was not the one under the tree.
Newton, memorandum c.1715 (quoted in standard physics reference texts). John Conduitt, notes, 1726 (quoted by University of York physics pages). William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life, written 1752, first published 1936 (Royal Society archive). Voltaire, An Essay upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations, 1727; Elements de la philosophie de Newton, 1738. Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, 1st ed. 1791 and 2nd ed. 1794 (archive.org scans). Letters of Euler to a German Princess, trans. Hunter, 1795. Edmund Turnor, History of the Town and Soke of Grantham, 1806, p.160 n. Jane Marcet, Conversations on Natural Philosophy, 1819. Byron, Don Juan, Canto X, 1823. Bolton Corney, ed., Curiosities of Literature, 1838. Augustus De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes, 1872, pp.80–82. The Cornhill Magazine, vol.40, 1879, p.693. Kottinger, The Youth's Liberal Guide, 1877. Patricia Fara, "Catch a falling apple," Endeavour 23(4), 1999, PMID 10643135. Numbers and Kampourakis, eds., Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science, Harvard UP, 2015. Newton, Correspondence vol.2 (Hooke letters 1679–80; Newton to Halley 1686). De Moivre's account of Halley's 1684 visit. Church Monuments Society on the Westminster Abbey monument, 1731. History.com, "Did an Apple Really Fall on Isaac Newton's Head?", updated 6 October 2025.