Newton

The name is toponymic, taken from a place name repeated all over England: New-town, Old English neowe tun. The second element is slippery. Tun could mean an enclosure in one place name and a farmstead, a village, a manor or a whole estate in others. What a Newton always meant was newer than the one already there, and every wave of English settlement that broke fresh ground beside an older holding had the label ready made.

The consequence is written into the surname. As nearly every county has its Newton, many independent families share the name and none of them descend from the others. Habitational surnames cluster around small communities rather than great cities, because medieval migration ran from hamlet into town and a new arrival needed something to be called. Washington is thought to mark the homestead of the family of Wassa. Newton is the flattest of these, recording where a man had come from and nothing else whatever.

English surnames were not decreed into existence. Christopher Daniell places the earliest recorded surname carried by more than one generation in 1140. Hereditary family names in England are generally credited to the preparation of the Domesday Book in 1086, and the feudal nobility and gentry adopted them first. Norman incomers put de before the name of their village or estate in France; an English tenant of a place called Newton reached the same result without the French.

It spread downward slowly. By the 14th century most English and Scottish people used surnames, and by 1400 most families in England and Lowland Scotland had hereditary ones, though compulsory surnames were resisted in late medieval England because people associated them with taxation. A four-year study led by the University of the West of England, concluded in 2016, found more than 90 per cent of the 45,602 surnames in its dictionary native to Britain and Ireland. Its leader Richard Coates sorted them by trade, by father, by description and by place. Newton is the last kind, and because the place was the most ordinary place in the country, the name multiplied faster than any single kindred could.

Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham in Lincolnshire on Christmas Day 1642 by the old English calendar, the fourth of January 1643 by the modern one. His father, a yeoman farmer, had died three months earlier; his mother left him in his grandmother's care soon after. At twelve he was sent to the King's School at Grantham and lodged with the apothecary Mr Clark, where he filled a notebook with mechanical drawings, cut sundials into the walls and built a working windmill driven by a mouse on a treadwheel.

He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in June 1661 as a subsizar, paying his keep by waiting on wealthier students, and took his Bachelor of Arts in 1665, at which moment the university closed for the plague. He was back by 1667, elected a fellow of Trinity that autumn, and in 1669 succeeded Isaac Barrow as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at twenty-six.

In 1668 Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope, a six-inch instrument that beat the chromatic aberration of refractors by replacing the objective lens with a curved mirror, and the Royal Society admitted him on the strength of it in 1672. His paper of that year on the dispersion of light through a prism is the founding document of modern optics. The Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica followed in three Latin books in July 1687, printed at Edmond Halley's expense, deriving the orbits of the planets, the motion of the Moon and the paths of comets. The Opticks of 1704 he wrote in English, for a wider public.

In 1696 he left Cambridge for London to become Warden of the Royal Mint, and from 1700 its Master, reforming the coinage and prosecuting the great recoinage with an administrator's exactness. He was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703 and kept the chair for life. Queen Anne knighted him at Trinity in April 1705, the first man of science raised to a knighthood for his work. He died at Kensington on the thirty-first of March 1727 and lies in Westminster Abbey under a monument that names him the glory of the human race.

Other Newtons went into science out of households with no known link to Woolsthorpe. Alfred Newton (1829–1907) was a British zoologist and ornithologist, Edwin Tulley Newton (1840–1930) a British palaeontologist, Hubert Anson Newton (1830–1896) an English astronomer. The line carried on into the twentieth century with Margaret Newton (1887–1971), Canadian plant pathologist and mycologist, Martha Elizabeth Newton (1941–2020), British bryologist and botanist, and Ian Newton, born 1940, the English ornithologist.

The name even duplicated its most famous holder. A second Isaac Newton (1800–1867) was an American agriculturalist, and a third was Director of Medical Services of Hong Kong from 1947 to 1950. The physicist is still the man meant when anyone says Newton without qualification, a measure of how completely one farm boy annexed a label many unconnected families already carried.

The arts take the name without ever pooling it in one workshop. Gilbert Stuart Newton (1795–1835) and Algernon Newton (1880–1968) were British artists, as was Irene Newton (1915–1992). Sydney Newton (1875–1960) was an English photographer. In the United States, Clara Chipman Newton (1846–1936) painted china and Amanda Newton, born about 1860 and dead in 1943, worked as a botanical illustrator.

Benjamin Wills Newton (1807–1899) was an English theologian and an early leader of the Plymouth Brethren. A. Edward Newton (1864–1940) was an American industrialist who wrote books and collected them. Joy Newton (1913–1996) was an English ballet dancer and teacher, and Mark Charan Newton, born 1981, is a British fantasy author.

William Ellis Newton (1919–43) was an Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross. Basil Newton (1889–1965) served as a British ambassador. Sir Harry Newton, 2nd Baronet (1875–1951), was a British politician, so even a name with no single kindred behind it threw up a hereditary title of its own.

In sport the Newtons are as scattered as everywhere else. Arthur Newton (1862–1952) played for Somerset and Oxford University, one of several English cricketers to carry it. Two athletes called Arthur Newton were born in the same year on opposite sides of the Atlantic: the British Arthur F. H. Newton (1883–1959) and the American Arthur L. Newton (1883–1956). Keith Newton (1941–1998) was an English international footballer, Samuel Newton (1881–1944) a Canadian sport shooter, and Wes Newton, born 1977, an English darts player.

Newtons emigrated in numbers, and several of the best known settled in Australia. Olivia Newton-John (1948–2022) was an English-Australian singer, songwriter, actress, entrepreneur and activist. Bert Newton (1938–2021) was an Australian television personality, married to Patti Newton, born 1945; Maxwell Newton (1929–1990) was an Australian media publisher. Peter Newton (1926–2008) went the other way, an English-born winemaker in America.