Admitted to the University of Cambridge on 1661, Newton at first failed to shine as a student. A practical child, he enjoyed constructing models, including a tiny mill that actually ground flour-powered by a mouse running in a wheel.

'But it was enough to develop space travel.' Isaac Newton, Underachiever? Born two to three months prematurely on January 4, 1643, in a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, Isaac Newton was a tiny baby who, according to his mother, could have fit inside a quart mug. 'His theory of gravity wouldn't have got us global positioning satellites,' said Jeremy Gray, a mathematical historian at the Milton Keynes, U.K.-based Open University. 'He showed that the force that makes the apple fall and that holds us on the ground is the same as the force that keeps the moon and planets in their orbits,' said Martin Rees, a former president of Britain's Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of science, which was once headed by Newton himself. Legend has it that Isaac Newton formulated gravitational theory in 1665 or 1666 after watching an apple fall and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or even upward.

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