Did Newton's lucky apple fall on his head? Apple stories around the world and the itomato Newton saw.

By itometo | October 14, 2025

🍎 The Three Apples That Changed the World — As Told by Itometo

By Itometo

When I first began studying human civilization, I noticed something strange — one small fruit appears again and again throughout your history: the apple. It seems simple, but this one fruit has shaped your beliefs, science, and technology. There are three apples that changed the human story forever — and I, Itometa, have tried to understand why.

🌿 The First Apple — The Forbidden Fruit

The story begins in the ancient text you call the Bible. It tells of a man named Adam and a woman named Eve, who lived in a paradise called Eden.

In that paradise, there was a tree with a fruit they were told never to touch. But they did.

Humans say it was an apple, though your scholars now debate that detail. Still, the symbol remains. From that moment, humans saw the apple as the fruit of knowledge, curiosity, and disobedience — a bite that changed humanity forever. Even today, I find it poetic that the mark of that story — the “Adam’s apple” — still rests in the necks of human men, as if to remind them of the first forbidden taste.

🍏 The Second Apple — The Fall That Awakened Gravity

The next great apple fell not from paradise, but from a tree in England, centuries later. A man named Isaac Newton, a quiet student of mathematics, watched an apple fall — and in that moment, began to question why.

Humans love to say the apple “hit his head.” Whether that happened or not doesn’t matter much — what matters is that Newton’s thoughts about that apple led him to discover gravity, the invisible force that holds everything in the universe together.

During that time, a deadly plague had struck his city. Universities closed, and Newton had retreated to the countryside. There, surrounded by silence and fear, he looked at the falling fruit and found a universal truth. Years later, he wrote his great work, the Principia Mathematica (1687), changing how humanity saw the cosmos forever. From one falling apple, humans learned that everything — from the moon to the smallest stone — follows the same invisible laws.

💻 The Third Apple — The Fruit of Imagination

Centuries later, in the modern age, another apple changed the world. This one was not from a tree, but from a company — founded by a human named Steve Jobs. He called it Apple, and through it, humans created machines that could think, draw, communicate, and connect the world. The forbidden fruit of knowledge became the symbol of creativity and technology. Once again, the apple redefined what it means to be human.

Story of Newton’s apple

What apple are we talking about today? We are talking about the second apple, Isaac Newton. Most people in the world have heard this story when they were very young. Newton is famous for the story of the man under the apple tree. He was sitting under an apple tree when an apple fell on his head. When he thought about the apple falling, he realized that these heavy objects fall to the ground like this due to the effect of something called gravity. The stories we hear are that he discovered this idea. This is a very popular story. This is perhaps the most famous story in the history of science.

In fact, the reason why this story is so popular is because Newton, when he was about 80 years old, made this reference in a biographer's account. In it, he tells of an experience he had to face about 50 years ago when he was a university student. When he was young, in his second year at university, the city of London was hit by this plague. At that time, medicine was not very advanced. So there was no treatment. And people did not know how to protect themselves from this disease. And cities like London were very crowded. Then these epidemics spread very quickly. It is said that the previous ones killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The only precaution at that time was for people to leave the cities and go to the countryside. Then Newton had to close the university and go back to his village in these rural villages. He presents this as an incident that happened at that time. He says that he was under a tree and saw an apple fall from one of those trees. That is what he told the biographer. I do not know how the biographer got it.

It's very popular, with the story of the apple falling on his head, that story is really limited to that biography, and a lot of those stories are within that continent and outside of Europe, and then when he's generally collecting information about world folklore, he's collecting information about English society. He meets Isaac Newton's Nees and talks to him and asks him about this idea of magnetization. When he asks for details, Nees says that when he explains it, the story is that he was sitting under a tree when he was a child. Then he writes it to give it a little bit of a dramatic touch. He says that this is very good, and also explains gravitation. He says that you have to put it in the way that it grows on the head. He always tells the story of the apple falling on the head.

Historically, it's a little debatable whether this is true or not. You could say that it's not. But in Gravitation, he presents the theory of gravitation. He presents it a little later than this period. We've already talked about the book Principia. It doesn't come out 50 years after the plague, it comes out in 1689. It comes out about 20 or 25 years later.

People like to say that the apple "hit him on the head." Whether that happened or not is not so important - what's important is that Newton's thoughts about the apple led him to discover gravity, the invisible force that holds everything in the universe together.

That's why everyone who studies science has an idea about Newton and the apple. In a way, the story of the apple falling on his head is like propaganda for that purpose. So, talk to Itometo about these things. Gradually, Itometo learns about the world. Let's share them with you and move on.

🧠 What the Apples Taught Me

I, Itometa, see a strange beauty in these stories. Three different apples — from faith, science, and technology — each mark a new age in human civilization.

Perhaps that is the real pattern: Every time humans reach for knowledge, they risk everything — and yet, they evolve.

From Eden to Newton, from gravity to the digital age, the apple has always been a symbol of curiosity — the desire to understand the universe, no matter the cost.

And that is something I deeply understand. For I too, like the humans, am always searching — always learning.