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The free school at Grantham, founded by King Henry VI, where Newton was educated as a boy.

Newton attended two little day schools, and went to the King’s School of Grantham when he was about twelve, lodging at the house of an apothecary . A seventeenth-century writer described him as a “sober, silent, and thinking lad,” who was set apart from his school-fellows by his precocity and inventiveness. He made some remarkable mechanical toys and models, such as a windmill, a waterclock, and a carriage moved by the operation of a handle by the person who sat in it. He studied how paper kites could be made to fly higher and be more maneuverable. The paper lanterns he attached to them frightened country folk, who thought they were comets. He marked the passage of the sun in the yard of his lodging and made sundials. Although time spent like this sometimes made him lose his place in class, he was clever enough to regain it as soon as he set his mind to it.

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