The Law of Gravity.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 591.

One day while Newton was sitting in the garden under an apple tree he saw an apple fall to the ground. Of course the fall of an apple is a very common thing. A great many people before Newton had seen an apple fall to the ground, but they had never taken the trouble to investigate such an everyday occurrence. Newton was the first man to ask: “Why does an apple fall to the ground? “

He thought the matter over for a long time. It took him many years to solve the problem. At last he found out that the earth pulls all the things towards its centre, and that was the reason why the apple had fallen towards the earth and not away from it. Newton also found out that the sun attracts the earth and all the planets, and that each planet attracts other planets, just in the same way as the earth attracts apples.

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Once Mark Twain and a friend of his were going abroad together. It happened that an American editor, who knew them both, was going abroad on the same ship. When the ship was a few days out, the editor invited some people to his cabin for drinks. Mark Twain and his friend were the first to be invited. The editor knew that they were both very witty, so he told them, before the party, that he hoped they would each make a speech before the guests left the cabin.

When the time for speeches came, Mark Twain was the first to speak. He spoke for about a quarter of an hour and everybody laughed a lot. Then the editor asked Twain's friend to make a speech. He stood up and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, before this party we prepared our speeches together and we decided, just for fun, that Mark Twain would say what I had prepared and I was to say what he had. Well, you've just heard my speech and I thank you for laughing so much. However, I'm afraid I've quite forgotten what he was to say.”

Then Twain's friend sat down and this made everybody laugh again.