How has it come down through time to Gaithersburg, Maryland?
Legend has it that Newton was sitting under an apple tree in his garden, trying to understand the motion of the planets. The apple fell, and inspired him to conceive the theory of gravity. He thought that what makes the apple fall toward the earth is not different from what holds Earth to the sun, and the moon to Earth. To some degree, you could think that, even as this apple is falling down, the earth is moving up to meet it. Proportionally to their masses, that is—the earth does not move very much. But he realized that gravitation exists, and it’s a two-way street. Newton’s original tree died in the early 1800s. A cutting was made, however, and the US Department of Agriculture eventually obtained a few scions from the descendents of that cutting. There are various stories about how this happened. But one of the seedlings was planted at the original location of the National Bureau of Standards—”Technology” was added to the name later—in Washington. Our tree is a cutting from that tree
