Cambridge University digitise rare Newton manuscripts

After spending hundreds of years hidden from view, over 4,000 pages of Isaac Newton’s personal notebooks and manuscripts have been unleashed into the public domain as part of an ambitious plan by Cambridge University to digitise its library.

The physical library currently hold the largest collection of Newton’s work found anywhere in the world and amongst the online offerings are some very rare items, including Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica.

This new resource will give people around the world the chance to see how one of history’s most influential scientist’s developed his revolutionary theories and experiments.

But before you decide to indulge in one of Newton’s notebooks, it is worth remembering that much of the work is written in Latin, the scientific language of the age.

Work on the project started 2010 but it wasn’t until summer this year that the first Newton collection had been photographed and uploaded to the site.

The University Library currently houses over eight million books and periodicals, along with maps and manuscripts that take up more than a hundred miles of shelves. The Newton collection is the only first of many due to be uploaded onto the online Cambridge Digital Library.