This photograph of the interior of Independence Hall in Philadelphia was taken in 1900.

This room is the place where the Declaration of Independence was signed.

LOC

It is a regal room. I wonder if they chose this place as the most worthy location or if it became hallowed after our Declaration of Independence was signed there.

Fateful things are far more likely to happen in a beautiful room like this than in a dirty or uninspired location. But they can happen anywhere. And if that place is not lovely now and the event is important enough, people will make the place beautiful in the future.

There are several famous garages near where I live that have become part of the legend of the Bay Area.  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computers in 1976 in a Los Altos garage. There’s also the HP garage in Palo Alto where the first Hewlett Packard computers were assembled in 1938.

LOC

John Trumbull’s depiction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence conveys the dramatic moment when the signing took place.

The founders knew they were going to sign an important document that day. They would have been on edge and excited but it wasn’t as if they were wearing special costumes because they were doing something of great importance. They were dressed nicely in their usual attire. The passing of time and the changes in fashion infuses the picture with an extra bit of mystique that would be absent if the founders were depicted in Tom Ford suits and modern hairstyles.

But not everyone is aware that something of great magnitude will happen to them and dresses for the occasion.

Sir Isaac Newton was sitting in the garden of his family home, Woolsthorpe Manor, in Lincolnshire, England when the fatal apple fell and inspired his universal theory of gravity.

Did you know Newton’s apple tree is still there?  Not a tree like the one in his garden; the same tree is still alive!

ancienttreeforum.org.uk

The official depiction of Newton shows him looking suitably grave and contemplative, while dressed at the height of fashion, circa 1666.

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

While it seems more likely he would make a discovery of this magnitude while looking picturesque, I doubt Newton looked quite like that at the time. You see how boggy the area around that tree is.  He wouldn’t dress like that if he was just sitting around in his garden, would he? Some accounts say he was sitting on the ground and the apple fell on his head. Not in that outfit!

I reckon some license was taken on this historical print. One of Sir Isaac Newton’s biographers quoted the great man late in life as saying, “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Imagine Sir Isaac Newton earnestly describing himself as a distracted child who frittered his life away, playing at the seashore.

This quote is a good example of the curiosity that guides the lives of so many great people who have shaped the world we inhabit. They have Curiosity and a grand sense of Possibility. And, if you can procure a sharp outfit and a breathtaking hall, garden, or garage setting, how could something momentous fail to happen? So ends this stream of consciousness.

Happy Fourth of July!