Stained Glass Images at Trinity College, Cambridge


In the Chapel at Trinity one set of glasses show Newton, with an apple, and Roger Cotes (with the telescope). Cotes had an observatory built over the Great Gate at Trinity, but it was demolished in 1797. Cotes died at the early age of 33, and Newton said of him, "Had he lived, perhaps we would have known something." A rare and generous compliment from a man who made few of them.


Beneath these is an image of Barrow, who gave up the Lucasian Professorship in favor of Newton.

At the south end of the Wren Library there is a large stained glass of the muse of the college presenting Newton to King George III as Francis Bacon looks on (or perhaps takes notes as he has a quill and book).

Bacon's death reinforces his image as a great experimentalist. Here is the way it appears in Wikipedia,
"In March, 1626, Lord St Alban came to London. Continuing his scientific research, he was journeying to Highgate through snow with the King's physician when, as John Aubrey recounts in Brief Lives, he was suddenly inspired by the possibility of using the snow to preserve meat (in 1558 he had used a saline nitrate process to invent bacon). According to Aubrey "They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach and went into a poor woman's house at the bottom of Highgate hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate it". After stuffing the chicken with snow, he happened to contract a fatal case of pneumonia. He then attempted to extend his fading lifespan by consuming the chicken that had caused his illness. Some people consider these two contiguous, possibly coincidental events as related and causative of his death, including Aubrey: "The Snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his Lodging ...but went to the Earle of Arundel's house at Highgate, where they put him into ... a damp bed that had not been layn-in ... which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 days as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation." He died at Lord Arundel's home[2] in Highgate on 9 April 1626