While there are thousands of fruits in the world, “Apple” seems to have been in the forefront for many centuries, garnering significant attention and attraction which continues to this day on scales that are bigger. It would be interesting to go through some of the key moments in the human evolution that are closely associated with the apple!
Eden Garden
We can first go to the Garden of Eden to see what transpired there. The Biblical reference (Genesis 3) describes the command of God to Adam and Eve, to not eat the fruit of a specific tree. However, the command gets violated by them, spurred by the temptation triggered by the serpent’s cunning talk. For this disobedience, God curses them as well as the serpent for its part. While there has been no direct reference to an “apple” in the earlier accounts, it is curious to see how it got embroiled. Around 4th century A.D. Pope Damasus asked his leading scholar Jerome to translate the Hebrew Bible to Latin. In Latin, evil is malum and an apple is called malus and so, either a pun or mistranslation led apple to the hotseat!
Paradise Lost
The great English poet of the 17th century, John Milton published his masterpiece “Paradise Lost” (1667 A.D.) which is a narration of the above biblical story in about 10,000 lines and originally organized into ten volumes. Milton begins his work with the below verses, which initially has a generic reference to a fruit. But Milton brings an explicit reference to “apple” at least twice in the subsequent narration!
“Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe”
Law of Gravitation
Almost the same time, when Milton was engrossed with Paradise Lost, there happened a “fall” of an apple at Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham, Lincolnshire, England, which led to the “rise” of gravitational theory and Newton’s laws 😊 While there could be exaggeration in the precise details of apple falling on Newton’s head, he had himself often narrated how he was inspired to formulate theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree. It reached Voltaire (through Newton’s niece Catherine Barton) who then wrote about it in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727)
The nutritious Apple
Then comes the English proverb “An Apple a Day keeps the Doctor away”, originating around 1866 and coined around 1913. While a good number of positives are enumerated about regular consumption of apple, research and statistical data are yet to reconfirm if the doctor is indeed kept away!
And now to the iPhone!
Oh yeah, seeing the title would have led quite a few of you to think that it is an article on the mobile phone 😊 So, let us wrap it up with how I got into “Apple – the iPhone”. A staunch android user for several years and extremely comfortable with the ease-of-use of such phones, I was gently nudged into this arena by my daughters, starting with IPod to IPad to Iphone. To my surprise, the latest versions have overcome most of such adoption glitches. True that, there are couple of powerful features that I still miss, they are outweighed by being in the Apple bandwagon!!
References :
https://www.alimentarium.org/en/fact-sheet/eve-and-forbidden-fruit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/isaac-newton-who-he-was-why-apples-are-falling/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_apple_tree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolsthorpe_Manor
https://www.medanta.org/patient-education-blog/mythbuster-an-apple-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away
