John Couch Adams: The place was resettled by Puritans in 1634. Adams Mansion Natural History Site preserves the home of the Adams family (including presidents John and John Quincy Adams) of whom four generations lived here. The first (horsedrawn) railroad in the United States was built here (1826) to haul granite.
Stone for building the Bunker Hill Monument was carried by this railroad. The famous Quincy Granite was used in building King's Chapel, Boston, 1752. Other buildings of historic interest include the Dorothy Quincy house in which she was married to John Hancock (a native of Quincy), and the Edmund Quincy homestead (1685). These buildings are preserved as museums. The 2nd and the 6th presidents of the United States—John and John Quincy Adams—are buried in a crypt under the First Congregational Church, the "Stone Temple." The Adams Academy occupies the site of John Hancock's home.
Newtonian Theory: Success and Problems. For hundreds of years, Newtonian mechanics was so unfailingly successful that it was regarded as the model for all physical theories. Perhaps its most spectacular success was the prediction of the existence of the planet Neptune. Before its discovery astronomers had noted that Uranus, the outermost planet then known, was observed to move in a way different from that predicted by applying Newton's law of gravitation to the interaction between Uranus and the sun and other planets. The British mathematician John Couch Adams and the French mathematician U. J. J.
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