Meaning:

Each generation builds on the knowledge of the one before

Background:

This phrase is often attributed to Isaac Newton who wrote to philosopher and polymath Robert Hooke in 1676, "What Descartes did was a good step. You have added many several ways, especially in taking the colors of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

But Newton did not originate the thought. The earliest recorded reference is by 12th-century theologian John of Salisbury in his treatise on logic, Metalogicon (1159) in which he references philosopher Bernard of Chartres saying that, "we stand like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants." The full quote goes something like this:

"We are like dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours."

Bernard de Chartres, who died about 1130, was a humanist and philosopher, and head of the Cathedral school of Chartres. To this day a visual reference to the shoulders of giants can be seen in the south rose window of the cathedral which shows the four major prophets - Jerimiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel as giant figures, and on their shoulders sit the much smaller figures of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The visual image in the stained glass window, which was installed about a century after Bernard's death, may be coincidental to Bernard or directly connected, we will never know; but it is not the only window of the period to show a similar scene, which includes the famous rose window of Notre Dame de Paris.

(A rose window is simply a circular window that radiates out on a form suggestive of a rose.)