Is the story of the apple falling really true?

Shortly after finishing college, while living on his family's farm, English mathematician Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree and wondered if the force that caused it to fall, gravity, also applied to orbiting bodies in space, such as the Moon. Why did they not fall away, instead of remaining in an orbital path? Prior to this time, gravity had been thought of as a force that only functioned on Earth. Newton explained the movement of orbiting planets as the result of motion along a straight line combined with the gravitational pull of the Sun. Newton put aside his notes for seventeen years, until astronomer Edmond Halley convinced him to write up his results. Three years after that, Newton's book was published.