Lord Henry Cavendish in 1798 (about a century after Newton) performed experiments with a torsion balance to figure out the value of G. It’s a very small number, so Cavendish had to carefully calibrate his experiment! The reason the number is so small is because we don’t see the effects of gravity until objects are very massive, like a moon or a planet in size.
Please login or register to read the rest of this content.