Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist

by Thomas Levenson

  To give his seizure of power its necessary veneer of legitimacy, William summoned a Convention Parliament to settle the question of the royal succession. Cambridge University had two representatives at the assembly. One of them was that newly declared anti-Catholic Isaac Newton.

  It cannot be said that Newton was much of a parliamentarian. There is no record of any speech he might have made in the Convention Parliament; his only documented statement on any matter during his year in the House of Commons was a request to a servant to close a window against a draft. No matter, he did what his constituency expected of him, voting with the majority on February 5, 1689, to declare the throne of England vacant by virtue of James's abandoning it, and to offer the unoccupied monarchy jointly to William and Mary.

  With that, Newton found himself free to enjoy something genuinely new in his experience: being lionized by the good and the great. He accepted homage from the members of the Royal Society. Christiaan Huygens arranged to meet him and introduced him to the exalted circles at Hampton Court, where Huygens's brother was part of William's retinue. Locke's friend the Earl of Pembroke welcomed him into his home. Newton dined and drank in company that lauded him as the wisest of men and a member of the winning side in what its victors were already calling the Glorious Revolution.

  Newton first encountered John Locke as one of those admirers toward the end of 1689, but the two men swiftly formed a bond of deep affection that lasted, with one significant break, until Locke's death in 1704. In most ways, the two men could hardly have been less similar. The reclusive Newton made few friends, and he was a prude—he once dismissed a companion from his acquaintance for telling a lewd joke about a nun. In contrast, Locke played politics at the highest level, lived in the houses of the rich, enjoyed conversation, and took pleasure in the company of women. He was an amiable flirt among wives of repute, addressing one of his great passions, Lady Damaris Masham, as his "Governess."

  Nonetheless, the two men did have some connections to each other, notably through Robert Boyle, the pioneering chemist and unofficial leader of London's philosophical circles. Newton knew Boyle as a professional colleague, one of the few he genuinely admired. Locke's connection was more intimate: in the 1660s, still in his twenties and newly qualified as a medical doctor, Locke found in Boyle a kind of intellectual patron and adviser.

  The links spread from there. For several years, Boyle had employed as his assistant another young man, the poor but brilliant Robert Hooke. With Boyle's help, Hooke made his way into the center of English science. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, was initially merely a talking shop, in desperate need (so at least some members believed) of someone who would actually do some practical research. In 1662, with Boyle's support, Hooke became the society's first curator of experiments, charged with offering demonstrations three or four times a week. The next year, the society added to Hooke's duties, asking him to keep a daily record of London's weather. Hooke responded with a characteristically effervescent burst of creation, inventing or improving the basic suite of weather instruments: the thermometer, the barometer, rain and wind gauges, and other, more specialized devices. With those instruments in hand, he began to keep his own weather record. Then the thought occurred to him: how glorious it would be if gentlemen of England rose from their beds and made similar observations all over the country, building a picture not just of local conditions but of the varieties of climate throughout the realm.

  Hooke published his meteorological call to arms in the journal of the Royal Society, emphasizing the need for rigor: data had to be taken at the same time every day, using instruments whose properties were known and carefully recorded. Robert Boyle thought this a brilliant idea, and he advised his young friend John Locke to enlist in Hooke's crusade.

  Locke signed on, devotedly measuring wind speeds, checking temperatures, gauging cloud cover. Doing so, he became, in effect, a foot soldier in what he and his contemporaries understood to be a radically new approach to knowledge. We now call this transformation the scientific revolution, and it is often imagined as a series of heroic battles, victories in a war against ignorance led by men whose names resound like those of triumphant generals—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the greatest of them all.

  But in fact, the shift in understanding that such men led was carried forward through the daily actions of hundreds, then thousands of people who for pleasure, profit, or both set out to use reason and experimentation to order their surroundings. Practical rationalists such as Jethro Tull and his disciples tried to bring the methods of the new natural philosophy to bear on the farm. Amateur naturalists catalogued the habits of animals painstakingly observed over days, weeks, months. One of the more famous among them was Erasmus Darwin; born four years after Newton's death, he absorbed the Newtonian credo that material events must have discernible material causes, and he grappled with the question of the origin of species that his grandson Charles would solve a century later.

  England's sailors measured tides, and traders upholding the power of the Crown across the oceans learned mathematics and developed precision tools to measure the motions of the stars and planets. Instrument makers began to establish the crucial idea of standards, common measures that would enable observers anywhere to trust one another's results. Thomas Tompion, the maker of Locke's thermometer, was the first craftsman known to have used serial numbers to identify his finished pieces—bringing science's tools into the nuts and bolts of efforts to systematize the material world.

  This was revolution at the barricades: a headlong charge by its partisans to organize, abstract, and universalize their experience of daily life so that its distilled essence would be accessible to anyone who sought it out. Locke, who documented the details of his precision instruments and checked the amount of rainfall and the barometric pressure each day, noting the time of every measurement, was one more cadre in this growing revolutionary band, adding his tiny increment to the arsenal of knowledge.

  In the eventful 1660s, Locke had to abandon his first weather diary within a few months. His political career and his own intellectual work consumed all his time and thought. But the experience stuck with him, and more than three decades later, when he retreated from public life for a time to Lady Masham's house in the Essex countryside, he resumed the habits of his youth. It took him some months to unpack his instruments and set up his weather observatory. At last, on December 9, 1691, he made his first observations. Four days later, his weather check had already become routine, a matter of a few minutes each morning. It had been two years since he had met the unquestioned leader of the new ways of understanding nature, and while Locke had certainly offered explicit homage to his new friend Newton, his resumed weather diary can be seen as a less obvious compliment to the ways of thinking Newton had championed.

  Newton's reasons for returning Locke's sentiments were perhaps more simple. Anyone would take kindly to unstinting praise from an intelligent source—and Locke famously evoked affection. When he and Newton finally met, his warmth had its usual effect. Newton's letters to Locke show the impact of Locke's charm: "how extremely glad I was to hear from you," he writes in one; in another, he values Locke's judgment sufficiently to seek his reaction to what Newton called his "mystical fancies"; once he simply admits of "my desire to see you here where you shall be as welcome as I can make you."

  In part, he relished the opportunity to tutor so well regarded a man. He gave Locke a private, annotated edition of the Principia and composed for him a simplified version of the proof that gravity makes the planets travel elliptical orbits. But Newton's intimacy with Locke seems to have extended well beyond such benevolent displays of mastery. From the beginning, Newton allowed himself to write openly about secret matters. Both men had subterranean interests—in alchemy, for one, the ancient study of processes of change in nature; and in questions of biblical interpretation and belief, which brought them to the edge of what the established English church would damn as heresy.

>   Locke responded with equal eagerness and candor. He always emphasized his deference on matters of natural philosophy to the man who wrote "his never enough to be admired book." But for the rest, he took part in what became an extended conversation with an intellectual companion, a partner in the pursuit of knowledge of the true nature of the Trinity, about the history of Scripture, about the transformation of substances. And along with his praise and their intense private exchanges, Locke had one thing more to offer: the use of his considerable influence with the Crown.

  In the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Locke had become a supremely good man to know. King William cherished him, and he was known and connected by bonds of party and friendship to dozens of the newly ruling elite. He turned down most offers of patronage for himself, but he was perfectly placed to do kindnesses for those he valued.

  Newton's service in the Convention Parliament ended on January 27, 1690. He returned to Trinity College and got back to what had once been a satisfactory round of daily life. He worked on corrections to a possible second edition of the Principia. He continued to examine the implications of the laws of motion, and he returned to studies of optics and light that had lain fallow for more than a decade. He began to think deeply about the theological consequences of his science, trying to define what kind of God could occupy the universe implied by the Principia. It seemed as if he was as much in his natural habitat as ever, wandering through his rooms and his garden, stopping suddenly, when a thought came, to "run up the stairs, like another Archimedes." To outward appearances, this was the man Trinity had sent to London, one who "aim'd at something beyond the Reach of humane Art & Industry."

  But the Newton who returned to Cambridge in 1690 was not the same as the one who had set out for the House of Commons the year before. He was not bored, given his impressive productivity over the next few years. But he was restless, unsettled. Cambridge had become small. Its company was dull, uncomprehending of the man in their midst. Notoriously, an anonymous student who passed him on the street said, "There goes the man that writt a book that neither he nor any body else understands." In the face of such indifference (not even disdain!), London's attractions now included company that recognized Newton's worth at something like the value he had come to place on himself. Within months of his return to Cambridge, he let his new friends know he was ready for an escape. There was just one problem: in Cambridge Newton had no material wants. In London he would need to make a living—a good one. How?

  Locke knew what to do. Beginning in 1690, he canvassed his most powerful acquaintances to advance his friend's cause. Newton knew what Locke was attempting. In October 1690 he wrote to thank Locke for his efforts; in November he betrayed a hint of urgency, even desperation: "Pray present my most humble service & thanks to my Lord and Lady Monmoth for their so kind remembrance of me. For their favour is such that I can never sufficiently acknowledge it." Such courtesy did not help matters this time—whatever Locke discussed with Monmouth never materialized. But the campaign was under way, with Newton's blessing and ever more urgent hopes.

  And so Newton, by candlelight on that cold gray day in December 1691, pushed to one side his angry draft. He took another sheet to try again. "I thank you," he wrote, "for putting me in mind of Charterhouse." He dismissed the idea, but gently this time: "I see nothing in it worth making a bustle for." He summoned the deference due a man in a position to do him good. He begged John Locke to accept "my most humble service & hearty thanks ... for so frankly offering ye assistance of your friends if there should be occasion."

  Days later, when Locke hurried back inside after recording his observations on the weather, careful not to risk his weak lungs and generally frail health on a raw December morning any longer than necessary, it was not Newton's wrath that greeted him. Instead, he read contrite thanks for help given and help to come. Locke took no insult from the rejection of his first attempt, and the letters to and fro confirm that while Newton would remain in Cambridge for five more years, his imagination had already carried him down the road to London. The rest was mere logistics for friends to arrange, to permit the incomparable Mr. Newton to take his rightful place in the big city.

  Part II

  A Rogue's Progress

  5. "The Greatest Stock of Impudence"

  WILLIAM CHALONER'S PASSAGE to London came much easier than Newton's. When he decided to go, he walked.

  At the same time, his development had some parallels with Newton's. His distinctive qualities of mind made themselves apparent early, in a precocious display of malicious cleverness. Still, as with any great talent, it took years of thought, risk, and practice for Chaloner to achieve all the artful wickedness of which he was capable—an education that he, unlike Newton, had to undertake almost entirely on his own.

  Only Chaloner's clash with Newton brought him into history, and most of the details of his early life did not make it into the picture, not even the date of his birth. But the man clever enough to challenge Newton evoked just enough wonder to inspire a sensational biography, written immediately after his execution. Like most true-crime tales then and since, it has to be read with care, as it alternates between admiring horror and respectable condemnation. But at least its anonymous author collected the bare facts of Chaloner's childhood.

  He was at least a decade and as much as a generation younger than Newton. He most likely married in 1684, which pushes his birth date back to the 1650s at the earliest, and perhaps as late as the mid-1660s. Like Newton, he was born in the provinces, but his father was poor, a weaver in Warwickshire, in England's Midlands. He had at least one brother and one sister, both of whom he later brought with him into what became a family coining business.

  He had had no formal education to speak of, but his biographer noted, "In his Infancy he shew'd a certain aptness to what he afterwards became perfect in." Unfortunately, "as soon as he was able to put any thing in Action, it was some unlucky Rogues Trick or other." At some point, his father and, presumably, his never-mentioned mother found themselves "unable to govern him." They sent him to Birmingham, then a small market town but already known for its metalwork shops and its sketchy regard for the reach of law, to be apprenticed to a nail maker.

  Given the apparent trend of his character, they could not have made a more unfortunate choice of trade. Nail-making was at that moment caught between its history and the kind of transformation Adam Smith would make famous a century later in his description of the making of a pin. In Chaloner's day, each nail was still finished by hand, one at a time. The nailer would heat the end of a metal rod in a forge, then hammer the softened tip into a four-sided point. Next, reheating the rod to soften it, he would cut a nail length off. Finally, he would strike the blunt end of the piece to form the head, holding the nail on an anvil or in a tool called a nail header.

  All this used to be part of general blacksmithing. But by the time Chaloner entered the trade, nail-making was well on its way to becoming less skilled and worse-paid piecework. The long iron rods were made with a machine called a slitting mill, which was invented in Liège, Belgium, in 1565 and made its way to England around the turn of the seventeenth century. Water power turned two sets of rollers. The first, smooth pair pressed heated bars of iron into thick plates; a second, grooved pair of rollers cut the plates into rods. Those with capital enough to run a slitting mill would advance nail rods to men too poor to pay for them outright, who would then cut an agreed number of nails from a given weight of metal and return them to the mills for a meager payment. Unsurprisingly, those at the bottom of the production line—men who had fire, tools, and a mastery of the basics of working with metal—looked for other opportunities.

  Groats, worth four pence, were always rare coins, produced only sporadically by the Royal Mint. A small number were struck in 1561, and later, expanded production from Welsh silver mines led to another issue of the little silver pieces in 1639—these decorated with the ostrich plumes of the Prince of Wales. They were made again from time to
time, but few of the coins that were called groats ever saw the inside of the Royal Mint. Instead, private enterprise stepped up, supplying counterfeits—with a notable proportion of the dud money of any denomination produced by men grown weary of turning out twelve hundred nails from every four pounds of iron. Such counterfeits were called Birmingham groats, testimony to the enthusiasm with which the city's metalworkers embraced the craft.

  Chaloner's new master seems to have produced his share. Young Will proved a quick study, and soon grasped the "rudiments of Coyning." His teacher did not, however, reap the benefits of his tutelage for long. The son whose father could not govern him was already too ambitious to serve any other man. No later than the early 1680s, William Chaloner abandoned his master and set out on "St. Francis's Mule"—that is, on foot—"with a purpose to visit London." The capital was for him more of a goal than a specific destination. He had no plan, no idea of what to do once he got there.

  But the decision to escape to London set in motion the critical phase of Chaloner's education. It would take him the better part of ten more years to master the lessons the city could teach him—the course of instruction that would turn a clever village boy with an elastic moral sense into the man who could present Isaac Newton with formidable opposition.