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

by Thomas Levenson

  Family and friends are the safety net without which I could not attempt the high-wire act of writing any book. Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam; Robert, Toni, and Matthew Strassler; Theo Theoharis; Michael, Isabel, and Thomas Pinto-Franco; Eleanor Powers; Lucinda Montefiore and Robert Dye; Simon Sebag-Montefiore; Geoffrey Gestetner; David and Juliet Sebag-Montefiore; and Alan and Caroline Rafael all lent ears, and sometimes beds, well past the point where the words "Isaac Newton" can have had any freshness to them. I am a lucky man to have such people in my life. My uncle Dan died just as I was writing these acknowledgments. He and my aunt Helen have helped keep me sane through all four of my books, and I cannot say how much I regret that Dan won't be able to help me see this one through. My siblings, Richard, Irene, and Leo, and their spouses and children, Jan and Rebecca, Joe, Max, Emily, and Eva, found the perfect balance: never (well, hardly ever) asking how the book was going while giving every appearance of enjoyment as I told them each newly uncovered tale.

  Last and first, my wife, Katha, and my son, Henry, are the constant joys of my life. They gave me support, time, shoves when I needed them, hands-up as appropriate, laughter, and crucial perspective on what is, after all, a very odd way to make a living.

  This book would not be here were it not for them. I cannot thank them enough, but I can try.

  A Note on Dates

  England during Isaac Newton's life used the Julian, or Old Style, calendar. At that time, the Gregorian, or New Style, calendar—the one we use today—had already been adopted on the European continent. The calendars differed in two important ways.

  When the Gregorian calendar was adopted (the 1580s for most of Catholic Europe), the Julian calendar was ten days out of alignment with what was presumed to be its original starting point, to which the Gregorian returned. By Newton's birthday, December 25, 1642, the error had grown to eleven days, making January 4, 1643, his birth date in the new calendar. The other difference between the English calendar in Newton's time and current practice lay in the start of each year. January 1 did mark the traditional celebration of the New Year festival, but the legal year began on March 25. Dates between those two markers were often written in the form "January 25, 1661/2."

  In this book I have used the dates as Newton would have known them—that is, following the Julian calendar as it was used in his time—"with one exception: I turn the year on January 1 and use a single number to mark the passage of time.

  * * *

  Notes

  PREFACE: "LET NEWTON BE"

  PAGE

  [>] "such vacan[t] places": "John Whitfield's Lettr to the Isaac Newton Esqr Warden of His Majtys Mint Febry 9th 98/9," Mint 17, document 134.

  Chaloner—or any counterfeiter: Only men were supposed to be hanged for currency crimes. Convicted women faced a worse penalty: they were to be burned to death. This punishment was rarely carried out by the late seventeenth century. See V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, p. 317.

  [>] a bust of Newton: Mordechai Feingold drew my attention to this painting in his The Newtonian Moment, p. 180. Feingold's book provides a wealth of detailed insight into the immediate reaction to Newton in both learned and popular culture, and his chapter seven, "Apotheosis," offers a valuable account of the myth-making that followed Newton's death.

  [>] four million pounds: Assessing monetary value across three centuries is a difficult and highly inexact process. But estimates of purchasing power, though imperfect, do confirm that Chaloner, if he was telling the truth, had been prodigiously successful. Among the most rigorous estimates comes from a research paper, published in 2002 by the Library of the House of Commons, that provides an index of the value of the pound from 1750 to 2002. In that calculation, one pound at the beginning of that period would be worth just over 140 pounds in 2002 (Library of the House of Commons, "Inflation: The Value of the Pound, 1750–2002," Research Paper 02/82, 11 November 2003). At that conversion rate, Chaloner would have produced about 4.2 million pounds of false currency in his eight years or so of coining. The number is probably a little lower than that, though again, any definite statement has to be hedged with fudge factors, acknowledging the drastic difference in patterns of consumption between the two ages. But E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins laboriously constructed a record of the value of a building craftsman's wages dating back to the thirteenth century, and their analysis shows that prices were higher in the late 1690s than in 1750. ("Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables Compared with Builders' Wage-Rates." Economica 23, no. 92, new series, November 1956, pp. 296–314). If we apply a slight correction, it is fair to say that Chaloner's truly self-made fortune totaled somewhere between 3 and 4 million pounds in today's money. In other words, a lot.

  I. "EXCEPT GOD"

  [>] carriage ride to the college: Isaac Newton, Trinity Notebook, Cambridge

  Ms. R. 4. 48c., f. 3.

  admitted into its company: Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 1, 66.

  [>] dependence on another human being: This summary of Newton's birth and early raising is based on the account in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 44–53. Westfall's account is largely derived from C. W. Foster's article "Sir Isaac Newton's Family," Reports and Papers of the Architectural Societies of the County of Lincoln, County of York, Archdeaconries of Northampton and Oakham and County of Leicester 39, part 1, 1928.

  "outstrip them when he pleas'd": William Stukeley, Stukeley's memoir of Newton in four installments, Keynes Ms. 136.03, sheet 4.

  [>] portraits of King Charles I and John Donne: John Conduitt, Keynes Ms. 130.3, 12v and 13r.

  "Isaac's dials": William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life, Royal Society Ms. 142. Online at http://www.newtonproj'ect.sussex.ac.uk/texts/viewtext.php?id=othe00001&mode=normalized.

  to master all the apparent confusion: Isaac Newton, Personal Notebook, Pierpont Morgan Library, sheets 5v, 7v, 13r, 15r, 18r, 20v, 28v, 32–r. Newton copied much of the material in this notebook from a popular work, The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate, published in London in 1654. Newton's use of Bate's book was identified by E. N. da C. Andrade in "Newton's Early Notebook," Nature 135 (1935), p. 360, and the connection between Bate and Newton is described in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 61.

  [>] "I know not what to do": Latin Exercise Book of Isaac Newton, private collection, quoted in Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, pp. 57–58. "forget his dinner": John Conduitt, Keynes Ms. 130.3, 21r.

  his neighbors' grain: William Stukeley, Stukeley's memoir, Keynes Ms. 136.03, sheet 6. The stories of Newton's livestock escaping come from manor court records showing fines mulcted on Newton for the offenses. The documents were turned up by Richard Westfall and are quoted in Never at Rest, p. 63.

  [>] more than a mile from Cambridge: William Stukeley, Stukeley's memoir, Keynes Ms. 136.03, sheet 7.

  "ink to fille it": Isaac Newton, Trinity Notebook, Cambridge Ms. R. 4. 48, f. I.

  milk and cheese, butter and beer: Trinity Notebook, sheets ii–iv. Newton actually listed beer under "Otiose & frustra expensa"—that is, luxuries for which he felt a measure of guilt for indulging in. But as Richard Westfall has also pointed out, many of his contemporaries would have seen beer as essential, or, in Newton's terminology, one of his "Expensa propria."

  a man of no social consequence: The question of how poor Newton really was, how subservient he had to be, and how alienated he became as a result is a matter of dispute among leading Newtonians. Richard Westfall argues that Newton's deprivation was real, and the slight truly felt—and Westfall has been echoed by a number of other writers. Mordechai Feingold, professor of the history of science at Caltech, curator of the New York Public Library exhibit The Newtonian Moment, and the author of its companion book, challenges that view. Feingold notes, correctly, that Newton was not the recluse he is sometimes painted, and further argues that the sizar status was merely nominal: his allowance was sufficient for such luxuries as the cherries mentioned above, and Newton's family connection to one
of Trinity's senior members, a relationship that could have cushioned the worst of his servitor status.

  My own view is based on the only three existing sources of anecdotes about Newton's undergraduate years, all written decades after the fact. Beyond those, there is one notebook that contains a partial record of Newton's accounts, and another with the astonishing confession of Newton's sins from 1662 and before. Trinity College records provide the institutional setting for the more personal recollections—and that's all there is. That thin documentary foundation offers great latitude for interpretation. In the end, the question turns on one's own judgments—guesses, really—about human nature in general and Newton's character in particular. Ultimately, as the text above states, I fall more toward the Westfall end of the spectrum: I think the record better supports a picture of a largely solitary young man with no strong emotional or social connection to his classmates, and with some real grounds for resentment and/or envy. But Feingold and others in the current generation of Newton scholars are clearly correct to point out that Newton was not totally friendless, not incapable of ordinary human contact, not averse to all pleasures, including such overtly sensual ones as good food and, on occasion, beer.

  just one letter to a college contemporary: Isaac Newton to Francis Aston, 18 May 1699, Correspondence 1, document 4, p. 9.

  [>] not one of the students from his year: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 75. The letter was to Francis Aston, a fellow of Trinity College and later a member and then the secretary (with Robert Hooke) of the Royal Society. See Correspondence 1, document 4, pp. 9–11.

  "money learning pleasure more than Thee": Fitzwilliam Notebook, sheets 3–r.

  [>] "any demonstrations of them": Abraham de Moivre, "Memorandum relating to Sr Isaac Newton given me by Mr Demoivre," Cambridge Add. Ms. 4007, pp. 706–r, cited in D. T. Whiteside, "Sources and Strengths of Newton's Early Mathematic Thought," in Robert Palter, ed., The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton, 1666–1696, p. 72.

  the meals he forgot to eat: Nicholas Wickens reported on Newton's indifference to sleep and food in a letter to Robert Smith, 16 January 1728, in which he described his father's memories of his chamber mate. Keynes Ms. 137, sheet 2. John Conduitt told the story of the cat's avoirdupois in his memoirs of Newton, Keynes Ms. 130.6, cited in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 103–4.

  [>] "except God": Isaac Newton, Quœstiones quœdam Philosophicœ, Cambridge Add. Ms. 3996, f. 1/88. The quoted material comes from page 338 in the excellent transcript of the Quœstiones in J. E. McGuire and Martin Tamny, Certain Philosophical Questions, pp. 330–489.

  [>] the point of his needle: Isaac Newton, Cambridge Add. Ms. 3975, reproduced in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 95.

  [>] "Great fears of the Sicknesse": Samuel Pepys, The Shorter Pepys, p. 486.

  "which took away the apprehension": Ibid., p. 494.

  [>] "such a calamity as this": Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, pp. 62–63.

  "on occasion of the Pestilence": Cited in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 142.

  2. "THE PRIME OF MY AGE"

  [>] "a perfect cure of the plague": Samuel Pepys, The Shorter Pepys, p. 557.

  "Mathematicks & Philosophy": Cambridge Add. Ms. 3968.41, f. 85, cited in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 143.

  infinitesimally small forms: D. T. Whiteside, ed., The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, vol. 1, p. 280.

  Newton returned to Trinity College: Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 142.

  [>] "rays of gravity": Isaac Newton, Quœstiones quœdam Philosophicœ, Cambridge Add. Ms. 3996, f. 19.

  heavy with fruit: John Conduitt reported a conversation he had with Newton in the last year of his life, 1726. Abraham de Moivre recorded another mention of the apple tree in a memorandum composed in 1727.

  [>] "thro' the universe": William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life, pp. 19–21.

  A sliver of the old tree: D. McKie and G. R. de Beer, "Newton's Apple: An Addendum," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 9, no. 2 (May 1952), pp. 334–35.

  Newton's apple itself is no fairy tale: D. McKie and G. R. de Beer, "Newton's Apple," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 9, no. 1 (October 1951), pp. 53–54. Cuttings from Newton's tree have now been propagated in several locations and are for sale by Deacon's Nursery on the Isle of Wight. One cutting, given to my home institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, produced its first fruit in September 2006, in a small garden next to Building 11. At Woolsthorpe, an old Flower of Kent—bearing tree still drops fruit in the garden there. This tree shoots up from a bent-over section of trunk, presumably the blown-down remnants of the Newtonian original.

  [>] did not publish his result until 1673: For a more detailed account of Newton's derivation of the formula for centrifugal force, see D. T. Whiteside, "The Prehistory of the Principia," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 45, no. 1 (January 1991), p. 13. Richard Westfall presents a less technical version in Never at Rest, pp. 148–50, which draws on J. W. Herivel's article "Newton's Discovery of the Law of Centrifugal Force," Isis 51 (1960), pp. 546–53, and his book The Background to Newton's Principia.

  the centrifugal push: Isaac Newton, Correspondence 3, 46–54. See D. T. Whiteside, "The Prehistory of the Principia, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 45, no. 1 (January 1991), pp. 14–15, for a discussion of Newton's analysis of the motion of a pendulum.

  [>] would come to be called gravity: This is not quite accurate. Objects under the influence of gravity travel around the center of mass of the total system, not just of the more massive body, as Newton in fact understood. At this time Newton did not have a clear understanding of the concept of inertia, nor yet his first law of motion, which holds that objects at rest or in linear motion tend to stay in motion or at rest unless acted upon by an exterior force. Without this fundamental idea, first suggested to Newton by Robert Hooke in a letter in 1679, his conception of gravity remained imprecise. See Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 382–88, for a discussion of both the insight and the conflict between Hooke and Newton that followed. See also S. Chandrasekhar's summary of the sequence of development of Newton's thinking in the first chapter of his Newton's Principia for the Common Reader, pp. 1–14. (Note, however, that I. Bernard Cohen, one of the great Newton scholars of the twentieth century and the translator of the best available English version of the Principia, does not think highly of Chandrasekhar's historical skills, and it is true, as Cohen says, that the "common reader" of Chandrasekhar's title had better know a lot of mathematics to make it through most of the argument. Nonetheless, Chandrasekhar, a Nobel laureate in physics, does offer a good introductory summary of the basic concepts in the first section of his book, and it is worth a look.) Another good account of the development of Newton's thoughts on gravity during this period comes in A. Rupert Hall's highly readable biography Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought, pp. 58–63.

  "sixty measured Miles only": William Whiston, Memoirs of the Life of Mr. William Whiston by himself, cited in J. W. Herivel, The Background to Newton's Principia, p. 65. Whiston was a Newton protégé and his successor to the Lucasian professorship at Cambridge. The circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,902 miles, or 40,076 kilometers. One degree, or 1/360, of that total is 69.172 miles, or 111.322 kilometers. D. T. Whiteside points out that Whiston may not be a reliable source—even though he was Newton's successor as Lucasian Professor, his notes on Newton's life were composed after his predecessor had died. The earliest surviving calculation in Newton's hand that analyzes the motion of the moon subject to an attractive force decreasing with the square of the distance from the earth comes no earlier than 1669, three years after the plague season. Still, it is clear that Newton's work on the problem began while he was sheltering from the epidemic. See D. T. Whiteside, "The Prehistory of the Principia," pp. 18–20. My thanks to Simon Schaffer for advice on picking through the minefield of memory and determined fact that stretches across
the history of the miracle years. All errors that remain are, of course, mine, not his.

  [>] "subjecting motion to number": The phrase "subjecting motion to number" is borrowed from Alexander Koyré's marvelous essay "The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis," which has been published a number of times but is most accessible in I. Bernard Cohen and Richard Westfall, eds., Newton, p. 62. I appropriate the line with an apology: Koyré applied it to Galileo, but it is just as true of Newton.

  "mutation in its state": J. W. Herivel, The Background to Newton's Principia, pp. 157–58.

  [>] "a Chair to sit down in": Humphrey Newton, Keynes Ms. 135, quoted in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 406. I have corrected a misspelling in the original document of the name Alchimedes and have rendered the "eureka" in English instead of the original's Greek.

  the landlocked Newton sought out data: Simon Schaffer has pointed out Newton's use of a global knowledge network in several papers. See Schaffer's "Golden Means: Assay Instruments and the Geography of Precision in the Guinea Trade" and his as yet unpublished "Newton on the Beach," a lecture delivered at Harvard University on April 4, 2006.