Newton and the Counterfeiter (18 page)

It seemed as if the worst was about to happen. The mood in the nation shifted from complaint to near panic. Edmund Bohun, formerly the Licensor of the Press—the official censor—wrote to a friend, "No trade is managed but by trust. Our tenants can pay no rent. Our corn factors can pay nothing for what they have had and will trade no more, so that all is at stand." Bohun expressed the general sense of terror. "The people are discontented to the utmost; many self murders happen in small families for want." Worse, he warned, "Should the least accident put the mob in motion no man can tell where it would end."

In June, the prolific scholar John Evelyn, a generally calm and well-connected observer, noted similar worries in his diary. There was a "want of current money to carry on the smallest concerns, even for daily provisions in the markets." It wasn't just small change that was lacking; the government was broke too. Between the cost of the war (the larger share of the problem) and the decline in the value of tax takings with the debasing of the currency, the treasure of the nation was exhausted. In Plymouth, an attempt to pay the army in old, worn coin raised the risk of mutiny—to the point where soldiers were paid in provisions instead of cash. Evelyn reached the same conclusion as Bohun: "Tumults are every day feared, nobody paying or receiving money."

In the town of Kendal, twenty people were arrested for rioting when a tax collector refused payments of the old, clipped money. In London, broadsides began to circulate blaming King William for the disaster: "Our Coine alas it Will not Pass / Which Makes ye World to Wonder"—wonder, that is, who was to blame. There was an easy answer: "Some say ye King contrived this Thing / his duchmen ffor to Cherish." Just in case anyone missed the point, the poet added: "In James time we had store of Coine / provision it was plenty." To all appearances, England had finally, literally, run out of money.

***

Newton entered the service of the Mint on May 2, 1696, having sworn that he would never "reveal or discover to any person or persons whatsoever the new Invention of Rounding the money & making the edges of them.... So help you God." Thus bound, his responsibilities included overseeing the maintenance of the buildings and machines and the care and feeding of the Mint's horses. But no one actually expected Isaac Newton to concern himself with fodder for the livestock or fixing broken windows, any more than previous incumbents had. That was what his three clerks were for. No Warden had done much real work for his four hundred and fifteen pounds a year for at least a century. (And after Newton, none would again until the office was abolished, more than a century later.) At any ordinary time, it would have been safe for Newton to take Montague at his word when the Chancellor assured him that the post would not be too demanding.

It took Newton no more than a few weeks to discover that this was no ordinary time. He measured the incumbent Master's qualities, coming to the common opinion that Neale was "a Gentleman who was in debt & of a prodigal temper." He took offense when he realized that Neale had more authority than he in the divided command of the Mint, and it galled him that such a wastrel made far more money than he did. Newton handled that problem by direct action—within a month of his arrival at the Mint, he asked for (and ultimately received) a raise to match the salary of the Master.

The larger issue of power in the Mint took a little longer to resolve. He immersed himself in paper and in meetings, making the decisions no one else could or would. In part, he was outraged at the level of neglect he found there. On May 6, just four days into his tenure, he sent the Treasury the painfully respectful suggestion that it might be a good idea to check the quality of the work of carpenters and laborers before paying their bills. In the next month, Newton wrote again, to complain that the Treasury had not supplied him with a budget sufficient to let him hire several needed employees. Sometimes he simply quibbled. Later that first summer, after tallying his expenses, he reminded the Treasury of a dispute over the grand sum of two pence.

More to the point, Newton quickly committed himself to mastering the details of every operation taking place in the Mint, including those that properly belonged in the Master's purview. He read up on the history of the Mint, tracing the records back more than two hundred years. He meticulously worked through decades of account books, annotating them in his own hand. He brought the rigor instilled by decades of painstaking laboratory work to bear on every step taken to turn raw metal into legal tender. He got his hands dirty as a matter of principle. As he told his deputies, his rule was to trust no other man's calculations, "nor any other eyes than your own." And through it all, he wrote. His holograph Mint papers fill five large portfolios, thousands of pages, a torrent of words.

As the summer of 1696 progressed, Newton's mass of knowledge accumulated into a weapon strong enough to bludgeon Neale aside. Faced with such overwhelming force, the Master had no hope, and he knew it. He surrendered, mostly quietly. He held on to that part of his pay he hadn't pledged against his debts, and left Newton to do his work for him. Apparently no one questioned this bloodless coup, although Newton lacked any official sanction to assume any authority over the Master's precincts at the Mint.

Newton now faced the same numbers that must have daunted the more experienced Mint officers. The coining machines had been designed to produce a maximum of 15,000 pounds of coins per week. At that rate, manufacturing the 7,000,000 pounds required to replace the entire silver coinage would have taken almost nine years. The Treasury ordered the Mint to ramp up production to between 30,000 and 40,000 pounds a week. But that, as Hopton Haynes, then a clerk assisting in the recoinage, reported, "was looked upon as a thing impossible."

By the end of the summer the impossible had become routine. Haynes, who became one of Newton's most trusted associates at the Mint, later said that the new Warden's cleverness with numbers (something of an understatement) enabled him to master the Mint's complex bookkeeping system faster than other men. That was certainly true. Newton was able to save the Mint from regular attempts to fleece it—like the time a pair of prominent metal dealers offered to take over the recoinage for the modest fee of twelve and three-eighths pence for every pound weight of silver to be coined. Newton ran a quick tally of the Mint's costs and demonstrated that these two benefactors were actually offering to overcharge the government by about a third. But it was the Warden's empirical skill—his ability to observe, measure, and act on his data—rather than his superior computational abilities that made the difference.

His first goal was to ensure that the Mint had the physical capacity to handle the recoinage. Mint workers crammed first one new furnace into the smelting room, then another. Newton oversaw the construction of a second melting house at the eastern end of the Tower walls. With all three of the main furnaces on line, the Mint could produce up to five tons of refined liquid silver suitable for currency each day.

That mass of molten metal flowed onto a decayed version of the assembly line that had so astounded Samuel Pepys. Now half a century old, many of the machines were falling apart, and those that still functioned were too few to handle the river of incoming silver. In response, at Newton's order, the Mint added eight new rolling mills and five new coining presses.

Next, the new Warden analyzed the potential performance of each stage of the coining process. He carefully observed the smelting operation, finding that each furnace consumed twenty-five bushels of coal per day. As in his alchemy, he made sure he understood the detailed characteristics of his instruments—for example, performing the measurement that revealed that a melting pot "which when new holds 800 lb wt, when it has been used a month or six weeks will hold but 700 or 650 lb wt or perhaps less."

Newton deployed the same empiricism on his men as on his machines. At the height of the recoinage, in late 1696 and through 1697, Newton commanded about five hundred men and fifty horses to drive the giant rolling mills. To ensure that this army wasted none of its efforts, he conducted perhaps the first time-and-motion study on record. As he observed, it took "Two [rolling] Mills with four Millers, 12 horses two Horskeepers, 3 Cutters, 2Flatters 8 Sizers one Nealer, thre Blanchers, [and] two Markers" to move enough silver from the melting rooms all the way down the line to feed two coining presses. Each press consumed seven more men—six to turn the capstan while one brave worker fed blanks into the striking chamber itself.

Those men constrained Newton's calculations. The Mint could not operate any faster than they could spin the capstan arms, and every other step had to be tuned to enable them to keep pounding out coins at the highest speed that human muscle and a driving screw could sustain. So Newton watched them work, to "judge of the workmen's diligence." He timed how long it took to strike each coin. He saw how quickly the brutal effort needed to turn the press wore out each team. He noted how nimble the man loading blanks and extracting finished coins from the press had to be if he was to keep his fingers. Eventually, Newton identified the perfect pace: if the press thumped just slightly slower than the human heart, beating fifty to fifty-five times a minute, men and machines could stamp out coins for hours at a time. That pounding set the rhythm that Newton used to drive the entire Mint.

Newton's drumbeat got results, fast. The record of the recoinage as a whole is one of an enormously complicated and expensive undertaking that was completed smoothly, efficiently, and mostly safely. (Only one man died at the rolling mills, an amazingly low number given the intensity of the work.) Under Newton's control, where once the sum of 15,000 pounds per week had been thought unattainable, soon the presses were turning out 50,000 pounds a week. By late summer of 1696, the Mint's men and machines achieved a record output of 100,000 pounds in six days—an unprecedented number, not just for the English Mint, but for all Europe.

At that rate, the recoinage raced well ahead of its original schedule. Most of the available silver was struck into new money by the end of 1697, and the entire project was essentially completed by the middle of 1698. In June 1699, matters had so far returned to normal that the Mint sold off the machines it had added to handle the national crisis. By then, the Mint under Newton's direction had totally remade England's stock of silver money, a total of 6,840,719 pounds. The total cost of the effort was huge—about 2,700,000 pounds, most of which represented the lost metal in clipped coins accepted for recoinage at face value. But for that price England had bought a whole new silver coinage with which to buy, trade, and fight.

The swift and ample transfer of silver coins from the Tower into public hands, beginning in the autumn of 1696, quelled the deepest fears of the day. There were no currency riots. The poor of London did not rise up to demand the return of good King James. King William continued to complain about the lack of money, but he was able to keep his army in the field, and by September 1697, after it was clear that the recoinage would be completed satisfactorily, he even achieved a peace with Louis XIV. Nothing directly links the success of the effort with England's domestic calm or its military success abroad. But the fears that had seemed almost overpowering less than two years before disappeared from the record of public concern as the recoinage wended its way to a quiet, competent end.

Everyone knew who deserved the credit. At the conclusion of the recoinage, Charles Montague said that the enterprise would have failed without the presence of Isaac Newton at the Mint.

F
OR ALL THE PRAISE
, honor, and wealth Newton's performance at the Mint earned him, there was one aspect of the Warden's work about which no one seems to have warned him before he accepted the post. By ancient practice, the Warden served as the Mint's only official magistrate, responsible for enforcing the King's law in and around London for all crimes committed against the currency.

Newton had no interest in the task, and he did his best to shirk it during his first summer at the Mint. He complained bitterly about the work to his superiors at the Treasury: "I am exposed to the calumnies of as many Coyners & Newgate Sollictors as I examine." A newly instituted reward granted forty pounds for each conviction of a coiner, along with a possible share in the convicted counterfeiter's confiscated property. Juries understood what such incentives could evoke and had become "so averse from believing witnesses," Newton noted, "that my agents and Witnesses are discouraged & tired out ... by the reproach of prosecuting and swearing for money." Simply asking him to do the work at all was unfair: "I do not find that prosecuting of Coyners was imposed upon any of my Predecessors." Hence, he concluded, "I humbly pray that this duty may not bee annexed to the Office of the Warden of his Majts. Mint."

His prayers were denied. On July 30, 1696, the Treasury gave him the bad news. There would be no escape from his duty, and he was to start right then, with the vexing case of the disappearance of a set of coining dies from inside the Mint.

Nothing in Newton's prior career would seem to have prepared him for the sheer muddle of a criminal inquiry. Curves had properties that could be analyzed and relationships that could be proved. The behavior of bodies in motion could be observed and mapped against mathematical predictions. Theological argument could return to ancient texts, and rested always on the truth that God existed and acted in the world. To be sure, no one knew better than Newton how to shape a chain of cause and effect until only one possible conclusion remained. But here, there was no reliable measure with which to penetrate a maze of conflicting, chaotically human accounts. But he had no choice: the new Warden had to turn himself into a detective able to penetrate such confusion.

Newton's law enforcement career began with a simple question: what, in fact, had happened to the tools from the Mint?