Newton and the Counterfeiter (31 page)

My thanks as well to Sallie Dixon-Smith of the Tower of London's curatorial staff, who very kindly led me through the former Mint precincts at the Tower, and Peter Jones of the Kings College Library at Cambridge, who gave me early leads on certain Newton manuscripts. David Newton, one of Isaac's distant relations, found documents relating to Chaloner's trial at the London Archives under considerable time pressure.

Early in the project, Rob Iliffe, now of Sussex University, Scott Mandelbrote of Cambridge University, Mordechai Feingold and Jed Buchwald, both of Caltech, and Owen Gingrich of Harvard University all gave me help and direction. Anne Harrington and her colleagues in Harvard's history of science department gave me a research home at a critical point.

I owe a special debt to the staff of Harvard's Widener Library, in which much of this book was written. My thanks also to those manning the desks at the British National Archives at Kew, where I was able to review all of Newton's Mint papers; at Newton's birthplace, Woolsthorpe Manor, where I received an out-of-season tour; and at the British Library's rare book and music reading rooms. History is a collaborative passion, and I could not have indulged my compulsion to engage the past without the generosity of so many others who share the same desire.

In addition to those acknowledged above, there are several people I never got the chance to meet whose work deeply influenced this project. I would not have known how to begin without Frank Manuel's attempt to understand Newton's emotional life in his
Portrait of Isaac Newton.
Robert Westfall created a body of scholarship that every subsequent writer on Newton has mined. I have too; his
Never at Rest
remains the definitive comprehensive biography (at least in English). I did meet I. Bernard Cohen—I even took one graduate seminar with him almost three decades ago. If I'd known then what I know now about the depth to which he followed Newton's thinking, I would have been able to thank him properly for all I have learned from his work. Last, I want to draw special attention to Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, who did so much to rehabilitate Newton's alchemy as an integral part of the totality of Newton's thought, science, faith, and motivation. She did so in the face of scholarly opposition, and she won her basic point by dint of persistent, elegant, and ferociously smart intellectual labor. The study of Newton's alchemy has since been taken up by many others, but she was one of the pioneers, and I am in her debt.

I owe a special debt of thanks to my MIT colleagues and students. Marcia Bartusiak, Robert Kanigel, Alan Lightman, and Boyce Rensberger of the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing gave me help, timely advice, and the useful knowledge that books do finally get written, no matter how many papers must be graded in the meantime. My colleagues in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies were equally supportive, and I particularly valued conversations with Professors James Paradis, Kenneth Manning, and Junot Díaz, along with our visiting colleague Ralph Lombreglia, at various points in the maturation of the book. The deans of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Philip Khoury and Deborah Fitzgerald, provided generous research support, and the dean of the School of Science, Marc Kastner, added valuable encouragement. My thanks as well to Rosalind Williams of MIT's Science, Technology, and Society Program, and John Durant, director of the MIT Museum. Science writer Gary Taubes has been a writer's escape hatch when the process closed in, and Jennifer Ouellette has also given gratefully received advice and counsel late in the game.

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.

PAGE

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 "such vacan[t] places": "John Whitfield's Lettr to the Isaac Newton Esq
^r
Warden of His Maj
^tys
Mint Febry 9
^th
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.

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 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.

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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. "E
XCEPT
G
OD"

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 "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.

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 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.

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 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.