A scientific detective story of greed and revenge: the unknown Newton
After he had become the most famous scientist in Europe
for his theories of planetary motion and gravity,
Isaac Newton left his sheltered rooms in Cambridge University and accepted
the job of running the Royal Mint.
This was no sinecure: England’s currency was in crisis.
No one had faith in it. The nation’s entire stock of coins
was recalled and new ones issued, a mammoth task that
Newton carried out with incredible precision.
He spent the last years of his life dealing with money and manufacturing it,
speculating with it and losing it.
At the Mint he had extraordinary powers
as the defender of the king’s currency.
Counterfeiting was a crime that the law
equated with treason, and it was Newton’s job
to hunt down those who faked His Majesty’s
coins. Newton was drawn into a deadly
struggle with the most skilful counterfeiter
of the age, William Chaloner. Here was a
man who not only got away with passing dud
money but accused Newton of incompetence,
and tried to ease him out of the Mint so that
he could take it over. Chaloner wrote
pamphlets denouncing Newton’s stewardship
and taunting him; he was even given a hearing
by Parliament.
Chaloner had no idea who he was taking on.
Newton pursued his enemy with the cold,
implacable logic that he brought to his
scientific research.
Their struggle was given a strange twist
because Newton had for years been obsessed with alchemy,
which many saw as a crime against divine and human law.
Thomas Levenson sets this dark tale against
the backdrop of early eighteenth-century London
with its sewers running down the middle of the streets,
its packed houses, its smoke and fog, and its great port,
into which ships were sailing with all the wealth of the world.
This is a compelling book about crime, science and money,
and transforms our image of Britain’s greatest scientist.
