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

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In 1695, Isaac Newton--already renowned as the greatest mind of his age--made a surprising career change. He left quiet Cambridge, where he had lived for thirty years and made his earth-shattering discoveries, and moved to London to take up the post of Warden of His Majesty's Mint. Newton was preceded to the city by a genius of another kind, the budding criminal William Chaloner. Thanks to his preternatural skills as a counterfeiter, Chaloner was rapidly rising in London's highly competitive underworld, at a time when organized law enforcement was all but unknown and money in the modern sense was just coming into being. Then he crossed paths with the formidable new warden. In the courts and streets of London--and amid the tremors of a world being transformed by the ideas Newton himself had set in motion--the two played out an epic game of cat and mouse.

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A Q&A with Thomas Levenson, Author of Newton and the Counterfeiter

Q: Why did you decide to write Newton and the Counterfeiter?

A: I first encountered the connection at the heart of Newton and the Counterfeiter when I was working on a very different project in the mid '90s. A long out of print book quoted from one of the few letters between my counterfeiter, William Chaloner, and Isaac Newton--and on reading it I wondered: what on earth was such a scoundrel doing in correspondence with the greatest mind of the age? The question stuck with me for a decade, and finally I made the time to dig a little deeper. Once I did, I discovered two things that made this book both possible, and from a writer's point of view, inescapable. The first was a trove of original documents that chronicled Newton's involvement in the pursuit and prosecution of not just Chaloner, but dozens of other currency criminals. The second was the insight this one story gives into Newton himself--and of the real extent and impact of the revolutions (plural deliberate) which he so prominently led. Isaac Newton is best remembered, of course, as the man at the vanguard of the scientific revolution--a status established by his discoveries: the laws of motion, gravity, the calculus, and much more. But I found that this story gave me a sense of what it was like to live through that revolution at street level. It provided an example of Newton's mind at work, for one, and for another, it involved Newton in the second of the great 17th century transformations, the financial revolution that occurred in conjunction, and with some connection to the scientific one.

Newton, I found, was a bureaucrat, a man with a job running England's money supply at a time with surprising parallels to our own: new, poorly understood financial engineering to deal with what was a national currency and economic crisis. He was asked to think about money, and he did--and at the same time, he was given the job of Warden of the Mint, which among other duties put him charge of policing those who would fake or undermine the King's coins. So there I had it: a gripping true crime story, with life-and-death stakes and enough information to follow my leading characters through the bad streets and worse jails of London--and one that at the same time let me explore some of critical moves in the making of the world we inhabit through the mind and feelings of perhaps the greatest scientific thinker who ever lived. How could I resist that?

Q: Are there comparisons to be made to the financial times we are living in today in this country?

A: When I started writing this book, (c. 2005) the American and the global economy was seemingly in robust health. The American housing market was booming; financial markets the world over were trading happily back and forth, the Dow in June, when I started working in earnest on the project, stood comfortably over 10,000, with a 40% rise to come through the first and second drafts of the work. And then, of course, things changed--and by that time (too late to do my own financial situation any good) I realized that in the story of Newton's confrontation with Chaloner I could see many of the pathologies that define our current predicament. England's currency and its system of high finance--the big loans and big banks behind them needed to fund government--were both under increasing strain when Newton arrived at the Mint.

Part of the damage was being done through imbalances of trade, as silver flowed out of England to the European continent and ultimately to India and China. (Sound familiar?) That loss of metal had huge economic consequences when you remember that money itself was made of silver back then. No silver, no coins. No coins--and how are you going to buy a loaf of bread, a pound of beef, a barrel of beer (which was a staple, and not a luxury given the state of London’s drinking (sic) water). At the same time, England was waging a war it could not pay for. (Sound familiar?) The Treasury was broke. Financial engineering got its start in the ever more desperate attempts by the government to raise the money it needed to keep its army in the field against France. Newton and his counterfeiting nemesis William Chaloner both found themselves operating on unfamiliar territory, with paper abstractions standing in for what used to be literally hard cash. This was when bank notes were invented--and Chaloner forged some. This was when the government began to issue what were in essence bonds--and Chaloner forged some of those too. Personal cheques were coming in, and--you guessed it--Chaloner passed a couple of duds. Most significantly, the Bank of England invented fractional reserve lending--lending out a multiple of the actual cash reserves it held at any one time. This was the birth of leverage. Put it all together and you have most of the crucial ideas in modern finance appearing at almost the same instant. These are fantastically useful tools; the enormous expansion of wealth, of material comfort, of human well being that we’ve seen over the last three centuries, derives in part from the fact that the English and their trading counterparties were so impressively inventive in those decades. But at the same time, as we know now all too well, each and every one of those financial ideas are capable of abuse. Now add to the usual temptations to financial sin the besetting danger of ignorance, of the sheer unfamiliarity of the new instruments, and you have the makings of an almost inevitable disaster.

In 2009, we are dealing with that double trouble: deliberate frauds combining with the larger problem that the complexity and sheer deep strangeness of new financial products allowed a lot of so-called smart money to make big bets they didn’t understand. Exactly the same kinds of pressures were building in Newton's day, and the financial crisis that Newton helped resolve in the 1690s kept spawning sequels, until in the 1720s, Newton himself got caught up in a disaster that in many ways eerily anticipates the one we are living through now. The South Sea Bubble of 1720 was born of a good idea--what we would now call a debt-for-equity swap--but rapidly turned into a fraud and then at the last a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme. What I found most striking is that Newton, who of all men had the mathematical chops to figure out that the South Sea promises couldn't possibly be met, still got sucked in by the promise of outsize returns. Avarice, desire, or perhaps in Newton's case just the agony of the thought that others were getting richer while he was not, propelled him into investing in the bubble at its very peak. According to his niece, he lost 20,000 pounds in a matter of months--which in today’s money would be roughly three million pounds, or close to five million dollars. The moral, at least the lesson I took from this personally? No one, not even Newton, and certainly not me, is smart enough to be smarter than one's own emotions. And that grim fact, as much as any specific financial innovation, lies behind our current economic woes, and surely caught that great thinker Isaac Newton in its grip as well.

Q: Tell us about your research.

A: I was fortunate in this project--in fact, I only took on the book--because there was a rich lode of little-known documents that told the story of the clash between Newton and Chaloner. Five large folders survive of Newton's own notes, drafts and memos covering his official duties at the Mint. Examining them, especially drafts of replies to some of Chaloner's most audacious attacks on him at Parliamentary hearings, it is possible to see across time to Newton's mounting frustration and anger at his antagonist: his handwriting gets worse, more cramped, swift, and in general ticked off as he works through his responses. I was also able to find the handful of documents that can be unequivocally attributed to Chaloner: a couple of pamphlets he had printed to display his expertise in the making and manipulation of coin, and to allege incompetence, or worse at Newton's Mint. To that I added a marvelous, if not entirely reliable, moralizing biography of Chaloner, hastily written and published within days of his execution. That was one of the early examples of what became a staple pulp genre--edifying and titillating accounts of the wicked, in which any admiration for the rascals being chronicled were carefully wrapped up through the appropriate bad ends to which all the subjects of such works were doomed.

But of all the wellsprings of this book, none were more important than the file it took me over a year to find. I knew that some of the records Isaac Newton's criminal interrogations survived, because I found reference to them in a couple of the older biographies and other secondary sources. But in the reorganization of British official records that took place in the decades after World War II, the cataloguing systems for Mint files had undergone enough changes that this crucial set of documents had slipped out of sight of the contemporary Newton scholarly community. I managed to track it down to its current location in the Public Records Office, and then I had writer's gold: more than four hundred separate documents, most countersigned by Newton himself, that allowed me to retrace his steps as a criminal investigator informer by informer. Most fortunately--Newton’s nephew-in-law reported that he helped his wife's uncle burn many of his Mint interrogation records. But the entire Chaloner case remained in the one surviving folder, and it made for fascinating, gripping reading. Once Newton realized how formidable an opponent he had in Chaloner, he proved relentless in reconstructing not just particular crimes, but the whole architecture of counterfeiting and coining as it was practiced in London in the 1690s. You get to see, smell, hear how the bad guys worked, in their own words, as elicited by a man who (surprise!) proved to be exceptionally good at extracting the evidence he needed to solve a problem.

(Photo © Joel Benjamin)

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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Justin Moyer Sir Isaac Newton -- bookish, asexual, harboring an uncool obsession with alchemy -- doesn't sound much like Humphrey Bogart. But after his famous apple-beaning inspired a mechanical portrait of our universe that would stand unchallenged for 200 years, the godfather of the Enlightenment used his plush sinecure at the Royal Mint to wage a war on counterfeiters that demanded very real gumshoe-ing. Thomas Levenson's "Newton and the Counterfeiter" presents the physicist's vendetta against "coiner" William Chaloner as a battle of wits between a genius polymath trying to reform the British Empire's monetary policy and a dastardly native of London's criminal underworld circa 1695. A pop-science writer who has made Einstein, acoustics and meteorology intelligible to the right-brained, Levenson transforms inflation and metallurgy into a suspenseful detective story bolstered by an eloquent summary of Newtonian physics and stomach-turning descriptions of prison life in the Tower of London. Shortly after abandoning his Cambridge library for the filthy metropolis, Levenson writes, Newton "managed incredibly swiftly to master every dirty job required of the seventeenth-century version of a big-city cop." Like "Heavenly Intrigue," the 2004 book that posits that great astronomer Johannes Kepler murdered greater astronomer Tycho Brahe, "Newton and the Counterfeiter" humanizes a legend, transforming him into a Sherlock Holmes in pursuit of his own private Moriarity.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (June 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151012784
• ISBN-13: 978-0151012787
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,994 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Great Scientist as Sleuth, June 27, 2009

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Everyone knows Isaac Newton as among the greatest of physicists and mathematicians. Far fewer know that he was an alchemist, busy attempting to make gold. Fewer still know that he was an infidel to the Anglican Church; his peculiar ideas of the Trinity, for instance, almost led to his abandoning the University of Cambridge because he could not swear allegiance to the church. And fewer still know that for more years than he was a professor, Newton was a civil servant, a bureaucrat at the Royal Mint. As such, Newton helped solve the enormous and tangled problems counterfeiters were posing to the economic existence of Britain. In _Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist_ (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), science writer Thomas Levenson has examined one aspect of Newton's forgotten second public career, his long fight against the forger and rascal William Chaloner. In doing so, he has not only cast light on a different aspect of the famous scientist, but has given a picture of how science was influencing the world's outlook on practical matters like coining and economics.

The first half of Levenson's book is mostly an accounting of the more famous aspects of Newton's career. Levenson points out that there is no doubting that Newton was inherently a genius, but that his achievements were based on his perseverance, a characteristic that would later serve his investigations at the mint. When Newton arrived at the mint in 1696, he had plenty of metallurgical hands-on experience in his own lab, and his empirical skills helped him observe, measure, and act on the data obtained. He did rudimentary time-and-motion studies to maximize how the workers at the mint moved themselves and the ingots and coins, and he refined procedures so that the output of the mint far exceeded anything that had gone before. William Chaloner is necessarily a more shadowy figure. He began his trade in nail-making, which was a trade that leant itself to counterfeiting, and when he ran away to London, he learned more refined techniques of the art. It was part of Chaloner's roguery that he had tried repeatedly to depict himself as a public spirited citizen, issuing pamphlets against counterfeiting while he did his best to counterfeit. He also "served society" as a thief-taker, informing on former associates so that he could collect a reward and the thanks of His Majesty's government. Newton hounded Chaloner with all the determination a driven man could muster, and he was consumed by a hatred of his counterfeiting foe. He employed informers, undercover agents, and enforcers, spending money on them and buying them rounds of drinks, "diving as deep as needed into the muck of the capital's criminal landscape." He himself showed up at the cells in Newgate to take depositions from the men he caught.

Newton was triumphant, but did not attend the hanging; he was still busy with other underworld affairs, but his involvement in Chaloner's case was the peak of his investigations for the mint. He went on to put forward the concept of a mint that was based on paper money, an idea whose time had not come but about which he was right. He was less happy in his personal involvement with another form of paper. He was an investor in the pyramid scheme of the South Sea Company, and if anyone should have seen the mathematical flaw in the company, Newton should have. He lost big, and he hated hearing about the bubble anytime afterwards. He may have been thinking of himself when he told an acquaintance that "he could not calculate the madness of the people." But for the nation's finances, Newton had provided excellent service (not just in fingering Chaloner), and in addition, his secondary career within the big city helped him become a little more congenial, a little better at working with others, and a little more capable of enjoying the company of his fellows. Levenson has concentrated on a part of the life of this genius, a relatively minor part that nevertheless ought not to be overlooked.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Lesser-known Chapter in Newton's Life, July 4, 2009

By	Gary Schroeder "GS23" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Newton and the Counterfeiter is split into roughly four parts: Newton's career as a pioneer of what came to be known as classical physics, his less well-known pursuits in alchemy, the criminal career of counterfeiter William Chaloner, and the eventual crossing of their paths while Newton was Master of the Royal Mint. Along the way, you'll get an introduction into the British monetary crisis of the 1700s, and the origins of modern banking and economics.

Arguably, the most interesting portions of the book are the first two, which could have been the basis for another Newton biography. Newton, like all great figures in history, has a fascinating back-story. The story of the man who single-handedly shaped the basic concepts of modern scientific thought is certainly big enough to fill the pages of any book. As many other authors have covered this territory, author Levenson finds himself a new niche: highlighting the end of Newton's professional life as Master of the Royal Mint. Turns out that this portion of Newton's life, while interesting from a perspective of "I didn't know that," is not really meaty enough to carry a book.

Newton's pursuit of William Chaloner is primarily a story of move and counter-move in a London that had as yet no professional police force. Newton considered Chaloner, a long-standing and bold counterfeiter, an affront to his authority and pursued him relentlessly in an effort to bring him to trial. But the story of counterfeiter Chaloner too often devolves into discussions of the web of minor criminals that Chaloner was at the center of. X knew Y who was used by Z to lure X into divulging the source of...etc. The recitation of names and associations towards the end of the book is dry and often hard to follow.

One style element that I would have changed is Levenson's extensive use of direct quotes from his source material. These quotes are in their original old english which predates standardized spelling and the modern dictionary. The reader is left to deduce what what is meant by a variety of unfamiliar spellings and archaic abbreviations. While scholarly, it often gets in the way of the narrative.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Side of Isaac Newton that Few Today Know Much About, July 6, 2009

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) did so many things so well that some of them, though important, have been virtually forgotten.

The thinker who conceived the idea of gravitational force, figured out how light rays behave, invented what we today call calculus and formulated three famous laws about the motion and interaction of bodies also speculated on the nature and knowability of God and served his country for years as watchman and guardian of its currency.

Thomas Levenson, a writer and science professor at MIT, has rescued from relative obscurity Newton's long vendetta against counterfeiters in a book that goes a long way toward humanizing the man and making his accomplishments understandable to the lay reader.

In the last years of the 17th century, England was in financial crisis. Counterfeiters and "clippers" were debasing its currency to the point where the country could barely finance its expensive foreign wars and international trade. Newton, already famous for his scientific work, was lured to London in 1696 for what looked like a sinecure --- overseeing the Royal mint (paper money was not yet in circulation). Counterfeiting was rampant; so too was "clipping" --- the practice of shaving tiny bits off metal coins to accumulate enough metal to stamp out bogus duplicates. The standard penalty for both offenses was hanging.

Newton went to work with righteous zeal, reforming the mint itself and relentlessly hunting down counterfeiters. Levenson sees Newton as almost maniacally driven, quickly building up a web of spies and informers who infiltrated the counterfeiting trade and kept him abreast of developments. William Chaloner was only the cleverest of his many adversaries, but it was no contest. Newton simply overwhelmed Chaloner with a mass of evidence that brought him to the gallows, much to Newton's satisfaction.

Levenson tells the story with close attention to detail. Things get fairly technical here and there as he explains the workings of the English financial system and the details of Newton's scientific work, but Levenson is an elegant writer and strives to keep the main narrative line going smoothly.

This is not easy to do. He has to start with Newton's earlier career in gravity, optics, mathematics and --- surprisingly --- even his obvious interest in alchemy. Then he has to introduce Chaloner, an opportunistic ne'er-do-well but a man clever enough to trick others into doing much of his dirty work for him. Along the way Levenson also gives us glimpses of Newton's earnest efforts to find a place for God in his cosmos. He also itemizes the large cast of bit players who worked with Chaloner at counterfeiting and in many cases ratted on him to Newton. Newton too has his supporting cast, and it is an all-star team of great literary, political and scientific names: Pepys, Locke, Boyle, Halley and Huygens, among others. All these peripheral matters are certainly important to Levenson's story, but they do give the book a structural problem.

The result is that Newton and Chaloner do not actually come face to face until halfway through the book. Chaloner tried to blacken Newton's reputation, insisting to his last breath that he was being unjustly "murthured." The trial was perfunctory, the verdict virtually certain, the hanging immediate. Isaac Newton, the rigidly perfectionist scientist, knew he had done his job well. He simply ignored Chaloner's several letters pleading for mercy.

This is a side of Isaac Newton that few today know much about. We learn little from Levenson about Newton's private life with the exception of one possible romantic involvement. Isaac Newton must have been a wonderful man to know --- but a merciless foe to tangle with.

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn