Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

This book sounded so great when we heard about it on public radio, and the story was interesting; but it was written more like a very long article in an academic journal. It became extremely tedious in it's detail about background and issues not very relevant to what we thought was the main subject. Unfortunately we chose this as one of the books we read aloud to each other, and that was a mistake because the writing style is stilted and the sentences do not flow well. I would only recommend this book to someone who was an academic pursuing details about the history of Isaac Newton, not to someone just interested in a good story.

I appreciate the communal glee over this book but i found it slow and moderately informative. There really is no need for such extensive quoting throughout. I felt i was back in college reading a dated text. With defter prose and more authorial creativity this book would have been a gem. Instead the dust it will gather may well be as heavy as Newton's.

Newton and the Counterfeiter is an engaging, informative look at a little known slice of history: Sir Isaac Newton as the Warden of the Royal Mint and his battle with a professional counterfeiter named William Chaloner. At age 53 with his great scientific achievements behind him, Newton employed his unique mental powers and indefatigable nature to work on behalf of King William at time of crisis for England's currency and economy.

At the time, all English currency was metallic. (Paper money was just about to make its first appearance and later plays a key role in the story.) English coins were relatively simple and crude with rounded edges and imprints hammered by hand. The coins were easily subject to clipping. "Coiners" literally clipped the edges off coins and melted the cuttings. That product could then be diluted with less valuable metals and used to manufacture new counterfeit money.

England faced an even more difficult problem: precious metals had a higher value on the continent. Thus melted English coins could be taken to continental Europe and used to acquire coins of greater value than the original English coins. Multitudinous repetition of this process left England with virtually no money in circulation. With no money to fuel commerce, the economy ground to a halt.

Newton's job then was two-fold: to produce large quantities of new edged coins and to catch, convict, and punish the counterfeiters. Chaloner was at the top of London's counterfeiting underworld. He had a fine mind, a genius for counterfeiting, and an audacious character. Politics and religion provided a backdrop to the battle. Jacobite supports of former King James II were still active and Chaloner aligned with them. Gathering enough evidence to put Chaloner was not easy.

English juries were often hesitant to convict the accused in large measure because of the brutal punishments that they knew would result. Counterfeiting was treason and treason called not merely for the death penalty, but for drawing and quartering. The gruesome process called for the prisoner to be strangled by hanging (the neck was not to be broken by hanging), taken down while still living and disemboweled - the "privy member" being also removed. The bowels would then be set afire in front of the prisoner's eyes, and only then would the prisoner's head be mercifully separated from the body. It took Newton two tries, but in the end he got his man. Fortuitously for Chaloner, by the time of his execution counterfeiters would be strangled to death before being disemboweled and burned.

The crime that led to Chaloner's downfall was counterfeiting Malt Lottery Tickets. The lottery had originally been intended to raise hard cash for the Crown, but then they failed to sell, the Crown turned them into 10 pound notes and forced sailors to accept them as pay. These tickets were one of the very first forms of paper money in England. They were treated as paper money, but also as bonds to be gambled - err, invested. Successful counterfeiting of paper money posed an especially dangerous dual threat: to the financial markets paying for the Crown's wars and to the acceptance of its currency for the small daily transactions.

Newton's battle with counterfeiters is an interesting slice of history and well-told by Levenson. Along the way he also gives the reader a view into the extremes of life in 17th century London (Samuel Pepys makes an appearance) and some insight into Newton the man. Highly recommended.

Readers may also enjoy a fictionalized version of Newton's life as an agent of the law in Phillip Kerr's Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton: A Novel.

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

Thomas Levenson, the author, has done a marvelous job researching and writing about the "other" career of Isaac Newton. Everyone knows about Newton's work with apples and gravity but few know about his other scientific discoveries including inventing "the calculus" and work with light, the solar system and alchemistry. Author Levenson, who also teaches "Scientific Writing" at MIT uses the first part of this book to refresh our knowledge of Newton "the scientist". He then begins to weave the criminal plot and workings of "Mastermind" William Chaloner.

Newton was over fifty years old when he left Cambridge and assumed the post of Warden of the London Mint. There he found challenges including inefficiency and counterfeiting that would test his amazing mind. Like the English Bulldog, Newton pursued with great tenacity all these problems and eventualy managed to solve them all.
Levenson's account of 17th and 18th century England also explains how the first use of "paper" money and national lotteries came to being. The rogue William Chaloner provides an excellent antagonist to the cerebral Newton. Only Newton's dogged police work could unravel Chaloner's scheme.
This book is history, science, economics and psychology all for the price of one book. Great Read.

Isaac Newton is almost universally known as a mathematical physicist, with images of a selfless scholar who stood on the shoulders of giants. Relatively little is known of him after he left the scholarly life for a sinecure in bustling London, ultimately leading to his involvement in petty national politics, for which his knighthood was a prop.

But before then he managed to save England's commercial economy by applying his intellect to diagnose a problem of economics and not physics, recommending a rational solution that was ignored, and then save the realm by helping to make its money worth something. That effort exposed him to an ugly underworld, which he eventually mastered with few scholarly methods other than intense analysis. Newton always had a hard side, and placing him in a position where he was figuratively judge, jury and executioner, made that side even harder.

Almost like reading a crime novel, and often just as exciting, this well written book explores Britain's social and economic system, including the counterfeiting underworld that he had to learn to control. To his credit he accomplished this within the letter of British law, with relentlessness typical of dedicated career government bureaucrats. There were no giants in this, his second career, but there certainly was far more personal involvement than we would expect from someone who explained the system of the world.

Review of `Newton and the counterfeiter: the unknown detective career of the world's greatest scientist' by Thomas Levenson.
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2009).
Reviewed by William P. Palmer

There are a huge number of books on Newton's life. Amongst the more well-known are: Memoirs of the life, writings and discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Brewster, D., 1855): Sir Isaac Newton his life and work (Andrade, E. N. da C.,1954): In the presence of the creator: Isaac Newton & his times (Christianson, G. E., 1984): The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy or, The Hunting of the Greene Lyon (Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter, 1984): The Newtonian revolution (Cohen, I. B., 1987): Isaac Newton: the last sorcerer (White, M., 1997): Coffee with Isaac Newton (White, M., 1998) Isaac Newton (Westfall, R. S. 2007): Introducing Newton (Rankin, W. 2007). This brief listing of biographies of Newton or of aspects of his work includes the scholarly and the introductory.

It is difficult for any current biographer to find some new angle on Newton as such exceptional scholars and communicators of the history of science have covered the options so thoroughly. Thomas Levenson has written a book about one specific part of Newton's life ' his tenure as Warden of the Mint, with the idea of seeing how well `the world's greatest scientist' succeeded in becoming a successful detective entrapping the criminal low-life of his times. Sir John Craig's book, Newton at the Mint (1946) and some of his academic articles also explore the idea of Sir Isaac Newton as a detective, but these are not easily accessible to today's reader. How well does Thomas Levenson's book succeed at this task?

I enjoyed the book though it did not contain much that was new about Newton. However with the considerable scholarship that has been devoted to Newton's life and works, novelty is not easy. The book is 318 pages long and this includes acknowledgements, informative notes and an index. There are six main sections in the book (parts I to VI) with a preface and an epilogue. The first three sections are introductory to Isaac Newton about his early years and scientific career and also about William Challoner and his background and criminal career.

The story is set up with Newton (Master of the Mint) as the hero and Challoner (master criminal) as the villain. But we are reminded throughout that life is not that simple as that; for both Newton and Challoner there are other factors intervening. Not all those on whom Newton relies are entirely honest. Chaloner's friends are prepared to betray him for reward or to save themselves.

It is an interesting story, though it should be remembered that Newton's importance in the history of science (or indeed in the history of the world) is due to his scientific discoveries. The author also makes some good and thought provoking points about the nature of money and Newton's brilliant administrative talents in running the Mint. It is a good book, thoroughly recommended.

BILL PALMER

What fun to read about the surprising second career of Isaac Newton, the scientist who is frozen in our heads as the guy with the apple.

Newton's intellect, knowledge of scientific method and years of experience were put to good use when he left his sheltered academic pursuits in Cambridge late in life to accept a patronage job as Warden of the Royal Mint (and later Master of the same).

In this position, he took charge of the re-issuing of British coinage, a huge undertaking intended to restore the health of the country's financial system. He also became a sort of detective, charged with bringing down criminals who were bankrupting the country with their "coin clipping" (shaving bits of coins off) and counterfeiting.

Most of the book is taken up with Newton's scientific career, with the last part of the book following him to the Tower of London and finally his quest to track down one of the biggest counterfeiters of the day, William Chaloner. The author makes a good case for how intricately Newton's seemingly disparate careers are intertwined. Mr. Levenson notes how perfectly Newton's feverish interest in alchemy -- making gold out of metal -- aligned with his career as overseer of Britain's coin-making.

I enjoyed the book most when Newton was on stage. When he disappears for any length of time, the book lags somewhat. Chaloner never really came to life for me, so the book's claim to be a story of an epic chase just didn't ring true. But Newton is so fully drawn in such an engaging portrait that he carried me to the end.