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Newton And The Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist Paperback – April 12, 2010

by Thomas Levenson (Author)

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A fascinating slice of true-crime history that unfolds in 1695, when law enforcement was unheard of and modern money was little more than a concept

When renowned scientist Isaac Newton took up the post of Warden of His Majesty’s Mint in London, another kind of genius—a preternaturally gifted counterfeiter named William Chaloner—had already taken up residence in the city, rising quickly in an unruly, competitive underworld. In the courts and streets of London, and amid the tremors of a world being transformed by ideas Newton himself had set in motion, Chaloner crosses paths with the formidable new warden. An epic game of cat and mouse ensues in Newton and the Counterfeiter, revealing for the first time that Newton was not only one of the greatest minds of his age, but also a remarkably intrepid investigator.

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336 pages
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English
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Mariner Books
Publication date

April 12, 2010
Dimensions

5.25 x 0.84 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0547336047
ISBN-13

978-0547336046
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Levenson reveals the remarkable and true tale of the only criminal investigator who was far, far brainier than even Sherlock Holmes: Sir Isaac Newton during his tenure as Warden of the Royal Mint. What a fascinating saga! It allows us to see the human side of Newton and how his amazing mind worked when dealing with practical rather than theoretical questions.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein, His Life and Universe and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“Newton and the Counterfeiter is a wonderful read that reveals a whole new side to a giant of science. Through a page-turning narrative, we witness Isaac Newton's genius grappling with the darker sides of human nature, an all too human journey reflecting his deepest beliefs about the cosmic order. This is a gripping story that enriches our sense of the man who forever changed our view of the universe.”
—Brian Greene, author of The Fabric of the Cosmos

As the great Newton recedes from us in time, he comes increasingly into focus as a man rather than a myth—thanks in no small measure to this learned and lively new study from the estimable Thomas Levinson.”
--Timothy Ferris, author of Seeing in the Dark

“Newton and the Counterfeiter is both a fascinating read and a meticulously researched historical document: a combination difficult to achieve and rarely seen . . . Recommended for anyone who wants to know the real story behind this astonishing but largely overlooked chapter of scientific history.”
--Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon and Anathem

"I absolutely loved Newton and the Counterfeiter. Deft, witty and exhaustively researched, Levenson's tale illuminates a near-forgotten chapter of Newton's extraordinary life--the cat-and-mouse game that pitted him against a criminal mastermind--and manages not only to add to our knowledge of the great mathematician but to make a page turner out of it. This book rocks."
--Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Newton and the Counterfeiter is a delicious read, featuring brilliant detective work and a captivating story . . . a virtuoso performance.”
--Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind

"I loved Levenson's book. It's a rollicking account of the fascinating underbelly of seventeenth-century London--and reveals an aspect of Newton I'd scarcely known of before, yet which shaped the world we know. A tour de force."
--David Bodanis, author of E=MC2

"Levenson's account of this world of criminality, collusion and denunciation is meticulously researched and highly readable...the tale of Newton the economist is one worth telling." -- New Scientist

"Levenson demonstrates a surpassing felicity in his brisk treatment of this late-17th-century true-crime adventure...Swift, agile treatment of a little known but highly entertaining episode in a legendary life."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"Highly Reccommended." -- Library Journal

"Newton and the Counterfeiter packs a wonderful punch in its thoroughly surprising revelation of that other Isaac Newton, and in its vivid re-creation of 17th-century London and its fascinating criminal
haunts." -- Providence Journal

"Newton and the Counterfeiter is as finely struck as one of Newton's shillings." -- The Oregonian

"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...Newton and the Counterfeiter humanizes a legend, transforming him into a Sherlock Holmes in pursuit of his own private Moriarity." -- Washington Post

About the Author

THOMAS LEVENSON is a professor of science writing at MIT and the author of three previous books: Einstein in Berlin, Measure for Measure, and Ice Time. He is also the producer of ten documentaries for which he has won numerous awards.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
“Except God”
JUNE 4, 1661, CAMBRIDGE.

   The tower of Great St. Mary’s catches what daylight remains as a young man passes the town boundaries. He has come about sixty miles, almost certainly on foot (his meticulously kept accounts show no bills paid to livery stables). The journey from rural Lincolnshire to the university has taken him three days. The walls of the colleges shadow Trumpington Street and King’s Way, but at this late hour, Trinity College is closed to visitors.
   The young man sleeps that night at an inn, and the next morning he pays eight pence for the carriage ride to the college. A few minutes later, he passes beneath the Gothic arch of Trinity’s Great Gate and presents himself to college officials for the usual examination. Their scrutiny does not take long. The records of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity for June 5, 1661, register that one Isaac Newton has been admitted into its company.
    On its face, Newton’s entrance to Trinity could not have been more ordinary. He must have seemed to be yet another example of a familiar type, a bright farm youth come to university with the aim of rising in the world. This much is true: now nineteen, Newton was indeed country-bred, but by the time he set foot in Trinity’s Great Court it was apparent that he was deeply unsuited for rural life. And he would prove to be a student unlike any the college had ever encountered.

Nothing in his beginnings suggested any such promise. On Christmas Day, 1642, Hannah Newton gave birth to a son, who was so premature that his nurse recalled that at birth he could fit into a quart jug. The family waited a week to christen him with the name of his father, dead for three months.
   The infant Isaac was at least reasonably well off. His father had left an adequate landholding, including a farm whose owner enjoyed the grand title of Lord of the Manor of Woolsthorpe. For the time being, however, the inheritance fell to baby Isaac’s mother, who was soon able to remarry up. Hannah’s second husband, a local clergyman named Barnabas Smith, had a church living, a considerable estate, and admirable energy for a man of sixty-three; he would produce three children with his new wife over the next eight years. There was, it seemed, no place for an inconvenient toddler in such a vigorous marriage. A little more than two years old, Newton was abandoned to the care of his grandmother.
    Of necessity, the child Newton learned how to live within his own head. Psychoanalysis at a distance of centuries is a fool’s game, but it is a matter of record that, with one possible exception, the adult Newton never permitted himself real emotional dependence on another human being. In the event, his upbringing did not dull his brain. He left his home and village when he was twelve, moving a few miles to the market town of Grantham to begin grammar school. Almost immediately it became obvious that his intelligence was of a different order from that of his classmates. The basic curriculum—Latin and theology—barely troubled him. Contemporaries recalled that when, from time to time, “dull boys were now & then put over him in form,” he simply roused himself briefly “& such was his capacity that he could soon doe it & outstrip them when he pleas’d.”
   In between such interruptions, Newton pleased himself. He drew eagerly, fantastically, covering his rented room with images of “birdes beasts men & ships,” figures that included copied portraits of King Charles I and John Donne. He was fascinated by mechanical inventions, and he was good with tools. He built water mills for his own amusement and dolls’ furniture for the daughter of his landlord. Time fascinated him: he designed and constructed a water clock, and made sundials so accurate that his family and neighbors came to rely on “Isaac’s dials” to measure their days.
    Such glimpses of an eager, practical intelligence come from a handful of anecdotes collected just after Newton’s death, some seventy years after the event. A closer look can be gained in the notebooks he kept, the first surviving one dating to 1659. In tiny handwriting (paper was precious) Newton recorded his thoughts, questions, and ideas. In that earliest volume he wrote down methods to make inks and mix pigments, including “a colour for dead corpes.” He described a technique “to make birds drunk” and how to preserve raw meat (“Immers it in a well stopt vessel under spirits of wine”—with the hopeful postscript “from whose tast perhaps it may be freed by water”). He proposed a perpetual motion machine, along with a dubious remedy for the plague: “Take a good dose of the powder of ripe Ivie berrys. After that the aforesd juice of horse dung.” He became a pack rat of knowledge, filling page after page with a catalogue of more than two thousand nouns: “Anguish. Apoplexie. . . . Bedticke. Bodkin. Boghouse. . . . Statesman. Seducer. . . . Stoick. Sceptick.”
    The notebook contains other lists as well—a phonetic chart of vowel sounds, a table of star positions. Fact upon fact, his own observations, extracts cribbed from other books, his attention swerving from “A remedy for Ague” (it turns on the image of Jesus trembling before the cross) to astronomical observations. The mind emerging on the pages is one that seeks to master all the apparent confusion of the world, to bring order where none was then apparent.
    At sixteen, though, Newton had no idea how to reconcile his abilities to his place in life. An exercise notebook from his school days provides a glimpse of real misery. It is a unique document, the purest expression of despair Newton ever committed to paper. He sorrows for “A little fellow; My poore help.” He asks: “What imployment is he fit for? What is hee good for?”—and offers no answer. He rails, “No man understands me,” and then, at the last, he collapses: “What will become of me. I will make an end. I cannot but weepe. I know not what to do.”
   Newton wept, but his mother demanded her due. If Isaac had exhausted what his schoolmaster could teach him, then it was time to come home and get back to what should have been his life’s work: tending sheep and raising grain.
   Let the record show that Isaac Newton made a miserable farmer. He simply refused to play the part. Sent to market, he and a servant would stable their horses at the Saracen’s Head in Grantham and then Newton would disappear, making a beeline for the cache of books at his former landlord’s house. Or “he would stop by the way between home & Grantham & lye under a hedg studying whilst the man went to town & did the business.” On his own land he paid no more attention to his duties. Instead, he “contrived water wheels and dams” and “many other Hydrostatick experiments which he would often be so intent upon as to forget his dinner.” If his mother gave him orders—to watch the sheep, “or upon any other rural employment”—as often as not Newton ignored her. Rather, “his chief delight was to sit under a tree with a book in his hands.” Meanwhile, the flock wandered off or the pigs nosed into his neighbors’ grain.
    Hannah’s attempt to break Newton to rural harness lasted nine months. He owed his escape to two men: his uncle, a clergyman and a graduate of Cambridge, and his former schoolmaster, William Stokes, who pleaded with Newton’s mother to send her son to university. Hannah relented only when Stokes promised to pay the forty-shilling fee levied on boys born more than a mile from Cambridge.
    Newton wasted no time getting out of town. Although the term would not begin until September, he set out from Woolsthorpe on June 2, 1661. He took almost nothing with him, and on arrival he equipped himself with a washstand, a chamber pot, a quart bottle, and “ink to fille it.” Thus armed, Isaac Newton took up residence in Trinity, where he would remain for thirty-five years.At Cambridge, it was Newton’s ill luck to be poor—or rather, to be made so by Hannah, who again registered her disdain for book learning by limiting his allowance at university to ten pounds a year. That was not enough to cover food, lodging, and tutors’ fees, so Newton entered Trinity as a subsizar—the name Cambridge gave to those students who paid their way by doing the tasks that the sons of richer men would not do for themselves. Having just left a prosperous farm with servants of his own, Newton was now expected to wait on fellow students at table, to eat their scraps, to haul wood for their fires, to empty pots filled with their piss.
    Newton was not the most wretched among his fellow sizars. His ten-pound stipend counted for something, and he had a family connection to a senior member of the college. He could afford at least a few creature comforts. Cherries and marmalade show up in his expenses, as do such essentials as milk and cheese, butter and beer. But in his first years at the college, Newton lived at the very bottom of Trinity’s hierarchy, standing while others sat, a man of no social consequence. He made almost no impression on the undergraduate life there. His entire correspondence contains just one letter to a college contemporary, written in 1669, five years after he completed his B.A. As Richard Westfall, Newton’s leading biographer, has established, even after Newton became by far the most famous of his generation at Cambridge, not one of the students from his year admitted having met him.
    There is no direct evidence to tell what Newton felt as he endured such solitude. But he did leave a powerful hint. In a notebook otherwise filled with expense records and geometry notes, he covered several pages in 1662 with what reads like a debtor’s ledger of sins, entry after entry of transgressions large and small, a reckoning of the burden of debt owed to an unforgiving divine banker.
    He admitted wrongs done to his fellow man: “Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer / Denying that I did so”; “Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar”; “Calling Derothy Rose a jade.” He revealed an impressive urge to violence: “Punching my sister”; “Striking many”; “Wishing death and hoping it to some”; and in a brutal comment on his mother’s remarriage, “Threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them.”
    He admitted to gluttony, twice, and once, “Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne”—with hindsight, quite an admission for the man who would become the counterfeiters’ scourge. He confessed to an escalating litany of crimes against God, petty misdemeanors like “Squirting water on Thy day” or “Making pies on Sunday night”; and then an agonized confession of mortal failure: “Not turning nearer to Thee according to my belief”; “Not Loving Thee for Thy self”; “Fearing man above Thee.”
   Worst of all, number twenty on his tally of fifty-eight failings convicted him of “Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee.” Since the Temptation, money and the delights of the senses have been Satan’s lures for the pious. But for Newton the true danger came from the snare that had captured Eve: an idolatrous love of knowledge. Trinity opened to Newton a world of ideas that had been closed to him in the countryside, and he entered it with ferocious concentration, so deep, it seems, that it drove God from his mind and heart. Even at Cambridge, though, Newton had to find his own way. He recognized quickly that the traditional university curriculum, centered on Aristotle as the ultimate authority, was a waste of his time. His reading notes show that he never bothered to wade all the way through any of the assigned Aristotelian texts. Instead, Newton set himself to master the new knowledge that was trickling into Cambridge past the defenses of ancient authority. He did so mostly on his own—he had to, for his understanding soon surpassed that of all but one or two of the men on the faculty who could have instructed him.
   He began with a glance at Euclid’s geometry, but on first reading found its claims “so easy to understand that he wondered how any body would amuse themselves to write any demonstrations of them.” More mathematics followed, and then he discovered mechanical philosophy—the notion that the entire material world could be understood as patterns of matter in motion. It was a controversial idea, mostly because it seemed, to some at least, to diminish the significance of God in daily life. But even so, Descartes and Galileo—and many others—had demonstrated the effectiveness of the new approach, to the point where the mechanical worldview reached all the way to the few receptive minds to be found in that backwater of European intellectual life, the University of Cambridge.
   Newton’s legendary capacity for study displayed itself here, in this first rush to master all that Europe knew of how the material world works. Sleep was optional. John Wickens, who arrived at Cambridge eighteen months after Newton, remembered that when Newton was immersed in his work, he simply did without. Food was fuel—and, as often as not, merely a distraction. He later told his niece that his cat grew fat on the meals he forgot to eat.
   In 1664, after two hard years, Newton paused to sum up his learning in a document he modestly called Quæstiones quædam Philosophicæ—Certain Philosophical Questions. He started by asking what was the first or most basic form of matter, and in a detailed analysis argued that it had to be those simple, indivisible entities dubbed atoms. He posed questions on the true meaning of position—location in space—and of time, and of the behavior of celestial bodies. He probed his new and temporary master, Descartes, challenging his theory of light, his physics, his ideas about the tides. He sought to grasp how the senses worked. He had purchased a prism at the Sturbridge Fair in 1663, and now wrote up his first optical experiments, the starting point for his analysis of light and color. He wondered about motion and why a falling body falls, though he was confused about the property called gravity. He attempted to understand what it might mean to live in a truly mechanical universe, one in which all of nature except mind and spirit formed a grand and complicated machine—and then he trembled at the fate of God in such a cosmos. He wrote that “tis a contradiction to say ye first matter depends on some other subject.” He added “except God”—and then crossed out those last two words.
    He offered no definitive answers. This was the work of an apprentice mastering his tools. But it is all there in embryo, the program that would lead Newton toward his own discoveries and to the invention of the method that others could use to discover yet more. And while the Newtonian synthesis was decades away from completion, the Quæstiones captures the extraordinary ambition of an anonymous student working on the fringes of the learned world, who nonetheless proclaims his own authority, independent of Aristotle, of Descartes, of anyone.
    Newton was fearless in the pursuit of anything he wanted to know. To find out whether the eye could be tricked into seeing what wasn’t there, he stared directly at the sun through one eye for as long as he could bear the pain, then noted how long it took to free his sight from the “strong phantasie” of the image. A year or so later, when he wanted to understand the effect of the shape of an optical system on the perception of color, he inserted a bodkin—a blunt needle—“betwixt my eye and ye bone as near to ye backside of my eye as I could.” Next, by “pressing my eye wth ye end of it (so as to make ye curvature . . . in my eye)” he saw several “white dark and coloured circles”—patterns that became clearer when he rubbed his eye with the point of his needle. To that description Newton helpfully added a drawing of the experiment, showing how the bodkin deformed his eye. It is impossible to look at the illustration without wincing, but Newton makes no mention of pain, nor any sense of danger. He had a question and the means to answer it. The next step was obvious.
    He pressed on, pondering the nature of air, wondering whether fire could burn in a vacuum, taking notes on the motion of comets, considering the mystery of memory and the strange and paradoxical relationship of the soul to the brain. But, caught up as he was in the whirlwind of new thoughts, new ideas, he still had to deal with the ordinary obstacles of university life. In the spring of 1664, he sat for the one examination required of undergraduates at Cambridge, a test that would determine whether he would become one of Trinity’s scholars. Pass, and he would cease to be a sizar; the college would pay his board and give him a small stipend for the four years it would take to become master of arts. Fail, and it was back to the farm.
    He survived the ordeal, receiving his scholarship on April 28, 1664. But his renewed studies at the college were interrupted within months. Early in 1665, rats turned up on the docks along the Thames which had almost certainly come by way of Holland, perhaps in ships carrying prisoners from the Dutch wars or smuggled bales of cotton from the Continent. The rats carried their own cargo of fleas across the North Sea, and the fleas in turn ferried into England the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The fleas leapt from the rats; they bit; the bacteria slid into human veins, and dark buboes began to sprout. The bubonic plague had returned to England.
   At first the disease proceeded slowly, a troubling backdrop to the daily routine. The first named victim died on April 12 and was buried in haste that same day in Covent Garden. Samuel Pepys noted “Great fears of the Sicknesse” in his diary entry for April 30. But the great naval victory over the Dutch at Lowestoft distracted him and many others. Then, in early June, Pepys found himself, “much against my Will,” walking in Drury Lane, where he saw “two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there.”
   That day, Pepys bought a roll of tobacco to chew, “which took away the apprehension.” But the epidemic had taken hold, and no amount of nicotine could hold back panic. A thousand a week died in London, then two, until by September the death toll reached one thousand each day.
   The very concept of a funeral collapsed under the weight of corpses. The best that could be done was disposal, landfill. As Daniel Defoe described it: A death cart enters a cemetery, halting at a broad pit. A man follows, walking behind the remains of his family. And then, “no sooner was the cart turned round and the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously, which was a surprise to him,” Defoe wrote, “for he at least expected they would have been decently laid in.” Instead, “Sixteen or seventeen bodies; some were wrapt up in linen sheets, some in rags, some little other than naked, or so loose that what covering they had fell from them in the shooting out of the cart, and they fell quite naked among the rest; but the matter was not much to them, or the indecency much to any one else, seeing they were all dead, and were to be huddled together into the common grave of mankind.” This was democracy at last, “for here was no difference made, but poor and rich went together; there was no other way of burials, neither was it possible there should, for coffins were not to be had for the prodigious numbers that fell in such a calamity as this.”
    Those who could fled as fast as possible, but the disease ran with the refugees, and the dread of the plague reached farther and farther into the countryside. Cambridge emptied early, becoming a ghost town by midsummer 1665. The great fair at Sturbridge—England’s largest—was canceled. The university ceased to offer sermons in Great St. Mary’s Church, and on August 7, Trinity College acknowledged the obvious by authorizing the payment of stipends to “all Fellows & Scholars which now go into the Country on occasion of the Pestilence.”
   Newton was already long gone, escaping before the August stipend came due. He retreated to Woolsthorpe, its isolation a sanctuary from any chance encounter with a plague rat or a diseased person. He seems not to have noticed the change of scene. No one now dared set the prodigal to the plow. In the last months before Newton abandoned Cambridge, his mind had turned almost exclusively to mathematics. In the quiet of his home, he continued, building the structure that would ultimately revolutionize the mathematical understanding of change over time. Later in the plague season, he would take the first steps toward his theory of gravity, and thereby toward his understanding of what governs motion throughout the cosmos.
   The disease cut through England all that summer and fall, murdering its tens of thousands. Isaac Newton paid it little mind. He was busy.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; First Edition (April 12, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0547336047
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0547336046
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.84 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #189,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #223 in Historical British Biographies
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- #532 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)

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Thomas Levenson

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My day job has me professing science writing at MIT, where I teach in the Institute's Graduate Program in Science Writing.

I continue to do what I did before I joined the professoriat: write books (and the occasional article), and make documentary films about science, its history, and its interaction with the broader culture in which scientific lives and discoveries unfold.

I've written six books. "Money for Nothing" explores the connection between the revolutionary advances in science of th 17th century with the birth of financial capitalism by retelling the story of the first great stock market boom, fraud and crash: the South Sea Bubble of 1720. "The Hunt For Vulcan" tells the story of the planet that wasn't there -- and yet was discovered over and over again. It is both a tale of scientific undiscovery and breakthrough, and an investigation into how advances in science really occur (as opposed to what they tell us in high school). My previous books include "Newton and the Counterfeiter" -- which is a great story from a little-known corner of Isaac Newton's life -- and "Einstein in Berlin," which is, I have reason to hope, on the verge of reissue.

Besides writing, film making and generally being dour about the daily news, I lead an almost entirely conventional life in one of Boston's inner suburbs with a family that gives me great joy.

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Dana Stabenow

Newton always gets his man.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 7, 2013

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This is one of those books that only underscores how little I know. I knew about Newton, sure, I'd even heard that great line of Pope's ('God said Let Newton be! and there was light.') but I certainly didn't know that after thirty years at Cambridge Newton got a patronage job at the Royal Mint and pretty much personally hauled the British nation back from the brink of bankruptcy, and further, acted in the capacity of criminal investigator (squee!) in chasing down counterfeiters.

Reading this book is like eating a really long, really good dinner sitting next to a really good raconteur who knows all the fun facts about Newton and his time. Herein, you discover that the story about the apple was not, in fact, apocryphal, and that

In 1943, at a dinner party at the Royal Society Club, a member pulled from his pocket two large apples of a variety called Flower of Kent, a cooking apple popular in the 1600s. These were, the owner explained, the fruit of one of the grafts of the original at Woolsthorpe. Newton's apple itself is no fairy tale; it budded, it ripened; almost three centuries later it could still be tasted in all the knowledge that flowed from its rumored fall.

Eating of the fruit of the the tree of knowledge. Really, I just have to give another [squee!].

They were crowd sourcing back then. Yes, they were:

...how glorious it would be if gentlemen of England rose from their beds and made similar observations all over the country, building a picture not just of local conditions but of the varieties of climate throughout the realm...Hooke published his meteorological call to arms in the journal of the Royal Society...

You'll find out why coins are ridged around the edge instead of smooth, that counterfeiting flourished in spite of a freely applied death penalty (always supposing you didn't have L6,000 to buy a pardon), that Newton spent twenty years trying to turn lead into gold, which had everything to do with his determination to prove the existence of God, and then refused to take communion from the Church of England before he died.

Newton and indeed all science, or natural philosophy as it was called then benefited by the explosion of print media at that time. Anyone with an axe to grind and a few schillings could print a broadside and see it circulated, including William Chaloner, a coyner (counterfeiter) who wrote a broadside attacking bad practices inside the Mint and actually succeeded in getting the ear of the Parliamentary committee that oversaw it. He came way too close to getting a job inside the Mint itself and proved to be Newton's biggest foe. Chaloner, who got his start with sex toys, faked coins of every denomination, the first Bank of England notes, lottery tickets, you name it, if it served as legal tender, Chaloner made a copy and sold it.

He was very careful about never distributing any of the fakes personally, farming that out to friends and associates, and therein his downfall, because

Like any street cop in history--and unlike any other fellow of the Royal Society or Cambridge don--[Newton] would have to wade hip-deep into London's underworld.

And wade he does. He even has himself appointed a justice of the peace so as to solve problems of jurisdiction over London's seven counties, and then, like any good natural philosopher, he starts gathering data.

Most of London's coiners did not grasp the danger this strange new Warden posed. The documents Newton didn't burn [and the story behind that involves torture, extralegal, shades of extreme interrogation], all written between 1698 and 1700, reveal the almost unfair contest between the Warden and those who tried to trade in bad money.

You get the feeling that Levenson feels a little sorry for those hapless counterfeiters, because Newton?

Always gets his man.

Highly recommended, and a quick read, too.

3 people found this helpful

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E. Baxter

Genius versus Mastermind

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 18, 2011

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Newton and the Counterfeiter presents the reader with a compelling crime drama which took place among sweeping changes in science and economics. The reader is first introduced to the more classical presentation of the great Sir Isaac Newton and his accomplishments, predominantly in physics. From this, the author builds a picture of the way Newton's mind operated and his systematic approach to problems. Meanwhile, Britain is increasingly in danger of economic collapse due to price imbalances in foreign markets, war, and of course, counterfeiting. Levenson's description of the counterfeiter's trade is very interesting, well detailed, and reveals the history behind many of the current innovations of our own currency. In fact, the master criminal here, William Chaloner, and his techniques are clearly driving forces behind many changes in the way people thought about money. Today we take it for granted that bank notes, such as our federal bank notes, are "cash" and have almost inherent value. In fact, these are abstractions which have proven very useful for the world, especially for the explosive growth of the British Empire, but simultaneously lend themselves to crime. Chaloner comes on the scene during a time when counterfeiting could be done by small-time crooks or could involve the most skilled craftsmen working with new technologies. His skills and intelligence lead him to become the greatest counterfeiter of his time while always keeping one step ahead of the law. In fact, Chaloner plays both sides of the law throughout his life, lending his expertise both to his criminal enterprise and the English Mint, telling them what they're doing wrong. This criminal has a flare for the dramatic and walks a fine line between trying to gain a foothold in the mint itself and being revealed as the master counterfeiter. The author also gives us a very good look at Newton's investigations into alchemy. The irony of one of the world's most dedicated alchemists pursuing one of the world's greatest counterfeiters cannot be lost on the reader. Newton, as Warden of the Mint, catches the scent of the elusive Chaloner and the two duel it out. Newton tries to build a case against the criminal even as Chaloner works to undo any possible prosecution. Interrogations, rounding up the usual suspects, human intelligence networks, jailhouse spies, and double agents are all brought to bear in a battle that spans years. Some jailhouse scenes are worthy of Dickens' Fagin himself. Many Dickensian staples are visited throughout the book: Newgate prison, the Old Bailey, and Tyburn's Hanging Tree.

No particular science background is necessary to enjoy this book. It would have been helpful to have an easy way to reference the relative value of different English denominations of the time which American readers such as myself may be less familiar with. Levenson does a good job explaining the economic forces driving the drain of precious metal currency from England into Europe then Asia which helps counterfeiting to flourish. The book has VERY extensive notes comprising roughly the last %43 of the book according to my Kindle. I did not, however, feel shortchanged as the length of the book was comfortable for the material. This book is a solid read for a little history, and little economics, and a lot of crime. Recommended.

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Laurence Paul

An Absolutely Addictive Story Of Truth Being Better Than Fiction - This Is A Well-Written Must-Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 10, 2016

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Sir Isaac Newton summons immediate thoughts of and a belief in the greatest scientific thinker of 17th Century England. A loner and reclusive man who applied himself to mastering a full understanding of calculus, mathematical interpretation and, in mechanical completeness, those physical laws such as motion, energy, light, optics, etc. which could definitively explain his and our understanding of, essentially, God as Creator of His 'system of the world.' In recent years his less well known but long-term embracing of alchemy, divinity and biblical prophecy, have all been revealed. Two books which cover these essential aspects of Newton's life are the succinctly explanatory 'Newton's Gift' by David Berlinski and the first-rate 'Isaac Newton The Last Sorcerer' by Michael White.

Adding further now to Newton's colossal cerebral achievements, Thomas Levenson, a most wonderful raconteur and storyteller, has written the fluid yet truthful account 'Newton and the Counterfeiter.' It reads as well as all good novels should, yet remains true to the facts - no easy feat - so that we can now be made aware that in The Royal Mint's direst hour - when England's currency had become bastardised, debased and brought so low in worth that the country teetered on the edge of monetary ruin, it was the self same Newton who, as Warden of the Mint, oversaw and implemented a complete overhaul of the production of the coin of the realm, arguably saving England from national fiscal insolvency.

Yet the book does not confine itself to Newton's planning, management and production skills for his country's newly-revitalised currency. Enter William Chaloner, master counterfeiter, and often times a most worthy and cunning opponent for the greatest analytical mind of the age. Even if the story of Chaloner's efforts to swindle the nation, and to produce counterfeit currency on an enormous scale never quite reaches the dizzy heights of Holmes versus Moriarty, the game was clearly afoot and a ripping yarn awaits. Except that that this ripping yarn is true. Newton certainly needed all his resolve, single-mindedness, detective skills and a certain police-like control of a network of informers and 'thief-takers,' who assisted him to defeat all who stood against England's glorious and wealthy future. Chaloner never realised that Newton equated counterfeiting and debasing of the currency with profane crime, almost blasphemy, and a crime that threatened divine law itself. That Newton was on a mission from Parliament was obvious, but the author shows us a side of his character that embraced such a ruthlessness and unforgiving aspect of his nature that it can only properly be explained by accepting that Newton himself believed that he was also engaged in God's work. Newton was not a hater. Put simply, he was a driven man and this book reveals him as such.

The book is superbly researched, historically titillating and splendidly descriptive of the stink and squalor that made its disgusting home alongside the mercantile expansion, foppery and naive riches of London from the mid 17th Century on.

A worthy addition to all we thought we knew about arguably the greatest original thinking scientist of the modern age. An absolutely absorbing and brilliant read.

5 people found this helpful

Victor

Newton and the Counterfeiter, Thomas Levenson. A fascinating look at a neglected period of Newton's life

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 26, 2009

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When someone mentions Sir Isaac Newton, you immediately think of the father of science, the three laws of motion, apples and gravity, modern mathematics, the principle of optics, chemistry, theology etc, etc, etc. But what did he do after he had revolutionised modern thinking? It turns out he became the Warden of the Mint, responsible for guaranteeing the value of the currency, and for catching counterfeiters.

This part of his life is often neglected, when discussing Newton people tend to concentrate on his intellectual achievements, and his famous arguments with Hooke and Leibnitz. But the job of Warden of the Mint required no less intellect than his scientific studies, with the systems he set up to prevent counterfeiting, and his painstaking investigations that would send counterfeiters to the gallows.

This book details his entanglements with William Chaloner, the greatest counterfeiter of his day, a man of great powers who managed to evade capture for years, along the way even managed to cast doubt on Newton's powers and probity, and even tried to get himself inserted into the Mint!

This book reads a bit like a good thriller. There is a brief description of Newton's early life, leading up to his reasons for taking the job at the Mint. A description of the known facts of Chaloner's early life is given, then there follows the details of the battle between the two, as Newton struggled to bring his quarry to justice. Along the way we also learn much about the foundations of modern finance and banks, which were methods to solve economic problems that bear a strange resemblance to those faced in the current economic crisis! It's gripping stuff, and even better, it's all true. The book has been excellently researched, the author has drawn from a wide range of reliable documentary evidence to build his tale. It's not a dry biography however, it's written in a very accessible style.

I would highly recommend this book, it will appeal to all fans of good crime thrillers, or anyone interested in Newton and would like to know a bit more about the man himself. 5 Stars with no hesitation.

32 people found this helpful

Lord Byron

Famous mathematician catches accomplished counterfeiter

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 29, 2011

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This story has two main characters, one (the counterfeiter) more likeable than the other (Newton). The counterfeiter was a lad from the sticks on the make in London. He began counterfeiting in a small way (clipping silver coins), tried for the jackpot years later and in the end lost his head. Newton was a mathematical genius and a bore (at least in mathematics). As is well known he was something of a cheat and a bit of a snide. Newton studied at Cambridge University, became resident there and wrote during his residency his famous work on mathematics. Did he invent calculus? Well, that's another story. The counterfeiter lived off his wits and studied at that great university of life, the streets of London. In those days (the late-1600s), silver was more valuable than gold and large quantities of English silver coins were being sold in Continental Europe for more than could be bought with them in England. If you clipped silver coins, you could "harvest" enough to make another (albeit underweight) coin and pass it off as the real thing along with the other lightweights. The counterfeiter graduated from clipping silver coins to minting complete duds, so good that they passed for legitimate coinage in and around London. English coinage was in meltdown. Its debasement was almost complete when Newton arrived on the scene. He left Cambridge to head up the Royal Mint and set about in a disciplined way reorganising the Mint and building cases against counterfeiters, including our likely lad. Rather cheekily, the lad had offered at one point to reorganise operations at the Mint and stamp out the corruption there. Had he got his feet under that table, he would have been ideally placed to continue his counterfeiting from the inside. His offer was rejected by the government minister responsible for the Mint. Newton caught some of the smaller fry involved in counterfeiting but suffered several setbacks in his efforts to trap our likely lad. Eventually, Newton succeeded in closing the net on him. The book is not exactly a ripping yarn - with Newton as one of the main characters it could never be - but it is a great read.

One person found this helpful

R Helen

A different side of Isaac Newton

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 14, 2012

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The fact that we are introduced to a part of Newton's life to which few have paid attention, is probably the biggest pull to this book. I would not say this is a gripping story, though. There is not much tension or drama in it. The author has tried to pull more out of the battle between Newton and Chaloner than there really was. Newton's "deadly struggle" with Chaloner was really only deadly for Chaloner, who risked being caught and executed for counterfeiting. As for Newton, it was all part of the job. However, it's an interesting read from a historical perspective. For those with an interest in the subject, but little background, this book provides a glimpse into some of the monetary troubles facing England in the late 17th century and the beginnings of the use of paper money. Basically, it's a look at Newton's successful time at the Royal Mint. And for all that, the book has done a great job. The brief biography of Newton in the first half of the book is worth reading, and I found particularly fascinating Newton's fervent wish to "prove" G-d through alchemy. An interesting subject worth further reading. Readers should just be forewarned that, although it's a good story, it's by no means a thriller. But that shouldn't discourage anyone from picking it up, for after all, it's an enjoyable little book.

lisa

A Cracking Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 11, 2020

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This book is beautifully written if, like me, you find non fiction can sometimes be hard work. Thomas Levenson has researched his subject well and makes it easy to picture the times he is describing. I was happy to read through the mathematical aspect relating to Newton's early studies and scholarly life and not feel I had to completely understand all the technique and theory involved in order to get to grips with what was going on (a bit like Locke when presented with Newton's theories). I also enjoyed reading all about William Chaloner's escapades and some of the concepts (such as painting clothes to regenerate them) give a brilliant insight into the societal practices of the era.

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