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Humberto Barreto



Source:
Powell's Review-a-Day
July 9, 2009
http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=7321


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

Isaac Newton to the rescue
A Review by Paul Collins


There are any number of settings where we might imagine Isaac Newton 
holding forth in February of 1699 -- under his famed apple tree, say, or 
before an august assembly of the Royal Society. Draining drams with 
counterfeiters in a lowlife London pub called the Dogg, though, seems 
less likely. But that's just what Britain's greatest scientist was doing 
-- and in Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of 
the World's Greatest Scientist, Thomas Levenson has done an admirable 
job of explaining how that odd scene came about.

Although Newton's fame comes from physics, Levenson points out that much 
of his life was in fact dedicated to studying alchemy, or figuring out 
how to transmute dross into gold. That fascination, so often regarded as 
oddly inconvenient by Newton scholars, becomes the hinge of Levenson's 
tale -- for by 1695, King William III's royal Mint was in such a dire 
state that it could have used a little alchemy itself. Because the 
silver in British coins was now worth more in continental Europe than 
the coins' face value, speculators were melting them down, shipping the 
metal abroad, and then using the proceeds to procure ... more coins. "It 
was the nearest thing imaginable," Levenson writes, "to a financial 
perpetual motion machine. "

But that motion came at the expense of British coffers. Soon the few 
coins remaining were either clipped -- that is, subtly shaved down for 
their silver -- or were counterfeits made from cheap alloys. Brits found 
themselves unable to pay for everyday basics, and the government, 
struggling to finance the Nine Years' War, found foreign bankers 
disenchanted with the country's literally flimsy currency: at one test 
conducted in Oxford, a sack of coins that should have tipped the scales 
at 400 ounces proved to weigh a mere 104.

And so the government called on the era's greatest mind to run the royal 
Mint -- a move roughly equivalent to asking Stephen Hawking to manage a 
TARP bailout. It is here that Levenson's book especially shines: for, as 
unlikely a figure as Newton appears for the job, Levenson shows that his 
deep experience of precious metals -- and his decisive grasp of 
mathematics -- actually made him an ideal choice.

Which brings us back to the dirty confines of the Dogg pub. Along with 
revamping the nation's currency through both the first time-motion study 
and modern coining techniques, Newton still faced the continued menace 
of counterfeiters. His solution was to create perhaps the greatest 
undercover force in the city, one that methodically snared low-level 
informants to aim upward at London's counterfeiting gangs.

The one man remaining out of reach all this time was the extraordinary 
William Chaloner; in him, Levenson has a cinematic figure of cunning and 
opportunistic criminality. Trained in metalworking as a nail maker, 
Chaloner fled his apprenticeship to a London life of hawking sex toys, 
fake timepieces and quack medicine. But when he returned to his old 
talent at metals, he found his real stock in trade as a crook.

Chaloner is an endlessly slippery presence in Newton and the 
Counterfeiter -- making and blowing fortunes at illicit coining, sending 
his accomplices to the gallows when that proves more profitable and even 
attempting to infiltrate the Mint itself with pamphlets passing himself 
off as a policy "expert." (This last bit of chutzpah, Levenson muses, 
was " a bit like John Gotti weighing in on Social Security.") When 
Chaloner attempts one last big score -- one that could bring down the 
national currency -- the result is a well-plotted game of cat-and-mouse 
with Isaac Newton.

Newton and the Counterfeiter is as finely struck as one of Newton's 
shillings, and just as shiny in its use of new technology; it owes much 
to Levenson's canny use of the digitized records of the Old Bailey court 
system, as well as the online Newton Project, which has digitized 
Newton's notebooks. The result is a history that, if it doesn't change 
Newton's primary reputation, certainly shows that there's more than 
meets the eye in our familiar genius. We are accustomed to enshrining 
Newton in the sciences: But G-men and bankers, it turns out, owe him a 
debt of gratitude as well.

Paul Collins' latest book is The Book of William: How Shakespeare's 
First Folio Conquered the World.