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

  • Thomas Levenson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Faber and Faber: 2009. 336 pp. $25/£20 9780151012787 | ISBN: 978-0-1510-1278-7

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which King James II of England was overthrown by a union of Parliamentarians led by William of Orange, the English government found itself in dire financial straits. It had joined the War of the Grand Alliance against France in 1689, and was struggling to fund its army in a conflict that was to last for another 8 years. To make matters worse, the country was suffering from a lack of good coinage.

As Warden of the Royal Mint, Isaac Newton used his genius to investigate and convict a similarly intellectual counterfeiter. Credit: ENOCH SEEMAN/NATL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

As Thomas Levenson explains in his engaging book Newton and the Counterfeiter, the government turned to an unlikely hero to save the nation from financial calamity — Isaac Newton.

In the 1660s, the English government had carried out a programme to machine-mill the edges of coins to dissuade unscrupulous operators from 'clipping' the edges and melting down the clippings for personal gain. But by the 1690s, many milled coins had dropped out of circulation, partly because their face value was less than the value of the silver they were made from. This caused a crisis for the Treasury, which would not take clipped coins as payment for tax because they contained less silver. So in 1696, the Treasury resolved to take £7-million-worth of non-milled coins out of circulation (today's circulation is £3.5 billion or US$5.7 billion), melt them down and re-coin them with milled edges.

Newton was brought in to manage this operation. An unlikely appointee for the role, he was at that time enjoying fame as the author of Principia Mathematica, his seminal work on the foundations of physics, and had just embarked on a radical change of career as a politician. Newton became the Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge in the Convention Parliament of 1689, formed in the wake of James II's departure. But his efforts to acquire a senior public position in London came to nothing until early 1696. Then, with the backing of his patron Charles Montagu — Chancellor of the Exchequer and 1st Earl of Halifax — Newton was awarded the position of Warden of the Royal Mint.

Although the job had been treated as a sinecure by most of his predecessors, Newton took it on with vigour. He masterfully oversaw the great re-coinage and, after overcoming his initial revulsion, prosecuted with relish the clippers and 'coiners', or counterfeiters, who were partly responsible for the disarray of the country's currency. It wasn't long before his role brought him up against the arch-counterfeiter and forger, William Chaloner, whose skill and success in faking French pistoles (gold coins) and English guineas had quickly taken him from poverty to riches.

The book documents the entertaining relationship between these two geniuses and the different worlds they inhabited. Although their story is well known to historians of science, Levenson's account adds substantially to our knowledge of the social and political background against which it played out. The author manages to unpick many of the tangled and morally ambiguous webs that made up the metropolitan counterfeiting culture of that era, and shows — impressively, given the scant sources available — how Chaloner pulled off many of his brazen schemes.

It is an enthralling tale. At one point, Chaloner became wealthy enough to live in a large house in central London, but just as quickly lost whatever fortune he had made. He bounced back in his typical extraordinary fashion. In February 1697, he managed to convince a Parliamentary committee that was investigating alleged abuses at the Royal Mint — the allegations had come from Chaloner himself — that he could oversee a much more efficient way of producing coinage than the method that was in use.

Newton showed that Chaloner's scheme was unworkable. However, within a year the trickster had distributed a document making further accusations of corruption against members of the Mint, this time alluding to the activities of the warden himself. Again his claims were taken seriously, and Newton and others were investigated by the most senior members of the Treasury. Newton then put all of his energies into preparing a careful case against his rival, personally interrogating a number of Chaloner's former associates, and at a trial in March 1699 secured a conviction against him for counterfeiting. Chaloner feigned madness for a time — his final sham — but was hanged the same month.

Newton and the Counterfeiter contains the odd error of fact, and Levenson is on sticky historical ground with his claims about the wider contexts of the events he describes. A more conspicuous drawback is the author's failure to consider Newton's feud with Chaloner in the light of his battles with other luminaries of that era, such as Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, or even Newton's relentless denunciation of the fourth-century Saint Athanasius — in his view, the propagator of the corrupt doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Privately, Newton expended a vast amount of time examining the morals and actions of people such as Athanasius, and finding them guilty of crimes against Christianity. Newton may have known next to nothing about prosecuting clippers and coiners, as Levenson correctly notes, but once it became personal, Chaloner stood little chance against a man who spent much of his life cutting much larger intellectual heavyweights down to size.