Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton once ran the Royal Mint like a detective, hunting counterfeiters in disguise, and sent at least one to the gallows.
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Quick Facts
- Born
- 25 December 1642 (Old Style), Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire
- Died
- 20 March 1727 (Old Style), Kensington; buried in Westminster Abbey
- Best known for
- Laws of motion, universal gravitation, calculus and work on light
- Landmark book
- Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published 1687
- Cambridge post
- Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1669
- Public service
- Warden of the Royal Mint from 1696, Master from 1699
- Honours
- President of the Royal Society from 1703; knighted by Queen Anne in 1705
- Invention
- The reflecting telescope, built in 1668
The farm boy who was bad at farming
Newton was born at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, a small, premature baby whose father had died three months before. His mother remarried and left him with his grandmother, a separation that left a mark on him for life. Back home as a teenager, he was meant to run the family farm. By all accounts he was hopeless at it, and a schoolmaster and an uncle persuaded his mother to let him go to Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1661.
The plague years and that famous apple
When the Great Plague closed Cambridge in 1665, Newton went home to Woolsthorpe. In the next year or two he worked on early calculus, on the nature of light and on gravity. Later in life he described himself as having been in his prime for invention then. The apple story comes from his own later recollections, passed on by people who knew him. There is no evidence it hit him on the head. It prompted a question: if gravity reaches to the top of a tree, might it reach to the Moon? The tree at Woolsthorpe is still there to visit, or at least a descendant-in-spirit of it is, as the garden is tended by the National Trust.
The book that explained the heavens
Newton's Principia, published in 1687 thanks to the urging and money of Edmond Halley, set out three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. The same rules, it showed, governed falling objects, tides and planets. It was written in dense geometrical proofs rather than the calculus he had developed, and few people could follow it. Yet it reshaped science. For the first time, the cosmos looked like a machine that could be calculated. In optics he showed that white light is a mixture of colours by splitting it with a prism, and he built a reflecting telescope, using a mirror instead of a lens, which he presented to the Royal Society.
Newton, the secret alchemist
Much of Newton's written output had nothing to do with physics. He wrote vast amounts on alchemy and on biblical chronology and theology. He privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, a dangerous view at a time when Cambridge fellows were expected to take holy orders. The economist John Maynard Keynes bought many of his papers at auction in 1936 and called Newton not the first of the age of reason but the last of the magicians. That line is much quoted, but it does capture how Newton's interests ran.
Thief-taker at the Royal Mint
In 1696 Newton left Cambridge for London to become Warden of the Mint, and he threw himself into the job. England was in the middle of a recoinage crisis, with clipped and forged silver everywhere. Newton gathered evidence on counterfeiters himself, including interviewing informants in taverns. His most famous target was the coiner William Chaloner, who was convicted of treason and hanged in 1699. That same year Newton became Master of the Mint, a post he held until his death. He also helped steer Britain towards a gold-based currency, as the gold guinea was valued in a way that drew silver out of circulation.
Feuds, fame and a funeral fit for a king
Newton could be fiercely combative. His bitter dispute with Gottfried Leibniz over who invented calculus ran for years, and as president of the Royal Society he oversaw a committee report that backed his own side. He also feuded with Robert Hooke over light and gravity. He never married and was famously absorbed in his work. He died in 1727 and was given a state-style funeral and burial in Westminster Abbey, where his monument stands near the nave. His likeness also appears on the Bank of England's old £1 note, and in Cambridge you can still see Trinity College's statue of him, prism in hand, gazing at the ground.
Notable people
- Isaac Newton
- Edmond Halley
- Gottfried Leibniz
- Robert Hooke
- William Chaloner
- John Maynard Keynes
- Queen Anne
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