A History Stranger Than Fiction

By N.S. Rajaram

Readers of Sherlock Holmes stories have long enjoyed tales about the great detective’s deadly tussles with the mathematics professor and master criminal James Moriarty. Two hundred years before Arthur Conan Doyle created them, a real life drama was played out along similar lines, but with an interesting role reversal. The master criminal was a self-taught genius, while his pursuer was a famous mathematics professor, the greatest that ever lived. His name was Isaac Newton, then Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.

This extraordinary story begins on June 5, 1661, when a nineteen-year old youth by name Isaac Newton presented himself for examination at the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in Cambridge and was admitted. He had walked from his home in the village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, covering a hundred kilometers in three days. Then as now, it was not unusual for an ambitious country lad trying to improve his lot by getting a university degree, and Newton seemed no different. He was somewhat older than the average undergraduate and not a child prodigy. There was nothing to indicate that it was to be the beginning of the most remarkable undergraduate career in history.

Newton received his bachelor’s degree in 1665 without any special distinction. The university closed for nearly two years because of the plague, which he spent at home in Woolsthorpe, absorbed in self study. These two ‘miracle years’ (anni mirabli) proved to be the greatest in his life or the life of any scientist in history. In those two years, he invented the calculus, formulated the basics of mechanics and gravitation theory as well as fundamental ideas about optics. Unknown to the rest of the world he had taught himself to become the greatest scientist of his or any other time.

Except for this break from 1665 to 1667, Newton lived in his rooms in Cambridge until April 1696 when he left for London to take charge of the Royal Mint as its Warden, later becoming its Master. By then he had accumulated a record of scientific achievement that remains unmatched by anyone before or since. By 1687, when his Philosophæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, was published, the bulk of his scientific work lay behind him.

A decade later, the 53 year-old Professor Newton was set on a second remarkable career as a criminal investigator and economist that essentially saved the English economy from collapse.  As Warden of the Royal Mint Newton relentlessly pursued the counterfeiter and master criminal William Chaloner who had hatched a daring plan to take over the Mint as its overseer. It is an extraordinary tale of truth stranger than fiction.

Since this scientist-to-detective metamorphosis is unique in the annals of history, it is worth taking a look at where Newton stood as a man and scientist when he packed his bags for London 1696. As early as 1669, Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the most prestigious in Cambridge, had resigned his post in favor of Newton acknowledging his genius. The Royal Society had published the Principia in 1687; his other great work Opticks was also widely known even though it appeared in print only in 1704.

By 1690 Newton was recognized as the greatest scientist of the age; we now see him as the greatest of any age. What made Newton the supreme scientist in history? He was of course a great mathematician but there were others though he was at least the equal of any of them. Albert Einstein, his scientific peer in physics though not in mathematics or astronomy offers an interesting comparison. Banesh Hoffman in his Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel writes:

“…by professional standards Einstein’s scientific talent and technical [mathematical] talent were not spectacular. They were surpassed by many a competent practitioner. …what he did have that was special was the magic touch… he had the authentic magic that transcends logic and distinguishes the genius from the mass of lesser men with greater talent.”

Newton too possessed the ‘magic touch’ of a mystic which allowed him to see truths that lie beyond logic and reason; but there were none that surpassed him either as a mathematician or as an experimental scientist. His power as a mathematician was equaled perhaps only by Gauss. Einstein was not an experimental scientist and as a mathematician, not remotely in the same class as Newton or Gauss. Einstein recognized his limitation when he wrote: “…my intuition was not strong enough in the field of mathematics.” He always needed the help of mathematical colleagues.

Newton recognized no limitations and brought to all his work an intensity of concentration that has never been equaled in history. In his famous essay ‘Newton the Man’, the Newton scholar (and economist) John Maynard Keynes wrote: “…the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentration.… His peculiar gift was the power of holding a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. …his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted.”

To go with this intellectual power, the most formidable ever given to a mortal, Newton brought a mystical streak that allowed him to penetrate the secrets of nature. In Keynes’s words, “Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind… [Newton] was the last wonder child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.”

This was the man that Secretary of the Treasury William Lowndes and Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Montague turned to in 1696, when they were faced with a major currency crisis resulting from the debasement of English coinage. Having completed his work on the Principia and the Opticks, Newton too was looking for a way out of the cloistered existence a Cambridge academic.

It may seem strange that he should want to give up a prestigious position at Cambridge for a civil service job, but to Newton, already the most famous scientist in Europe, prestige meant nothing. If anything, it was he who brought prestige to Cambridge then ranked below Oxford, Paris and several other European universities. Newton knew that he would never again produce scientific work of the same quality. Another two hundred years were to pass before Albert Einstein found and solved problems of comparable significance. So there was nothing left for Newton in Cambridge except the drudgery of routine teaching.

When Newton was called to London in 1696 the problem that England faced was a severe shortage of coinage, particularly of silver coins. In short it was a liquidity crisis like what happened in 2008 when the banks ran out of money. Antiquated silver coins then in circulation were easy to debase by clipping and also easy to counterfeit. Some coins were clipped to such an extent that they weighed as little as half their face value. The clippings were melted down and sold as bullion in Holland and France where they fetched a much higher price.

The historian Macaulay later wrote, “The Mint had produced nearly half a million pounds’ worth of silver currency between 1686 and 1690. But so much silver poured out of England that in the next five years, the Mint could find almost none to coin, producing just over seventeen thousand pounds between 1691 and 1695.” Counterfeiters had a field day, with nearly a tenth of all coins in circulation being fakes. In short, the Royal Mint had lost control of the coinage.

It was a desperate situation in a country still recovering from Civil War, religious strife and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ which saw the Catholic King James II driven out by Mary Stuart and William of Orange. But the currency crisis was the worst. In Macaulay’s words, “It may well be doubted that all the misery which had been inflicted on the English nation in a quarter century of bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad Parliaments and bad Judges was equal to the misery caused in a single year by bad shillings.”

Montague had known Newton at Cambridge and felt that it was a problem that only he could solve. When Newton took charge as Warden in May 1696 he found the Mint riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Thomas Neale, nominally his superior as Master treated his job as a sinecure and rarely showed up for work. Newton quickly realized that the problem had to be fought on two fronts— re-coinage or replacing old coins and eliminating clippers and counterfeiters. It involved economics, coin production and crime fighting. Amazingly, Newton the scientist succeeded at all three.

On the other side of the fence was William Chaloner, once a humble nail maker’s apprentice, now the greatest counterfeiter in London. What distinguished Chaloner however, were not his counterfeiting skills, which were considerable, but daring and organizational genius. He had a network of engravers, die makers and the machinery to mass produce counterfeit coins. He even had a young couple, Thomas and Elizabeth Holloway, to handle the distribution of his fake currency. In effect what Chaloner ran was a parallel operation that competed with the Royal Mint, but more efficient.

But Chaloner was not satisfied with just growing rich by counterfeiting. What he wanted was nothing less than control of the Royal Mint as its overseer. To achieve this he ran a publicity campaign against the Mint and its officials including Newton, charging them with incompetence and corruption.

Had Chaloner succeeded, he would have ended up controlling the production of both legal and counterfeit money. Auric Goldfinger of the James Bond movie fame had nothing on this former nail maker: Another case of truth stranger than fiction.

For all his daring, Chaloner proved no match for Newton. He seems to have underestimated Newton as an ivory tower academic unused to the ways of London. He could not have been more wrong. Newton pursued Chaloner relentlessly through the back alleys of crime ridden London, interviewing more than two hundred witnesses, arresting accomplices and enemies until he had enough evidence to build an airtight case. William Chaloner was hanged on March 16, 1699 pitifully begging for mercy.

With his usual penetration, Newton saw that saving the currency was only part of the solution. The real problem was there would never be enough coins to serve the expanding trade with India and the New World. (Newton was one of the largest individual shareholders of the East India Company.) So he suggested that there should be government borrowing and lending to allow for expansion of trade. In effect he was advocating an interventionist government policy. He had come up with this Keynesian idea 200 years before Keynes was born, just as he had become a detective 200 years before Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes.

It may seem surprising that this absent minded professor who often forgot to eat his meals when absorbed in work should have proved such a brilliant economist and administrator, but not to those who knew him. Keynes wrote:

“It should not be inferred from his introspection, his absent-mindedness, his secrecy and his solitude that he lacked aptitude for [practical] affairs when he chose to exercise it.  …He possessed in exceptional degree almost any kind of intellectual aptitude— lawyer, historian, theologian, not less than mathematician, physicist, astronomer.” To this we must add economist and criminal investigator.

As Michael White, the author of Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer summed up Newton’s achievement as civil servant: “[If Newton had failed] it could have broken the English economy and provoked social upheaval comparable to that of the Civil War. The Mint, the City of London and consequently the King and Queen [William and Mary] of England and Holland were immensely lucky to have found in Newton a man who could turn his hand to almost anything with equal skill and intellectual rigor— a man whom, a few years earlier, none would have guessed to be the perfect administrator.”

This brings up an interesting fact about Newton’s character and versatility. Leonardo Da Vinci is famous as a renaissance figure in the arts, but in the sciences and practical arts, Newton was his superior. Leonardo was something of a dilettante who rarely finished what he started. Newton was the opposite: for sheer intensity of concentration, his refusal to let go of a problem until he had extracted all the answers, history knows no equal. No subject was beyond him. And he was incapable of half-measures.

To Newton nothing was taboo including subjects like alchemy and unorthodox theology. Long after his death it bothered his biographers that this most revered of scientists should have devoted more of his life to alchemy, Biblical prophecies and unorthodox theology than to science. But it is no puzzle. As Michael White observed:

“Newton was above all a secretive man, a man coiled in upon himself, detached from the world, and for long periods of his life he was secluded from everyday current affairs. For much of his life he studied and experimented alone in his college rooms and in the laboratory nearby. …He subscribed to Arianism—the doctrine of a heretical sect which denied the principle of the Holy Trinity—when public awareness of such beliefs would have wrecked his career. [Sic: As fellow of Trinity College!] And most importantly of all he was an alchemist.”

Newton was an extreme nonconformist who held that the New Testament was a fourth century forgery executed by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. The truth is he sought knowledge in every sphere, and he sought it with an intensity of mind and body never equaled in history. If his experiments in alchemy and theology seem foolish to us, to Newton they were a necessary part of his quest, the price to be paid before truth is revealed. As he once said: “A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.”

The almost demonic intensity that he brought to anything that occupied his mind, and the tenacity with which he pursued those he felt had wronged him frightened many people. He was thought to be something inhuman. Aldous Huxley wrote:

“If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons that would not be progress. For the price that Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love; …and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.”

This is pure hyperbole. He could be kind and generous. Whenever invited to a wedding by his close friends or relatives, he invariably made a generous gift, sometimes as much as £100 to the bride and set up the bridegroom in a job or a business.

We may sum up Newton as scientist and philosopher by quoting the much quoted ‘Newton the Man’ by Keynes: “… strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe at the time… that he could reach all the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind— Copernicus and Faustus in one.”

Finally, it is interesting to compare how economic criminals were dealt with in Newton’s time and in our own. In our time, those engaged in electronic counterfeiting in the name of ‘derivatives’ and caused the global financial collapse were bailed out at taxpayer expense and allowed to pay themselves hefty salaries and bonuses. In Newton’s time they called a crook a crook and hanged him.