Newton and the Money

NATURE|Vol 462|5 November 2009 OPINION issue, the authors suggest that UV radiation can Garrabou of the University of the Mediterra- have accompanied climate-related changes be removed from the list of potential causes of nean in Marseille, France, reported that the in populations of birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibian die-offs. high temperatures favoured certain bacteria insects and plants, we are studying orchids that Collins and Crump offer little comparison that ravaged the coral. In Italy, a team led by have recently begun to die in the cloud forest. between amphibian declines and losses affect- Ines Di Rosa at the University of Perugia and Amphibians belong to a chorus of canaries tell- ing other species. Organisms from lodgepole Daniele Canestrelli at the University of Tuscia in ing us one thing: Earth’s life-support system is pines to African lions are dying en masse Viterbo proposes that the heatwave had similar in trouble. ■ because of disease shifts that are linked to global consequences for some of Italy’s amphibians. J. Alan Pounds is resident scientist at the Tropical warming and other environmental problems. By asking how long it will be before Science Center’s Monteverde Cloud Forest For instance, in the wake of the European heat- amphibians are safe from the chytrid fungus, Preserve, Santa Elena, Puntarenas 5655-73, wave of 2003, many millions of invertebrate Extinction in Our Times misses the bigger pic- Costa Rica. Karen L. Masters is director of the sea creatures, including sponges, molluscs and ture. The interacting changes threaten many life Monteverde Program on Sustainability and the corals, died along several thousand kilometres forms. Di Rosa, Canestrelli and their colleagues Environment of the Council for International of the northwest Mediterranean coastline. After are studying how climate change and pathogen Educational Exchange, Santa Elena, Puntarenas studying a soft coral known as the red gorgo- movement may conspire to cause amphib- 5655-26, Costa Rica. nian, marine biologists Marc Bally and Joaquim ian die-offs. In Costa Rica, where such losses e-mail: [email protected] his initial revulsion, prosecuted with relish the Newton and the money men clippers and ‘coiners’, or counterfeiters, who were partly responsible for the disarray of the Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Newton was brought in to manage this country’s currency. It wasn’t long before his Unknown Detective Career of the World’s operation. An unlikely appointee for the role brought him up against the arch-coun- Greatest Scientist role, he was at that time enjoying fame as the terfeiter and forger, William Chaloner, whose by Thomas Levenson author of Principia Mathematica, his seminal skill and success in faking French pistoles Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Faber and work on the foundations of physics, and had (gold coins) and English guineas had quickly Faber: 2009. 336 pp. $25/£20 just embarked on a radical change of career as taken him from poverty to riches. a politician. Newton became the Member of The book documents the entertaining Parliament for the University of Cambridge in relationship between these two geniuses and After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in the Convention Parliament of 1689, formed in the different worlds they inhabited. Although which King James II of England was over- the wake of James II’s departure. But his efforts their story is well known to historians of sci- thrown by a union of Parliamentarians led by to acquire a senior public position in London ence, Levenson’s account adds substantially William of Orange, the English government came to nothing until early 1696. Then, with to our knowledge of the social and political found itself in dire financial straits. It had the backing of his patron Charles Montagu — background against which it played out. The joined the War of the Grand Alliance against Chancellor of the Exchequer and 1st Earl of author manages to unpick many of the tan- France in 1689, and was struggling to fund its Halifax — Newton was awarded the position gled and morally ambiguous webs that made army in a conflict that was to last for another of Warden of the Royal Mint. up the metropolitan counterfeiting culture 8 years. To make matters worse, the country Although the job had been treated as a of that era, and shows — impressively, given was suffering from a lack of good coinage. sinecure by most of his predecessors, Newton the scant sources available — how Chaloner As Thomas Levenson explains in his engag- took it on with vigour. He masterfully over- pulled off many of his brazen schemes. ing book Newton and the Counterfeiter, the saw the great re-coinage and, after overcoming It is an enthralling tale. At one point, government turned to an unlikely hero Chaloner became wealthy enough to live to save the nation from financial calam- in a large house in central London, but ity — Isaac Newton. just as quickly lost whatever fortune he In the 1660s, the English government had made. He bounced back in his typical had carried out a programme to machine- extraordinary fashion. In February 1697, mill the edges of coins to dissuade unscru- he managed to convince a Parliamentary pulous operators from ‘clipping’ the edges committee that was investigating alleged and melting down the clippings for per- abuses at the Royal Mint — the allega- sonal gain. But by the 1690s, many milled tions had come from Chaloner himself coins had dropped out of circulation, partly — that he could oversee a much more because their face value was less than the efficient way of producing coinage than value of the silver they were made from. the method that was in use. This caused a crisis for the Treasury, which Newton showed that Chaloner’s scheme would not take clipped coins as payment was unworkable. However, within a year for tax because they contained less silver. the trickster had distributed a document So in 1696, the Treasury resolved to take making further accusations of corrup- £7-million-worth of non-milled coins tion against members of the Mint, this out of circulation (today’s circulation is time alluding to the activities of the war- £3.5 billion or US$5.7 billion), melt them As Warden of the Royal Mint, Isaac Newton used his genius to den himself. Again his claims were taken ENOCH SEEMAN/NATL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY ART LONDON/BRIDGEMAN GALLERY, PORTRAIT ENOCH SEEMAN/NATL down and re-coin them with milled edges. investigate and convict a similarly intellectual counterfeiter. seriously, and Newton and others were 39 © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved OPINION NATURE|Vol 462|5 November 2009 investigated by the most senior members of of the events he describes. A more conspicuous Newton may have known next to nothing about the Treasury. Newton then put all of his ener- drawback is the author’s failure to consider prosecuting clippers and coiners, as Levenson gies into preparing a careful case against his Newton’s feud with Chaloner in the light of correctly notes, but once it became personal, rival, personally interrogating a number of his battles with other luminaries of that era, Chaloner stood little chance against a man who Chaloner’s former associates, and at a trial in such as Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, spent much of his life cutting much larger intel- March 1699 secured a conviction against him or even Newton’s relentless denunciation of lectual heavyweights down to size. ■ for counterfeiting. Chaloner feigned madness the fourth-century Saint Athanasius — in his Robert Iliffe is professor of intellectual history for a time — his final sham — but was hanged view, the propagator of the corrupt doctrine of and the history of science in the Department of the same month. the Holy Trinity. Privately, Newton expended a History, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH, Newton and the Counterfeiter contains the odd vast amount of time examining the morals and UK; author of Newton: A Very Short Introduction; error of fact, and Levenson is on sticky historical actions of people such as Athanasius, and find- and editorial director of the Newton Project ground with his claims about the wider contexts ing them guilty of crimes against Christianity. (www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk). The observatory tower remained closed, but Florence’s observatory restored has now been renovated to its original glory. It reopens as an extension to the museum Torrino della Specola observers,” he wrote in 1808, a year after he was on 7 November, in this International Year of Museum of Natural History, Florence appointed director. Astronomy that marks the 400th anniversary Opens 7 November Indeed, few astronomers approved. The of Galileo’s first observations with a telescope. modern trend was to build observatories away There are three good reasons to visit. First Newly restored, an elegant eighteenth-century from towns and above the mist, on top of hills is the exhibition. Paying homage to Fontana’s astronomical observatory in Florence, Italy, where there was plenty of space. The observa- vision of the all-inclusive scientific centre, the reopens to the public this week after 135 years. tory tower was simply cramped — the architect tower displays representative artefacts from the Its builder, Italian polymath Felice Fontana, had built it without consulting astronomers original collections — ornaments acquired by had rushed from Pisa across the hills of Tus- and had failed to provide space for them to Captain James Cook; two bewilderingly life- cany, bursting with zeal. The Grand Duke like magnolia and lotus flowers made Pietro Leopardo had chosen him to direct of wax; a Medici collection of worked his new Museum of Physics and Natural gemstones; an ancient herbarium; some History in Florence, which opened to the fossils, a pair of taxidermically prepared public in 1775.

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