Biographies & Memoirs

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

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

In 1695, Isaac Newton, already renowned as the greatest mind of his age, made a surprising career change. He left quiet Cambridge, where he had lived for 30 years and made his earth-shattering discoveries, and moved to London to take up the post of Warden of His Majestys Mint.

Newton was preceded to the city by a genius of another kind, the budding criminal William Chaloner. Thanks to his preternatural skills as a counterfeiter, Chaloner was rapidly rising in London's highly competitive underworld, at a time when organized law enforcement was all but unknown and money in the modern sense was just coming into being. Then he crossed paths with the formidable new warden.

Preface: 'Let Newton Be'

Part I: Learning to Think

Chapter 1: "Except God"

Chapter 2: "The Prime of My Age"

Chapter 3: "I Have Calculated It"

Chapter 4: "The Incomparable Mr. Newton"

Part II: A Rogue's Progress

Chapter 5: "The Greatest Stock of Impudence"

Chapter 6: "Every Thing Seem'd to Favour His Undertakings"

Part III: Passions

Chapter 7: "All Species of Metals ... from This Single Root"

Chapter 8: "Thus You May Multiply to Infinity"

Chapter 9: "Sleeping Too Often by My Fire"

Part IV: The New Warden

Chapter 10: "The Undoing of the Whole Nation"

Chapter 11: "Our Beloved Isaac Newton"

Chapter 12: "Stifling the Evidence Against Him"

Chapter 13: "His Old Trick"

Chapter 14: "A Thing Impossible"

Part V: Skirmishes

Chapter 15: "The Warden of the Mint Is a Rogue"

Chapter 16: "Boxefulls of Informations in His Own Handwriting"

Chapter 17: "I Had Been Out Before Now but for Him"

Chapter 18: "A New and Dangerous Way of Coining"

Part VI: Newton and the Counterfeiter

Chapter 19: "To Accuse and Vilify the Mint"

Chapter 20: "At This Rate the Nation May Be Imposed Upon"

Chapter 21: "He Had Got His Business Done"

Chapter 22: "If Sr Be Pleased..."

Chapter 23: "If I Die I Am Murthered"

Chapter 24: "A Plain and Honest Defence"

Chapter 25: "O I Hope God Will Move Yor Heart"

Epilogue: "He Could Not Calculate the Madness of the People"

Notes

Bibliography

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