Merry Newtonmas

Sir Isaac Newton spent the last thirty years of his life as Warden and then Master of the British Royal Mint. Before Newton, the posts of warden and master were only sinecures for the favored who then further stocked their own larders at public expense. They were not exceptions. Married to sisters, the master smelter and the assay master were brothers-in-law, living beyond the limits of their official salaries, inferentially guilty of conspiring to pass debased silver into the official coining operation. The vector that impelled Newton's trajectory was the sale of dies from the Mint to counterfeiters on the outside.

While most educated people know something about his Three Laws of Motion, his work at the British Royal Mint is less often taught. Biographer David Berlinski (_Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World_, New York: The Free Press, 2000) called Newton's tenure at the mint "uninteresting." Numismatists, who study the forms and uses of money, feel differently.

_Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist_ by Thomas Levenson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) is intended for a general readership, yet rests on an extraordinary foundation of careful scholarship. Thomas Levenson teaches science journalism at MIT. He has been granted several awards for his PBS documentaries. Levenson delivers to print the videographer's impact of sight and sound. You walk down the alleys and into the pubs where Isaac Newton investigated crimes against the Mint of which he served as warden and later master. He had himself sworn as a justice of the peace so that he could pursue and prosecute counterfeiters.

Newton's colleagues called him fearful, cautious, suspicious, insidious, ambitious, excessively covetous of praise, and impatient of contradiction. Even his relatives and his true friends were modest in their praise of Newton.. Physically sound in his life, he died at 84. He had lost only one tooth, still had much of his hair, and read without glasses. Yet, he was a hypochondriac, suffering from illnesses and diseases that he treated with medicines he made for himself.

A NEWTON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berlinski, David. Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World. New York: Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Craig, Sir John. Newton at the Mint. Cambridge: University Press, 1946.
Craig, Sir John. "Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters." Notes and Records of the Royal Society (18), London: 1963.
Craig, Sir John. "Isaac Newton - Crime Investigator," Nature 182, (19 July 1958), pages 149-152.
Keynes, Milo. "The Personality of Isaac Newton," Notes and Records of the Royal Society (49), London: The Royal Society, 1995.
Levenson, Thomas. Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist (Boston;New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 336 pp. $25
Marotta, Michael. "Sir Isaac Newton: Warden and Master of the Mint", The Numismatist, November 2001.
Newman, E. G. V. "The Gold Metallurgy of Isaac Newton." The Gold Bulletin Vol 8. No. 3, London: The World Gold Council, 1975.
Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: a Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, Perseus Books, 1997.
www.experiencefestival.com/newtonmas
www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/, The Newton Project, Professor Rob Iliffe Director, University of Sussex, East Sussex - BN1 9SH
www.royalmint.com/museum/newton Web site pages of the British Royal Mint.