Newton/Detective

There are any number of settings where we might imagine Isaac Newton holding forth in February of 1699 -- under his famed apple tree, say, or before an august assembly of the Royal Society. Draining drams with counterfeiters in a lowlife London pub called the Dogg, though, seems less likely. But that's just what Britain's greatest scientist was doing -- and in Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist, Thomas Levenson has done an admirable job of explaining how that odd scene came about. Although Newton's fame comes from physics, Levenson points out that much of his life was in fact dedicated to studying alchemy, or figuring out how to transmute dross into gold. That fascination, so often regarded as oddly inconvenient by Newton scholars, becomes the hinge of Levenson's tale -- for by 1695, King William III's royal Mint was in such a dire state that it could have used a little alchemy itself. Because the silver in British coins was now worth more in continental Europe than the coins' face value, speculators were melting them down, shipping the metal abroad, and then using the proceeds to procure ... more coins. "It was the nearest thing imaginable," Levenson writes, "to a financial perpetual motion machine. "But that motion came at the expense of British coffers. Soon the few coins remaining were either clipped -- that is, subtly shaved down for their silver -- or were counterfeits made from cheap alloys. Brits found themselves unable to pay for everyday basics, and the government, struggling to finance the Nine Years' War, found foreign bankers disenchanted with the country's literally flimsy currency: at one test conducted in Oxford, a sack of coins that should have tipped the scales at 400 ounces proved to weigh a mere 104. And so the government called on the era's greatest mind to run the royal Mint -- a move roughly equivalent to asking Stephen Hawking to manage a TARP bailout. It is here that Levenson's book especially shines: for, as unlikely a figure as Newton appears for the job, Levenson shows that his deep experience of precious metals -- and his decisive grasp of mathematics -- actually made him an ideal choice. Which brings us back to the dirty confines of the Dogg pub. Along with revamping the nation's currency through both the first time-motion study and modern coining techniques, Newton still faced the continued menace of counterfeiters. His solution was to create perhaps the greatest undercover force in the city, one that methodically snared low-level informants to aim upward at London's counterfeiting gangs.