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

by Thomas Levenson

  More to the point, Newton quickly committed himself to mastering the details of every operation taking place in the Mint, including those that properly belonged in the Master's purview. He read up on the history of the Mint, tracing the records back more than two hundred years. He meticulously worked through decades of account books, annotating them in his own hand. He brought the rigor instilled by decades of painstaking laboratory work to bear on every step taken to turn raw metal into legal tender. He got his hands dirty as a matter of principle. As he told his deputies, his rule was to trust no other man's calculations, "nor any other eyes than your own." And through it all, he wrote. His holograph Mint papers fill five large portfolios, thousands of pages, a torrent of words.

  As the summer of 1696 progressed, Newton's mass of knowledge accumulated into a weapon strong enough to bludgeon Neale aside. Faced with such overwhelming force, the Master had no hope, and he knew it. He surrendered, mostly quietly. He held on to that part of his pay he hadn't pledged against his debts, and left Newton to do his work for him. Apparently no one questioned this bloodless coup, although Newton lacked any official sanction to assume any authority over the Master's precincts at the Mint.

  Newton now faced the same numbers that must have daunted the more experienced Mint officers. The coining machines had been designed to produce a maximum of 15,000 pounds of coins per week. At that rate, manufacturing the 7,000,000 pounds required to replace the entire silver coinage would have taken almost nine years. The Treasury ordered the Mint to ramp up production to between 30,000 and 40,000 pounds a week. But that, as Hopton Haynes, then a clerk assisting in the recoinage, reported, "was looked upon as a thing impossible."

  By the end of the summer the impossible had become routine. Haynes, who became one of Newton's most trusted associates at the Mint, later said that the new Warden's cleverness with numbers (something of an understatement) enabled him to master the Mint's complex bookkeeping system faster than other men. That was certainly true. Newton was able to save the Mint from regular attempts to fleece it—like the time a pair of prominent metal dealers offered to take over the recoinage for the modest fee of twelve and three-eighths pence for every pound weight of silver to be coined. Newton ran a quick tally of the Mint's costs and demonstrated that these two benefactors were actually offering to overcharge the government by about a third. But it was the Warden's empirical skill—his ability to observe, measure, and act on his data—rather than his superior computational abilities that made the difference.

  His first goal was to ensure that the Mint had the physical capacity to handle the recoinage. Mint workers crammed first one new furnace into the smelting room, then another. Newton oversaw the construction of a second melting house at the eastern end of the Tower walls. With all three of the main furnaces on line, the Mint could produce up to five tons of refined liquid silver suitable for currency each day.

  That mass of molten metal flowed onto a decayed version of the assembly line that had so astounded Samuel Pepys. Now half a century old, many of the machines were falling apart, and those that still functioned were too few to handle the river of incoming silver. In response, at Newton's order, the Mint added eight new rolling mills and five new coining presses.

  Next, the new Warden analyzed the potential performance of each stage of the coining process. He carefully observed the smelting operation, finding that each furnace consumed twenty-five bushels of coal per day. As in his alchemy, he made sure he understood the detailed characteristics of his instruments—for example, performing the measurement that revealed that a melting pot "which when new holds 800 lb wt, when it has been used a month or six weeks will hold but 700 or 650 lb wt or perhaps less."

  Newton deployed the same empiricism on his men as on his machines. At the height of the recoinage, in late 1696 and through 1697, Newton commanded about five hundred men and fifty horses to drive the giant rolling mills. To ensure that this army wasted none of its efforts, he conducted perhaps the first time-and-motion study on record. As he observed, it took "Two [rolling] Mills with four Millers, 12 horses two Horskeepers, 3 Cutters, 2Flatters 8 Sizers one Nealer, thre Blanchers, [and] two Markers" to move enough silver from the melting rooms all the way down the line to feed two coining presses. Each press consumed seven more men—six to turn the capstan while one brave worker fed blanks into the striking chamber itself.

  Those men constrained Newton's calculations. The Mint could not operate any faster than they could spin the capstan arms, and every other step had to be tuned to enable them to keep pounding out coins at the highest speed that human muscle and a driving screw could sustain. So Newton watched them work, to "judge of the workmen's diligence." He timed how long it took to strike each coin. He saw how quickly the brutal effort needed to turn the press wore out each team. He noted how nimble the man loading blanks and extracting finished coins from the press had to be if he was to keep his fingers. Eventually, Newton identified the perfect pace: if the press thumped just slightly slower than the human heart, beating fifty to fifty-five times a minute, men and machines could stamp out coins for hours at a time. That pounding set the rhythm that Newton used to drive the entire Mint.

  Newton's drumbeat got results, fast. The record of the recoinage as a whole is one of an enormously complicated and expensive undertaking that was completed smoothly, efficiently, and mostly safely. (Only one man died at the rolling mills, an amazingly low number given the intensity of the work.) Under Newton's control, where once the sum of 15,000 pounds per week had been thought unattainable, soon the presses were turning out 50,000 pounds a week. By late summer of 1696, the Mint's men and machines achieved a record output of 100,000 pounds in six days—an unprecedented number, not just for the English Mint, but for all Europe.

  At that rate, the recoinage raced well ahead of its original schedule. Most of the available silver was struck into new money by the end of 1697, and the entire project was essentially completed by the middle of 1698. In June 1699, matters had so far returned to normal that the Mint sold off the machines it had added to handle the national crisis. By then, the Mint under Newton's direction had totally remade England's stock of silver money, a total of 6,840,719 pounds. The total cost of the effort was huge—about 2,700,000 pounds, most of which represented the lost metal in clipped coins accepted for recoinage at face value. But for that price England had bought a whole new silver coinage with which to buy, trade, and fight.

  The swift and ample transfer of silver coins from the Tower into public hands, beginning in the autumn of 1696, quelled the deepest fears of the day. There were no currency riots. The poor of London did not rise up to demand the return of good King James. King William continued to complain about the lack of money, but he was able to keep his army in the field, and by September 1697, after it was clear that the recoinage would be completed satisfactorily, he even achieved a peace with Louis XIV. Nothing directly links the success of the effort with England's domestic calm or its military success abroad. But the fears that had seemed almost overpowering less than two years before disappeared from the record of public concern as the recoinage wended its way to a quiet, competent end.

  Everyone knew who deserved the credit. At the conclusion of the recoinage, Charles Montague said that the enterprise would have failed without the presence of Isaac Newton at the Mint.

  Part V

  Skirmishes

  15. "The Warden of the Mint Is a Rogue"

  FOR ALL THE PRAISE, honor, and wealth Newton's performance at the Mint earned him, there was one aspect of the Warden's work about which no one seems to have warned him before he accepted the post. By ancient practice, the Warden served as the Mint's only official magistrate, responsible for enforcing the King's law in and around London for all crimes committed against the currency.

  Newton had no interest in the task, and he did his best to shirk it during his first summer at the Mint. He complained bitterly about the work to his superiors at the Treasury: "I am exposed to the calumnie
s of as many Coyners & Newgate Sollictors as I examine." A newly instituted reward granted forty pounds for each conviction of a coiner, along with a possible share in the convicted counterfeiter's confiscated property. Juries understood what such incentives could evoke and had become "so averse from believing witnesses," Newton noted, "that my agents and Witnesses are discouraged & tired out ... by the reproach of prosecuting and swearing for money." Simply asking him to do the work at all was unfair: "I do not find that prosecuting of Coyners was imposed upon any of my Predecessors." Hence, he concluded, "I humbly pray that this duty may not bee annexed to the Office of the Warden of his Majts. Mint."

  His prayers were denied. On July 30, 1696, the Treasury gave him the bad news. There would be no escape from his duty, and he was to start right then, with the vexing case of the disappearance of a set of coining dies from inside the Mint.

  Nothing in Newton's prior career would seem to have prepared him for the sheer muddle of a criminal inquiry. Curves had properties that could be analyzed and relationships that could be proved. The behavior of bodies in motion could be observed and mapped against mathematical predictions. Theological argument could return to ancient texts, and rested always on the truth that God existed and acted in the world. To be sure, no one knew better than Newton how to shape a chain of cause and effect until only one possible conclusion remained. But here, there was no reliable measure with which to penetrate a maze of conflicting, chaotically human accounts. But he had no choice: the new Warden had to turn himself into a detective able to penetrate such confusion.

  Newton's law enforcement career began with a simple question: what, in fact, had happened to the tools from the Mint?

  No one could quite say.

  It was possible to see how the affair began—or rather, first became known to the authorities. One day early in the year, Charles Montague, Chancellor of the Exchequer, found in his office a petition to the King and his Privy Council, dated January 13, 1696, and signed by a suspected felon confined at Newgate Jail, William Chaloner. Chaloner blamed his current predicament on the testimony he had given to the councilors the previous summer of wild abuses at the Mint. Mint officers had responded to the accusations by arranging with a private thief-taker to round up some of their usual coining suspects to testify against Chaloner, and had managed to get him committed to the cells pending the proper stitching up of the case that should have put a full stop to his career.

  Despite this history, Montague does not appear to have fully grasped the significance of the signature on the petition he held in his hand. He may have recalled that someone by that name had been rewarded for his role in the discovery of Jacobite printers back in 1693. He probably did not remember, if he ever knew, that Chaloner had been held for coining at least once before, winning escape before trial when his accuser was put to death. Even if Montague could call that episode to mind, Chaloner's petition contained such a shocking, eminently plausible description of a conspiracy at the Royal Mint that Montague could not ignore the document. With the Great Recoinage just beginning, any hint of scandal could destroy whatever remained of public faith in the Treasury, so the Chancellor had no choice but to order an immediate investigation into Chaloner's claims.

  Chaloner was duly released from Newgate. He returned to Whitehall on May 16, 1696. There, an investigative committee of the Lords Justices of Appeal heard him tell a harrowing story of official corruption and greed. In this sequel to his testimony of the year before, he repeated the claims of his petition: mint moneyers, the men entrusted to make true coins for England, were instead committing crime after crime. Using smuggled blanks made of base metal, they were producing counterfeit guineas on their own. When they did use properly pure silver or gold, they cheated the Mint and the nation by short-weighting the coinage. Worst of all, Chaloner testified, it was the Mint's own chief engraver who had sold off the official dies—the tools that struck the design into the faces of new coins—to coiners beyond the Tower's walls. Chaloner named names and swore that "he himself never made a Guinea in his Life," but he listed both his old confederate Patrick Coffee and, with marvelous bravado, a Mr. Chandler—a name known in the right sort of circles as the coining pseudonym of William Chaloner.

  That was one story—horrifying enough to account for Montague's urgent reaction to the original letter. But was it true? Confounding the investigation, the tale was challenged on the spot by one Peter Cooke, described in his arrest record as "a gentleman," although he was already known to the authorities and presently residing in Newgate, where he was struggling to escape the death penalty in an unrelated counterfeiting case. With that incentive, he needed to be as persuasive as possible in his testimony, and the story he told the Lords Justices certainly captured their attention. Cooke admitted that he knew about the missing dies. But, he swore, those dies had not been corruptly sold out of the Mint. Rather, they had been stolen in a theft organized by a gang that included Chaloner himself.

  Two incompatible accounts were bad enough. But then the Lords Justices heard from Thomas White, no gentleman, but like Cooke a convicted counterfeiter, testifying in the shadow of the gallows. According to White, the Mint itself and at least some of those who worked there had indeed conspired in what was growing into a massive counterfeiting scheme. White named a specific employee, a moneyer's man named Hunter, as the source of official dies sold to coiners. So far, it was a clear, straightforward story—until White added that Hunter had sold one set of dies to William Chaloner.

  The swamp into which the inquiry had wandered grew soggier still when a Mint engraver known as Scotch Robin appeared before the committee. Robin corroborated Cooke's claim that the dies had been stolen, not sold. But the culprit he implicated was not Chaloner but Chaloner's accuser, Thomas White. When Robin himself came under suspicion, he ran, making his way to Scotland, safely beyond the reach of English writs.

  Here the investigators seem to have given up. In this tangle of conflicting stories, only one fact could be stated with any certainty: someone, somehow, had gained illegal access to official coining apparatus. Beyond that, the mystery of the missing dies had become not so much a criminal conspiracy as a circular firing squad, with the growing army of the accused tumbling over themselves in their haste to betray one another.

  Into the middle of this mess, under compulsion, came Isaac Newton. He did not yet have any real knowledge about how to run a criminal investigation. He would prove an able student.

  The jail at Newgate no longer exists. The earliest prison on that site admitted its first tenants in 1188. The last was demolished in 1904 to make room for an expansion of the Old Bailey. The jail in use in 1696 was almost brand new, constructed on top of the ruins left by the Great Fire of 1666. The façade of the rebuilt prison was given a hint of the elegance with which its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, hoped to endow the whole city. But such graces did nothing to alter the essential character of a place that was, as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders put it, not just "the emblem of hell itself" but "a kind of entrance to it" too. Defoe wrote from personal experience: he had been imprisoned there briefly, for debt. Other celebrated inmates confirmed Defoe's judgment. Casanova, imprisoned at Newgate under accusation of child rape, called it "this abode of misery and despair," an infernal place "such as Dante might have conceived."

  This was useful terror, of course, and it began when a new prisoner first entered the underground holding cell beneath the main gate that the inmates called Limbo. Not coincidentally, condemned prisoners also waited there for their final ride to the place of execution, providing exemplary horror for the new arrivals.

  There in the gloom, beside an open sewer cut into the floor, prisoners were taught the basics of life in Newgate. From that moment forward, bare survival—let alone any comfort—depended on how much cash the prisoner could feed his jailers. To be or become poor in Newgate invited disaster. New prisoners arrived bound in manacles and shackles on the hands and feet, neck collars for some. It cost two shillings si
xpence "easement" to get rid of the ironmongery, and those who resisted could be persuaded. The jailers had been forced to give up the old technique of "pressing" inmates—crushing them beneath weights that were increased slowly, day by day—to get them to surrender their wealth. But there were still ways for an inventive or determined turnkey to encourage the miserly, such as tightening the metal collars enough to break a man's neck.

  From the holding cell, prisoners were moved into the main prison. Richer inmates went to the Masters side. Those who could not pay the necessary bribes endured the Commons, where they were packed with up to thirty others into cells designed for a dozen or less. Beds were unknown in the common cells, so prisoners slept where they could, if they could. The diet was mostly bread, but an investigation in 1724 found that even those rations were routinely stolen by privileged prisoners—those who paid to handle the distribution of food and candles—some of which they sold to local shops. Starving, cold, condemned to rot in the dark, Newgate's most desperate residents went on suffering even when found not guilty of any crime. Prisoners had to pay a discharge fee before walking out the front gate, along with a charge for the food they might well never have received. No money, no exit.

  Those in the Masters wards fared better. In what was called—and not in jest—the most expensive lodgings in London, prisoners with enough money could rent beds at three shillings sixpence a week, about a day's wage for a skilled worker. They could buy candles and coal, food and wine. The cells were less crowded, and the inmates organized them into something resembling a social order, with rank determined by time served.