The other side of the coin(age): Newton and the Counterfeiter

Did you know that Isaac Newton had two jobs? One, you know about: To figure out all that physics and math stuff so we could live for a while in a Newtonian world (later to be replaced by an Einsteinian world). The other was as the big honcho of the Royal Mint. Where they make the money.

In that second job, Newton had several interesting problems to deal with, which were in some ways more complex than how planets keep orbiting around stars and apples keep falling from trees. He needed to secure the coinage of the land against counterfeit, and in particular, to end the career of one particular master counterfeiter, William Chaloner.

This story is expertly chronicled in Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Tom Levenson.

This is interesting for many reasons, including the fact that modern money, as we know it today (not coinage … that’s old … but the mint system itself) was pretty new, and modern law enforcement as we know of it today simply didn’t exist.

Of this book, Levenson notes:

Newton, I found, was a bureaucrat, a man with a job running England’s money supply at a time with surprising parallels to our own: new, poorly understood financial engineering to deal with what was a national currency and economic crisis. He was asked to think about money, and he did–and at the same time, he was given the job of Warden of the Mint, which among other duties put him charge of policing those who would fake or undermine the King’s coins. So there I had it: a gripping true crime story, with life-and-death stakes and enough information to follow my leading characters through the bad streets and worse jails of London–and one that at the same time let me explore some of critical moves in the making of the world we inhabit through the mind and feelings of perhaps the greatest scientific thinker who ever lived. How could I resist that?

Those were the days … when a physicist could murder a counterfeiter in the name of the King

William Chaloner, the counterfeiter, reminds me of a handful of people I’ve known. He possessed a sense of entitlement balanced by a remarkable capacity for greed and tempered with an acute sociopathy. He clearly had a keen intellect and extraordinary manual skill. When Isaac Newton murdered Chaloner (to put it the way Chaloner would put it) he did the world a favor. I’m not saying that certain people I’ve known should be hanged, gutted, and sliced like a chicken into five or six parts, but one can see why the idea would have been attractive back in the late 17th century when that was the usual practice for dealing with treasonous individuals in London.
Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientistrelates the days when Isaac Newton, in his job as Warden of the Mint (housed in the Tower of London) engaged in a long term game of cat and mouse with the criminal and counterfeiter Chaloner, over the course of several years in the late 17th century. A very striking part of this story is the nature of the legal system and the role of due process in courts in London and Middlesex County. For Levenson’s story, we (eventually) find Newton prosecuting a case against the counterfeiter. So that’s the first difference. Instead of having prosecutors, they had physicists (or whomever) arguing as plaintiff. And, on the other side of it, it seems defendants were often defending themselves. Of particular interest is the apparent fact that while Chaloner was probably guilty of everything we think of him as being guilty of (mainly forging coins and to a lesser extent paper instruments) Newton’s case was largely invalid and should have been thrown out. For reasons I’m not entirely clear on, Levenson does not conjecture at any length or depth about why Newton tried the case in the “wrong” court (county instead of city, essentially) and why he pretty much fabricated one set of charges to reflect reality in some ways but to be factually utterly incorrect, and thus invalid, in others. Did Newton carry out a prosecution that an excellent lawyer would have easily undone (in the first case, or on appeal) in order to torment the lawyerless Chaloner, who does seem to go nearly insane with the idea that his conviction was tantamount to “murder?”

And there are, of course, other details of the legal system that would make a modern American first cringe, then think about the American Revolution some 75 years later, and then think “oh, that revolution certainly was a good idea.” There are numerous key points in the American Constitutional system that one realizes are direct outcomes of abuses possible (and seemingly common) under the old British system.

Newton may or may not have tortured Chaloner or others he detained or prosecuted, but it is interesting that torture was officially illegal at the time, and Levenson discusses the legality and practice of torture over the previous century or so. I won’t reiterate the discussion here; When you read the book you will find it interesting.

I spent several years as an archaeologist digging up 16th and 17th century European (including British) coins. Not many of them, but those that did turn up on early sites usually proved interesting and important. The early colonists in Boston carried vats of King James I farthings, which had become worthless and disdained, to trade with the Native Americans as though they were glass beads or bangles. The Natives in Massachusetts rolled the farthings (small thin copper disks with a tin plate) into tubes and used them as one might use a tubular glass bead. Flat farthings were found in Euro-colonial contexts (not yet traded) and tubulated farthings were found with trade goods or on Native sites (though this was uncommon). And there were other interesting things about digging up coins, but I have already digressed enough. My point is simply this: Reading in Levenson’s book about the production of coins, the problems of valuation, international trade and value imbalances, counterfeiting, and so on was especially interesting to me because I dug some of those suckers up.

It occurs to me that I may have dug up coins actually made by Isaac Newton (well, under his supervision). Until I read Newton and the Counterfeiter, that had never dawned to me.

Another point: I had no idea there was a sex toy industry in 17th Century England. But of course, there would be.

I worked with someone years ago on a project looking into the evolutionary psychology of money, including the acceptance of both coins and paper as interchangeable or, at least, “worth something” in relation to, the usual human needs for which we are probably evolved to deal: Sex, food, shelter, whatever. Many humans have, indeed, incorporated money into their psychology. I was reminded of those readings, writings, discussions.

I had not really paid attention to the fact that Newton was mainly an alchemist for much off his scholarly life, and that this whole physics thing was sort of a side trip for him. If only he had insights of the sort he had for mechanics but for chemical bonds and elements.

Finally, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist presents a description of intellectual or academic life in England one or two “eras” before Darwin, contemporary with the early Natural Philosophers. That is not the intent of the book, but it serves that purpose and I enjoyed that aspect of the story.

Let Them Eat Shrimp: The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea by Kennedy Warne has been out for about a year, but if you’ve not seen it you may want to have a look at it. Warne, editor of New Zealand Geographic magazine, is a naturalist who writes about the embattled mangrove swamps, which are a key part of many oceanic ecosystems as well as local and regional economies.

“What’s the connection between a platter of jumbo shrimp at your local restaurant and murdered fishermen in Honduras, impoverished women in Ecuador, and disastrous hurricanes along America’s Gulf coast? Mangroves. Many people have never heard of these salt-water forests, but for those who depend on their riches, mangroves are indispensable. They are natural storm barriers, home to innumerable exotic creatures—from crabeating vipers to man-eating tigers—and provide food and livelihoods to millions of coastal dwellers. Now they are being destroyed to make way for shrimp farming and other coastal development. For those who stand in the way of these industries, the consequences can be deadly.

In Let Them Eat Shrimp, Kennedy Warne takes readers into the muddy battle zone that is the mangrove forest. A tangle of snaking roots and twisted trunks, mangroves are often dismissed as foul wastelands. In fact, they are supermarkets of the sea, providing shellfish, crabs, honey, timber, and charcoal to coastal communities from Florida to South America to New Zealand. Generations have built their lives around mangroves and consider these swamps sacred.“

This is complicated. Mangrove habitats have a distinctive set of plants and animals and a typical set of ecological systems that reside in them, and are distributed around the world everywhere that is not too cold, where the continents meet the seas. But each region is different in the exact link to inland and oceanic system and the relationship between traditional human societies and natural resources. In addition, scientific, conservation, and political interests and stakeholders make up myriad stories of involvement. Warne deals with this diversity in Let Them Eat Shrimp by producing over a dozen separate essays chronicling his own investigations in disparate locations around the world, and in so doing weaves a rich tapestry made up of mud, funny looking trees, edible animals and the people who eat them, the natives, nations, scientists and other interested parties. Global warming, sea level rise, globalization of the food supply, indigenous rights, and numerous personal stories are all part of the weft and warp of this complex cloth. I’m actually thinking of using a few chapters of this book in an upcoming Anthropology class.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this: You are at the grocery store, or in a restaurant, faced with a set of choices as to which vertebrate or invertebrate life form you will chose for your dinner. You left your handy dandy reference card that tells you which sea food to avoid, which sea food to eat, in order to do the least damage to the planet. You instinctively know that this is a rather complicated problem with many factors involved many of which you can’t even imagine. Read this book, then you can imagine, even know about, some of them!

“The question arises…What can we do to help reverse the mangrove decline? I suspect that our greatest contribution, as individuals and communities, is to be responsible consumers, aware that our economic choices ahve global consequences. We can demand that suppliers and purveyors demonstrate that the seafood we eat comes form sustainable sources, and we can vote with our palates and pockets if it doesn’t.

Furthermore, we can insist that food be not just ecologically sound but socially fair–to the extent that fairness is possible in an unequal world. We can refuse to give our business to companies that are known to trade in the marginalization of the poor. “

Yeah, like that.