Humans have always worried about the end of the world, but Isaac Newton wasn't the type of man to accept an apocalypse scare at face value. quarter? Those are milled edges, a feature introduced by Newton on English coins to prevent clipping.Ī vision of the apocalypse, which Newton saw happening in 2060. You know those ridges on the edge of a U.S. Working as many as 18 hours a day, Newton reorganized the Royal Mints into high-quality, high-efficiency factories pumping out currency that was highly resistant to forgers. It was a bold move, considering that the entire country had to make do without a currency for an entire year.
In addition to hands-on crime fighting, he recalled all English coins and had them melted down and remade into a higher-quality, harder-to-counterfeit design. So in 1696, the British government called on Newton. Riots broke out as faith in the English currency plummeted. Since English coins varied so widely in size and quality, it was easy to pass off even the most sloppy knockoffs as legal tender. The average bag of English coins was just a hodgepodge of damaged and unrecognizable silver chunks. So what did people do? Why, they melted down the coins or "clipped" silver from the edges to sell to France.īy Newton's time, clipping had done a number on the nation's currency. The country's currency consisted entirely of silver coins, and that silver was often worth more than the value stamped on it. See, by the late 1600s, England's financial system was in full-blown crisis mode. No transmutations were reported.Īnd since counterfeiting was then a capital offense in Britain, the miscreants he brought to justice typically wound up at the execution block. In 2005, historian Newman reproduced this same stone by following Newton's 300-year-old notes. While not quite an invention, the stone illustrates much about the mind and times of this scientific icon. Ultimately a fruitless effort, Newton managed to produce a purple copper alloy. This led Newton to texts on the philosopher's stone, which he attempted to decode in order to produce the mysterious substance itself.
According to historian William Newman, he sought "limitless power over nature." Thirty years' worth of experimental notebooks, however, reveal that Newton's sights were set on far more than chemical reactions or even the promise of gold. Alchemy hadn't quite been kicked to the curb as outdated quackery, and for all their occultism and mystical philosophy, alchemical texts also dabbled in very real chemistry. Why did one of the greatest scientific icons involve himself with alchemy? To answer that question, you have to remember that the scientific revolution was just gaining steam in the 1600s.
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