SIR ISAAC NEWTON
See Also: ASCERTAINING THE VERTICAL; THE CARRINGTON EVENT; CATS The Cat Flap; CLASS Intellectuals;
FINANCIAL SCANDALS The South Sea Bubble; LEARNED SOCIETIES The Royal Society;
MONEY The Guinea; MONEY The Royal Mint, Sir Isaac Newton; THE TOWER OF LONDON
The Ravens; TOWNHOUSES, DISAPPEARED Northumberland House, The Wizard Earl and
His Master; WEATHER Blue Skies
Isaac
Newton's studies of light rays had led him to believe that it would not be
possible to remove colour distortion from refracting telescopes. In 1669 he built a reflecting one. News of his creation percolated through to
the Royal Society, which, two years later, invited him to show his device to
its members. He sent it to the
Society. His achievement was applauded
by the body's members.
The
following year the body elected Newton to be one of its Fellows. In the reply to this that he sent he included
a statement about his theory of colours.
The Society's Philosophical Transactions published the letter as
a paper. Robert Hooke, who had written
on light in Micrographia (1665), and who had a tendency to be something
of a universal claimant , felt the need to comment adversely upon the
Cambridge academic's work. His presence
within the Society disinclined Newton to disclose anything more about his
researches.
In
conversation Newton stated that he believed that the planets revolve in
ellipses, only providing a written proof subsequently. Hooke claimed that the idea was his. Newton responded sarcastically to this
assertion by drawing upon the myth of Orion the Hunter to declare I have seen
further because I have sat upon the shoulders of giants to Hooke in a
sarcastic manner, i.e. that Hooke would regard himself as being a
giant. That is, it was one thing to be
able think of an idea, it was quite another to be able to prove it by
mathematical means. The insult was compounded
by the fact that Hooke was a short man with a twisted spine.
It can
be argued that the Civil Wars had helped to create an intellectual climate in
which the previous prevailing orthodoxies no longer had the weight that they
had enjoyed historically. Newton
employed observation and measurement. In
spring 1686 Newton started writing his masterwork Principia. The following year Edmond Halley published
the book at his own expense. (At, the
time, the Royal Society's finances were too precarious for it to be able to do
so.) Principia combined
mathematics and philosophy through real-world data that was harvested from
people who had been sailing across the world.
He processed this information by using the assumption that the laws of
nature were universal across the globe.
This was an important theoretical assumption. By the early 1690s the period of Newton s
great intellectual creativity had come to an end. In 1696, through the offices of his friend
the Whig politician the 1st Earl of Halifax, the government offered
him the post of Warden of the Royal Mint.
He accepted the tender with alacrity.
The scientist proved to be an able administrator. In 1699 Newton used his political associates
to have himself devoted to more the influential and more remunerative Mastership.
For the
seven years after he accepted his initial position at the Mint, Newton did not
involve himself in the affairs of the Royal Society. During that time the body underwent a
decline. In spring 1703 Hooke died. This left the way clear for Newton to
dominate the organisation. In autumn he
was elected to be its President, a post that he was to retain until his own
death. He deployed his organisational
talents both to revitalise the Society's intellectual life and to improve its
financial condition. By 1710 the latter
was strong enough for it to be able to buy its own premises in Crane Court to
the north of Fleet Street (it having been housed previously in Gresham College
in Broad Street). It did this by paying
550 in cash and assuming a debt of over 1600.
The sum was paid off within six years.
Newton
was dissatisfied with his work in the lunar section of Principia. This had been one of the last portions of the
book that he had written. In the early
1690s he voiced his unhappiness about the incompleteness of the treatise,
singling out John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, as a cause. He became convinced that the man had built up
a body of observations that would have enabled him (Newton) to develop his
lunar theory fully. In the mid-1700s the
Whigs, having previously lost their influence within the government, started to
regain it. Newton exploited this
development to secure control of the astronomer's data and to publish it how he
saw fit in Historia coelestis (1712).
Like the Master, Flamsteed had a Whig patron - the 2nd Duke
of Bolton. However, his grace was an
ally of Halifax and, while the former was a territorial magnate and the latter
was not, the baron had financial expertise that rendered him a politician of
the first rank in the way that the duke was not.
In 1700
Richard Bentley had been appointed to be the Master of Trinity College
Cambridge. As the institution's head,
the Classicist sought to foster its intellectual reputation. He came to the view that one of the ways that
this might be done would be to enable Newton to produce a second edition of Principia,
which had already acquired renown as one of the great works to have been
written in Cambridge. Bentley forwarded
Roger Cotes, the Plumian Professor of Astronomy, to the scientist as someone
who might be able assist him in the preparation of a new version. Newton found that he was able to co-operate
with the younger man. The treatise was
greatly improved. In 1713 it was to be
republished, becoming the Principia that was to play a central role in
creating modern physics.
Gottfried
Leibnitz was a close friend of the Electress Dowager Sophia of Hanover, who was
Queen Anne's heir-apparent. In 1711 the
Leipziger wrote a letter to the Royal Society in which he asserted that he had
devised calculus before Newton had. This
caused a long latent rivalry between the two men to turn into open
hostility. The Master used every
opportunity to counter the claim, especially those that were available to him
as the President of the Society. In the
early 1670s Newton had devoted himself to studying theology. In the late 1700s he had returned to this
interest. As a result, both his skills
at handling a large amount of written material and his ability to marshal
arguments far exceeded those of Leibnitz.
He was able to utilise a correspondence that the pair of them had
conducted in 1676, in which it had been the Leipziger who had been learning
from Newton. In addition, Leibnitz while
visiting London had consulted a number of Newton's papers that had been being
held there. In 1716 Leibnitz died. The affair rumbled on for several more years
because several third parties had been drawn into it.1
During
the final years of Anne's reign the Whigs political gains had been
reversed. In 1714 Sophia's son acceded
to the British throne as King George I.
As a result, the party's fortunes began to rise again. The following year Halifax died but Bolton
lived on. Flamsteed was thus able to
reclaim his data. He himself expired in
1719. However, two of his former
assistants and his widow oversaw the publication of his Historica coelestis
Britannica (1725) in the form that he had envisaged.
Location:
Crane Court, EC4A 2EJ (blue, turquoise)
87
Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6JD (red, brown)
The
Tower of London, EC3N 4AB (purple, orange)
Westminster
Public Library, 35 St Martin's Street, WC2H 7HP. Newton settled in a house on the eastern side
in 1710. (purple, brown)
Website:
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton
1. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) found Newton s
mathematics to be wanting. He rebuilt
calculus placing it upon a firmer basis.
David
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