Sir Isaac Newton was Master and Warden of the British Royal Mint for 30 years. The Royal Mint issued a commemorative this year and I treated myself to one to celebrate Newtonmas.
The US mint could learn a thing or two on how to make a beautiful coin with a unique approach from that one
Newton versus the Counterfeiter is worth the time and easy to find. Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the WorldÆs Greatest Scientist takes you to London, 1699. Having been rebuilt only a generation before, following the Great Fire of 1666, the town is at once opulent and squalid, close and large. An award-winning video producer for PBS Nova, Levenson delivers a narrative that is rich with sensory adjectives. To be sure, this is creative non-fiction. Meeting a counterfeiter in a pub, "Newton swallowed his impatience." Whether he did or not is beyond assessment. The book is nonetheless factual. Levenson teaches science journalism at MIT, so it is no surprise that 150 footnotes and another 150 bibliographic entries support the story. Whether or not Newton's career as an investigator and prosecutor is "unknown" may also be putative. Certainly, numismatists have known of it, since Sir John Craig's works. (Sir John Craig was Deputy Master and Comptroller of the British Royal Mint.) Newton at the Mint (Cambridge: University Press, 1946). "Isaac Newton: Crime Investigator," Nature 182, 149-152 (19 July 1958) "Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters." Notes and Records of the Royal Society 18), London: 1963.
America has no shortage of scientists and other savants, but we tend not to honor them. For a nation of autodidacts, we also have a strong anti-intellectual tradition. (The first Harry Potter book is the Philosopher's Stone -- but that would never sell here...) You can find far more examples of American scientists in philatelics (stamp collecting), perhaps because stamps are consumable and cheaper to make.
A while (definitely more than a year) ago I read a crime novel involving him, written by Philip Kerr: "Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton". It is about Newton, the mint warden, his assistant Ellis, and some counterfeiters. Kind of light reading for those winter nights ... That 50 pence coin I have too - like the design, and the fact that it is, or could well be, a circulating commem. Christian
Actually, I was looking at the Native American commems for this year, The Code Talkers. It comes packaged about the same as the Royal Mint's Newton 50p.
