Lesson 205 - Isaac Newton's Nemesis

Lesson 205 - Isaac Newton's Nemesis is a Lesson sent by Email by The Professor alongside Isaac Newton's Nemesis. It is the fifth episode sent by Email to fans.

## Lesson

Hello! And welcome to week 5 of Puppet University: online edition!

I’m the TA blessed enough to teach this class on behalf of The Professor, writer and researcher Kari Koeppel.

Let’s start today’s class with a comment from one of your classmates:

(Comment on a Puppet History episode):"'Explain Roake'

Me: 'It's when you create a small colony in the americas, and go back to england for food but get caught up in a war, and when you come back the colony is abandoned. You see a tree with a nearby friendly tribe's name carved into it and cannot find the people of the colony.'"

Bless your heart, you’re thinking of *Roanoke*. (JK, I’d never heard of *roque* before researching this episode, either!)

Now, the bitter rivalry between renowned genius, Sir Isaac Newton, and dude you’ve never heard of before today, William Chaloner.

Of course, by this point, you’ve probably heard the whole *Newton invented calculus during quarantine* thing — or maybe it’s been so long since that early phase of stay-at-home that you’ve already forgotten about it. Well, not to make you feel bad about yourself, but it’s true. In 1665, the plague (Bubonic: the OG plague) closed Cambridge University for two years, so Newton was forced, like most of us, to Work From Home. But that’s not the only way he spent that time. He was 22, 23 years old, casually theorizing about the existence of *gravity* and how color is a property of *light*. But it’s not like people knew that’s what he was up to — he wasn’t out here posting on his IG stories, making Reels of apples falling on his head. Sidenote: I bet we could invent calculus, too, if we didn’t have social media hogging up half of our brain space. So yeah, even though he invented it during that time, It would be over a decade before it was published.

Back to our current WFH situation: Let’s answer some questions from the episode, shall we?

**How were the machines horse-powered? Like, what did that look like/mean?**

Before electricity, horses used to use their horse muscles to pull machines and make all the parts move! Here’s a little example illustration from the *U.S. Mint*:

So when Newton went about with the recoinage, taking the old clipped money out of circulation and reminting it, he put his math and science brain to work, and figured out the optimum speed at which the *500 men and 50 horses* should operate the production line of molten silver.

It hasn’t been *that long* since we phased out getting actual power from the use of live horses, which is why the phrase “horsepower” is still applied to things (like car engines) that have absolutely nothing to do with horses.

**How did Robert Hooke die?**

First of all, you Boogaras, Newton didn’t kill Hooke — let’s debunk that one right away. There’s literally no evidence of that and it’s not even been theorized. It’s actually all rather normal, as far as deaths go. Hooke died at the age of 68, which is a totally respectable old age for those times! Sure, Newton held a grudge against Hooke until his age-appropriate-for-the-era death, but they were also kind of frenemies who perhaps butted heads because they had so much in common. They corresponded for years, and had gone through other periods when Newton was mad at Hooke (or vice versa) for one totally nerdy reason or another. If Newton had just been able to acknowledge that he hadn’t come up with these theories in a vacuum, that of course he was building off of existing knowledge, maybe they could’ve made up! But it’s also worth noting that Newton wasn’t the only fellow scientist that Hooke *squabbled* with, and he too, like Newton, became more of a hermit with age. Sounds like two very fun, very chill dudes.

**What was Newton’s actual \*job\* at the Mint?**

As you might’ve gathered, the 1690s were a bad time for English currency. The massive debts run up by ongoing wars in France compounded with an epidemic of counterfeiting and coin-clipping. I’m no economist, but when the materials your currency is made out of are worth more than the currency itself, ya got a problem. Basically, Newton’s job was to solve this huge financial crisis. He thought of the recoinage (removing and replacing the devalued, clipped currency from circulation — shouldn’t take a genius to think of that one, but apparently back then, it did) and he successfully implemented it. He also went about taking the counterfeiters and clippers themselves out of circulation.

As The Professor mentioned, police didn’t yet exist in the 1690s. (It wasn’t until 1829 that the British government *established* the Metropolitan Police.) But justices of the peace in many ways were similar, only less militaristic; they could make arrests, search premises, and charge people with crimes. Newton himself became a justice of the peace in at least seven counties, and employed undercover agents to scope out the counterfeiters, like Chaloner.

Newton wasn’t just rewarded with the satisfaction of a job well-done, however; he made bank (like, figuratively in this instance). Newton’s income was as large as £2,000 per year by the end of his tenure, which was a huge amount of money for the time. And he was given rooms at the Tower of London — totally sweet, albeit haunted, digs. Later he moved to some of London’s *fanciest* neighborhoods.

I also just want to note that on a personal level, I hold a grudge against Isaac Newton for inventing the modern concept of money. Before the recoinage, the idea was that the value of currency came from the precious metals it was made from. But Newton figured that the way people used money was more as a unit of exchange; he *wrote*, “ ‘Tis mere opinion that sets a value upon [metal] money; we value it because with it we can purchase all sorts of commodities and the same opinion sets a like value upon paper security.” So the next time I tell my dad “money isn’t real,” I can add, “Isaac Newton agrees with me!”

**How do they decide who gets hanged and who gets horse-pulled?**

Sadly, there isn't any insight into the judge's reasoning behind this! It was just the one guy's decision: Sir Salathiel Lovell (what a name). That’s kind of how sentencing works these days, too — the judge on the case decides what they think is the appropriate punishment based on the verdict reached by the jury. They often don’t explain their exact reasoning, either.

Speaking of names, I’d just like to share that the whole team here at *Puppet History* was really disappointed to learn that Chaloner was not, in fact, pronounced like *Chalamet*, as we’d originally believed.

One last thing I wanted to expand upon was that *lottery ticket* that Chaloner was caught counterfeiting. Government-sanctioned lottery tickets aren’t exactly the norm these days. Like I mentioned before, the government was broke from ongoing wars. They needed a way to make money — 1.4 million pounds, to be exact — and keep funding them. So they tried a novel idea (not Newton’s): lottery tickets! Malt lottery tickets cost 10 pounds, and were entered in a drawing for cash prizes of up to several hundred pounds. (Also, I just wanna say: rude that The Professor wasn’t like, attend section on Friday to find out more… I see you Professor...)

Hopefully, you learned a couple of extra things about the epic cat-and-mouse between Isaac Newton and William Chaloner!

*Next week, tune in as The Professor shares the story of a great warrior-poet, which is honestly one of the coolest multi-hyphenates a person could be.*

And finally, The Professor has new merch!

You can purchase all the news items **here**

For more stories from history you’ve never heard before, check out my book, *Strong Women: 15 Biographies of Influential Women History Overlooked*, available pretty much wherever books are sold (including both *the big guns* and *the little bbs*, whomsoever you choose to give your money to).