Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist
By Thomas Levenson
Fabe5 £15.99, 299 pages
FT Bookshop price: £12.79

Thomas Chaloner had a way with coinage. If he wasn’t lacquering bits of worthless pewter with gold, he was coating tin with silver. By the 1690s he had brought counterfeiting virtually to an industrial scale, and was living in style in a grand Knightsbridge house worth £2m at today’s prices. The penalties for forging, or passing on, counterfeit money were ultimate: death by hanging at Tyburn.

But Chaloner, the son of a weaver, built up a circle of crooks, ensuring that he, the master counterfeiter, and holder of the various false dies, could never be traced. On those rare occasions when the law caught up with him, he had a genius for snitching on his rivals, and escaping the noose by turning King’s evidence. It was a golden age for counterfeiting because there was an acute shortage of the real stuff.

Before paper became legal tender, the money supply was running out in 1690s London. In 1695 it was virtually impossible to find real, legal silver, the basic units of exchange for daily business. Silver coins – from half-groats (two pence) to crowns (five shillings) – had been disappearing in massive quantities for over a decade. Silver was worth more on the French gold markets as ingots, than in coinage for normal trade. So there was a booming business melting coins into ingots to sell, and smart dealers used the gold to buy even more silver at home. As Thomas Levenson, puts it, in his pacy and absorbing history thriller, Newton and the Counterfeiter, “It was the nearest thing imaginable to a financial perpetual motion machine.”

What was to be done? In those days there were no economists to guide the City out of, or into, crises. So Treasury officials consulted individuals of intellectual repute. In 1695 William Lowndes, secretary of the Treasury, sought the advice of the great and good, including Sir Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton – Lucasian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Newton had by this time spent some 20 years in Cambridge on £100 a year – a paltry sum for a genius. Most of his intellectual achievements were behind him and he was bored with the same faces at High Table. He longed to go to London, to achieve something in the real world of political and business affairs; and to make money.

Newton advised the Treasury to devalue. If the amount of silver in the coinage fell below the point where it was worth less in ingots than as legal tender, it would stop the drain on the money supply. But there were fierce objections, not least from the landed gentry who argued that the real value of their income from rents would plummet

Newton’s suggestion was not adopted, but he came to the notice of the City and the government as someone to lead the Royal Mint. He was offered the job of Warden. One of the most fascinating portions of Levenson’s book is his description of the mechanics of minting in the late 17th century, matched by the story of Newton’s success as a manager. His mathematical skills and daunting concentration were focused on time and motion studies, and the task of creating impressions that could not easily be replicated. He increased the generation of coins from 15,000 per day to 50,000, and made the money more secure from counterfeiting.

Newton still had counterfeiters to contend with, some of whom were in league with Mint workers. There was a major inside job: a set of dies disappeared – destined for the counterfeiters’ workshops. Chaloner was under suspicion for a catalogue of other counterfeiting offences. He pleaded innocence of the Mint dies, but took the opportunity to present himself as an expert on minting who, given the chance, could set the Mint straight. Chaloner accused the officials of the Mint of poor security, incompetence and corruption, while offering himself as an Alan Sugar, or Geoffrey Robinson, ready to fix the Mint’s problems.

Newton, thus, fell briefly under suspicion. But extricating himself from Chaloner’s allegations, he turned his focus on his antagonist with awesome ferocity and single-mindedness. Employing scores of informants, and engaging in the equivalent of wire tapping (listening into suspect’s conversations), Newton did not rest until he brought Chaloner to trial at the Old Bailey. I won’t spoil the ending. A vivid portrait of the seamier side of the City three centuries ago, Levenson’s book is a gripping tale of unrelenting revenge and obsession.

John Cornwell is author of ‘Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Riposte to The God Delusion’. (Profile)