Newton Read online

  Patricia Fara

  NEWTON

  THE MAKING OF GENIUS

  PICADOR

  For Michael

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  1 SANCTITY

  2 ICONS

  3 DISCIPLES

  4 ENEMIES

  5 FRANCE

  6 GENIUS

  7 MYTHS

  8 SHRINES

  9 INHERITORS

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

  0.1 – Salvador Dalí: Homage to Newton, 1969. (© Inter Art Resources)

  1.1 – Colin Cole: Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven’s coat of arms. (Drawing courtesy of Cecil Humphrey-Smith)

  1.2 – Eduardo Paolozzi: Statue of Isaac Newton at the British Library

  1.3 – John A. Houston: Newton Investigating Light. (Illustrated London News 56, (1870) 589)

  1.4 – Joseph Wright of Derby: A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, 1766. (Derby Museums and Art Gallery)

  1.5 – Frontispiece of Andrew Motte’s English translation of Newton’s Principia, 1729

  1.6 – Frontispiece of Voltaire’s Élémens de la philosophie de Newton, 1738. (Engraved by Jacob Folkema after Louis-Fabricius Dubourg). (By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  2.1 – Godfrey Kneller: Newton, 1689 (mezzotint engraving by Thomas Oldham Barlow, 1868). (The Wellcome Library, London)

  2.2 – Godfrey Kneller: Newton, 1702. (by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

  2.3 – John Vanderbank: Newton, 1725 (engraving by George Vertue, 1726). (The Wellcome Library, London)

  2.4 – Nineteenth-century engraving based on Godfrey Kneller’s 1720 portrait of Newton

  2.5 – William Stukeley: Pen and wash drawing, c. 1720

  2.6 – George Bickham: Isaac Newton, 1787 engraving. (The Wellcome Library, London)

  2.7 – William Hogarth: A Performance of ‘The Indian Emperor or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards’, 1732. (Private collection)

  2.8 – Anthony Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson: Entrance into the Choir of Westminster Abbey, coloured aquatint, 1812. (The Wellcome Library, London)

  2.9 – Louis François Roubiliac: Newton’s statue at Trinity College, Cambridge (1755) (stipple engraving by J. Whessell, 1812). (The Wellcome Library, London)

  2.10 – Giovanni Battista Pittoni, with Domenico and Giuseppe Valeriani: An Allegorical Monument to Sir Isaac Newton, 1727–30 (line engraving by L. Desplaces after D. M. Fratta). (The Wellcome Library, London)

  2.11 – Jakob Houbraken after Kneller (1702): Allegorical portrait of Newton. (The Wellcome Library, London)

  2.12 – R. Page: Engraving of Kneller’s 1702 portrait for the London Encyclopedia, 1818. (The Wellcome Library, London)

  3.1 – Frontispiece of John Colson’s The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series, 1736. (By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  3.2 – William Hogarth: Frontispiece of John Clubbe’s Physiognomy, 1763. (By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  4.1 – William Hogarth: Frontis-Piss, 1763. (British Museum)

  5.1 – Newton in Senegal: Jean Delisle des Sales, De la philosophie de la nature (Paris, 1804), vol. 4, p. 205. (By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  5.2 – Maurice Quentin de la Tour: Mlle Ferrand méditante sur la philosophie de Newton. (Collection of the Bavarian Hypo- und Vereinsbank AG, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

  5.3 – Étienne-Louis Boullée: first design for Newton’s cenotaph, 1784. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

  6.1 – William Blake: Newton. (Tate Gallery, London)

  6.2 – Stipple engraving of 1809 by Meadows after George Romney: Newton Making Experiments, 1812. (The Wellcome Library, London)

  6.3 – The Genius of the Times, 1812. (British Museum)

  7.1 – John Leech: Discovery of the Laws of Gravitation by Isaac Newton, from Gilbert A’Beckett: The Comic History of England (London, 1847–8), vol. 2, p. 273. (By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  7.2 – George Cruikshank: Sir Isaac Newton’s Courtship, from Bentley’s Miscellany 4, (1838), facing p. 167. (By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  7.3 – Newton as a child, from Tom Telescope, The Newtonian Philosophy (London, 1838), p. 213. (By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  7.4 – The first six statues at the Oxford University – Museum, Illustrated London News, 13 Oct 1869, 339. (By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  7.5 – Mizuno Toshikata: Isaac Newton (c. 1900)

  7.6 – Engraving by T. L. Atkinson, after Frederick Newenham, 1859: Isaac Newton, at the Age of Twelve. (The Burndy Library, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Grace K. Babson Collection of the works of Sir Isaac Newton)

  8.1 – Newton’s three sites of inspiration (1836), from Charles John Smith’s Historical and Literary Curiosities. (By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  8.2 – J. C. Barrow: Newton’s Cottage at Woolsthorpe, 1797. (The Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland)

  8.3 – William Theed: Grantham Statue of Newton, 1858 (line engraving by C. & E. Layton). (The Wellcome Library, London)

  Acknowledgements

  During the last few years, many people have contributed anecdotes and advice, but I should especially like to thank Anne Secord and Richard Yeo for their detailed critiques of draft chapters, and Jim Secord for his constant interest and advice, which included reading the complete final version. In addition, I am particularly indebted to Simon Schaffer and Judith Zinsser for their encouragement and comments, and I have also benefited from helpful discussions with Gadi Algazi, Malcolm Baker, Ulrike Boskamp, Michèle Cohen, Matthew Craske, Gideon Freudenthal, Cole Harrop, Michael Hau, Kilian Heck, Rob Iliffe, Ludmilla Jordanova, Milo Keynes, Nigel Leask, Christine MacLeod, David Money, Wendy Pullan, Steven Shapin, Skuli Sigardsson, Stephen Snobelen, Richard Staley, Ralph Stern, Jonathan Topham, Simon Werrett and Michael Wintroub.

  For financial assistance, I wish to thank the Max Planck Institute, the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society; and for their assistance during publication, my thanks to my marvellous agent, David Godwin, and to my Macmillan editor, Anya Serota, who made many extremely helpful suggestions. I would never have completed this book without the invaluable support of relatives and friends, to whom I am deeply grateful.

  Shortened versions of Chapters 2 and 8 have appeared as: ‘Faces of genius: images of Newton in eighteenth-century England’, in Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (eds), Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and ‘Isaac Newton lived here: sites of memory and scientific heritage’, British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000), 407–26.

  Preface

  Sublime spirit! Vast and profound genius! Divine being! Newton, deign to accept the homage of my feeble talents!. . . Surely even an idiot uses the same ink as a man of genius?

  Étienne-Louis Boullée, 1784

  Salvador Dalí’s startling surrealist sculpture of Isaac Newton is an elegant abstract figure, its outstretched hand holding a ball on the end of a rope (Figure 0.1). Despite its rippling musculature, this polished bronze humanoid has a hollow body and a disturbingly empty oval instead of a face. By obliterating Newton’s personality, Dalí implicitly invites us to impose our own interpretations. Similarly
, generations of interpreters have created mythical visions of Newton from which the central core of the man himself is missing.

  Although Newton wrote far more on alchemy, theology and ancient chronology than on either gravity or optics, he is now universally acclaimed as a scientific genius. Many good biographies fill in the details of Newton’s life – Dalí’s central void. In contrast, Newton: The Making of Genius examines how Newton was converted into the world’s first scientific genius. The story of Newton’s shifting reputations is inseparable from the rise of science itself. During the last three centuries, our views of Newton, science and genius have all changed dramatically, and this book explores these transformations. Repeatedly made to mean different things for different people, Newton has become an intellectual icon for our modern age, when genius commands the reverence formerly reserved for sanctity.

  Newton was born well over 300 years ago, and much has happened since then. This may be stating the obvious, but it explains why comprehensiveness is not just impossible, but undesirable. To clarify the ways in which multiple versions of Newton’s life have been created, this book deliberately leaves a lot out. It is emphatically not a conventional biography: on the contrary, one of its central arguments is that no ‘true’ representation of Newton exists. The narrative moves from Newton’s lifetime to the present, hinging about the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a key period when science became consolidated and genius took on new meanings. Newton’s ideas and opinions permeate this study of idolatry, but it is written for readers with no particular scientific, religious or historical expertise.

  There are many different ways of telling history. History of science is a relatively new field, which came into its own after the Second World War. Partly in response to public repulsion at the atomic bomb, several eminent scientists wrote ‘Plato to NATO’ accounts that celebrated science’s progressive march towards the truth. But these stories, appealing though they may be, now seem too simplistic and triumphal. Since the 1970s, sociologists have been minutely dissecting specific episodes from the past to reveal the social, political, economic and religious constraints that affect scientific practices and knowledge. Currently, historians are exploring new ways of incorporating these micro-studies within long-term analyses of science’s rising power. This study of Newton’s posthumous reputations responds to that challenge.

  Newton is not just another dead white male scientist, but a major figurehead who symbolizes individual brilliance and scientific achievement. Moreover, he has helped to define what those very concepts mean. We can only view Newton’s accomplishments and experiences through the refracting prism of a society that has itself been constantly changing. Examining his fleeting images illuminates how we have come to see ourselves.

  1

  SANCTITY

  In Newton this island may boast of having produced the greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species.

  David Hume, History of England, (1754–62)

  Borrowing the names of famous people does not necessarily bring good luck. During the nineteenth century, several young Isaac Newtons were prosecuted for forgery and other crimes, while French, German and American steam ships called Newton crashed on to rocks or burst into flames with alarming frequency. More recently, Apple has withdrawn its Newton range of computers, which failed to match up to expectations.1 But other bearers of this illustrious name have been more fortunate: generations of Beatrix Potter fans have admired Jeremy Fisher’s newt-like friend Sir Isaac Newton as he swaggered in his black and golden waistcoat, while the architectural writer Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes numbered among the wealthy American socialites glitteringly portrayed by John Singer Sargent. Images of the original Sir Isaac are ubiquitous, appearing not only on stamps throughout the world, but also in more specifically – if somewhat unexpected – British contexts, including Margaret Thatcher’s coat-of-arms (Figure 1.1), the forecourt of the new British Library (Figure 1.2) and advertisements for the Financial Times.

  Isaac Newton is now universally celebrated as a scientific genius, perhaps the greatest who ever lived. Yet Newton himself was not a scientist. Surprising as this assertion may seem, it is crucial for analysing his rise to glory. The word ‘scientist’ was not even invented until more than 100 years after his death, and Newton was an expert in fields that profoundly interested his contemporaries, yet have nothing to do with modern science. Unpaid, often mocked, his esoteric colleagues were as interested in moving nearer to God as in achieving progress towards a better world. Obsessed with alchemy, Newton constantly scoured the Bible for prophecies, redated ancient Egyptian chronology, converted his own mathematics back into the classical geometry of the Greeks, and spent thirty years chasing forgers as head of the Royal Mint in London.

  ‘Does he eat, drink and sleep like other men?’ inquired a French mathematician; ‘I cannot believe otherwise than that he is a genius, or a celestial intelligence entirely disengaged from matter.’2 Often retold, such anecdotes contributed to Newton’s canonization as a secular saint endowed with supra-human capacities. Not everyone regarded Newton with such esteem, however. When the unknown and reclusive Cambridge scholar first appeared on the philosophical stage he was strongly criticized, and sceptics continued to launch virulent attacks right through the eighteenth century. Newton has frequently been accused of mental instability or even insanity, his scientific theories have been constantly reinterpreted or even rejected, and the overriding goal of his studies was to learn more about God.

  How, then, did Newton become world famous as a brilliant scientist? The obvious answer, that he discovered fundamental laws of nature, is too simple. For one thing, philosophers question whether scientific knowledge can ever be absolutely and permanently true. But even without venturing into these huge debates, it is clear that Newton’s legacy is problematic. We often talk about a Newtonian world view, but that term is deeply ambiguous, since Newton’s successors interpreted his ideas in directions that he would find unrecognizable. Moreover, in the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein showed that Newton’s ideas were of little help in describing the quantum world of sub-atomic particles.

  Newton’s centrality in theoretical physics may have been displaced, but his legendary reputation endures. Recent biographers have portrayed Newton as an alchemical and biblical expert convinced of God’s presence throughout the universe, yet he still symbolizes the committed scientist emotionlessly investigating a mechanistic world. Rather than searching for more facts about Newton himself, this book explores how he became celebrated as a national hero and a scientific genius – a secular saint for our modern society.

  Matters of fact

  Even the briefest survey of Newton’s life unsettles his image as the idealized prototype of a modern scientist.3 Like many of his contemporaries, Newton was engaged in a wide range of activities, many of which fell far beyond the scope of what we would expect of a scientific figurehead. A renowned expert on Jason’s fleece, Pythagorean harmonics and Solomon’s temple, his advice was also sought on the manufacture of coins and remedies for headaches. On the other hand, he was free of the responsibilities besetting today’s international high-fliers. Newton had no laboratory team to supervise, no obligation to generate commercially viable research projects, and never travelled outside eastern England – his most adventurous journey was a trip up the Thames to the Astronomical Observatory at Greenwich.

  This reluctance to travel provides a useful framework for recounting Newton’s life in three phases, corresponding to the three places where he lived – Lincolnshire, Cambridge and London. Such a geographical approach, apparently based on well-established facts, conveys a reassuring ring of historical truth. But, of course, even the most apparently straightforward biography is structured according to its author’s beliefs. Exploring Newton’s posthumous existences entails confronting a fundamental historical problem: circularity. To appreciate the diverse images of Newton that were created after h
e died, it is essential to have some basic knowledge of what are generally accepted as facts about his life and work. Any attempt to present such information neutrally is impossible, however, since each biographer will have a different view of what is important. Even worse, any discussion of how Newton has been portrayed in the past must itself enter into the archive of Newtonian representations, and so affects how he will be viewed in the future. By analysing the processes through which myths are made, this book is itself altering their interpretation. All that can be presented is one version of the ‘facts’ of Newton’s life and achievements . . .

  Born in a small Lincolnshire hamlet in 1642, Newton was brought up mainly by his grandmother until he was twelve, when he was sent away to the nearby market town of Grantham to attend the local grammar school. With only a brief interlude back home, at the age of eighteen Newton went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained for most of the next thirty-five years. As a student, he subsidized his meagre allowance by performing menial chores and initiating a money-lending enterprise. Although the examination system was mostly a formality, he did dutifully broach the officially prescribed Aristotelian texts. But Newton also explored extra-curricular books on history, astrology and modern European philosophy, teaching himself the mathematics he needed to understand the novel ideas being put forward by controversial scholars such as Réne Descartes, the French natural philosopher.

  By the summer of 1665, after four years of intensive and self-directed study, this solitary scholar had made little impression on his colleagues. There are no recollections of him by other students, and Isaac Barrow, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a position that he later handed over to Newton), ‘conceived then but an indifferent opinion of him’.4 But Newton’s life suddenly changed when he retreated to Lincolnshire for about eighteen months to escape the plague sweeping through Cambridge.