Started by Tomás Rinaldi (@tomas_rinaldi) ·
Isaac Newton spent his later years hunting counterfeiters
I knew Newton worked at the Mint but assumed it was a cushy title. Instead he ran a network of informants, personally interrogated suspects, and got Chaloner hanged in 1699.
7 sources · 52 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “isaac newton royal mint counterfeiters”
- Ended at
- Gresham's law
The Trail
- “isaac newton royal mint counterfeiters” (google.com)
- Isaac Newton (en.wikipedia.org)
- Royal Mint (en.wikipedia.org)
- William Chaloner (en.wikipedia.org)
a counterfeiter who tried to get Newton's Mint discredited. it did not go well for him
- Great Recoinage of 1696 (en.wikipedia.org)
- Debasement (en.wikipedia.org)
this is why coins have ridged edges
- Gresham's law (en.wikipedia.org)
What I came away with
People were shaving silver off the edges of hammered coins, so the 1696 recoinage replaced them with milled coins whose ridged edges show tampering. In 1717 Newton set the value of the gold guinea in a way that made silver tend to leave the country, nudging Britain onto a de facto gold standard.
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