Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career by Dr Patricia Fara

Wed 3 March 2021

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Isaac Newton is celebrated throughout the world as a great scientific genius, but in his early fifties, he abandoned his life as a reclusive scholar at Cambridge to spend three decades in London. Through exploring a painting by William Hogarth packed with Newtonian allusions, Dr Fara reintegrates Newton into metropolitan culture at a time when the British economy depended on global trading underpinned by slavery. Within only a few years, he was making and losing small fortunes on the stock market, manoeuvring for favour at court and entertaining eminent European visitors. Knighted by Queen Anne, and a close ally of the influential Earl of Halifax (who became Chancellor of the Exchequer), Newton occupied a powerful position as President of London’s Royal Society. But he also became Master of the Mint, responsible for the nation’s money at a time of financial crisis. A major investor in the East India Company, Newton profited from the revenue generated by selling African captives to wealthy plantation owners in the Americas, monitored the African gold that was melted down for English guineas, and revised his great book on gravity by soliciting scientific measurements from overseas traders.