Newton and the Counterfeiter
The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist
By Thomas Levenson
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), Hardcover, 9780151012787, 318pp.)
Publication Date: June 2009
Categories: Europe - Great Britain - General, Historical - British, History
![]() |
Newton was preceded to the city by a genius of another kind, the budding criminal William Chaloner. Thanks to his preternatural skills as a counterfeiter, Chaloner was rapidly rising in London's highly competitive underworld, at a time when organized law enforcement was all but unknown and money in the modern sense was just coming into being. Then he crossed paths with the formidable new warden. In the courts and streets of London--and amid the tremors of a world being transformed by the ideas Newton himself had set in motion--the two played out an epic game of cat and mouse.











