Show Notes
There was a fire against a garden wall at Trinity College, and for weeks at a stretch it scarcely went out. The furnaces were brick, and the man who used them had laid the brick himself — a professor of mathematics, down on the ground beside a wall, because what he wanted to do next needed a furnace of a particular shape and nobody was going to build it for him.
His assistant left an account of it. The fire going six weeks at a stretch, spring and autumn. His master up at two or three in the morning, forgetting to eat, going to dinner with his shoes down at heel and his stockings untied. And once, in the middle of the room, stopping, turning about, and going up the stairs at speed to write standing at his desk — not sitting down first, because there was not time.
The work at that fire was alchemy. About a million words of it survive in his handwriting, across some thirty years.
Tonight is Isaac Newton: the whole life, in order, and not a physics lesson.
The farmhouse in Lincolnshire, and a baby small enough, the family said, to be put in a quart pot. A father already buried. A mother who married again and left him with his grandmother for eight years. A boy taken out of school to run a farm and fined twice in the manor court for letting the animals stray, because he was sitting under a hedge with a book. Cambridge, where he paid his way by waiting on students his own age.
Then the plague, an emptied university, and the two years everybody has heard about — told here against what the manuscripts actually show, and against the fact that our best evidence for them is Newton's own memory, written down fifty years later, during a quarrel in which an early date was worth something.
And the apple, told properly for once: two old men in a garden in April 1726, talking about going home to Lincolnshire, with tea, in the warm weather, "only he, & myself." Nothing hits anybody. There is no year given. The apple on the head is American newspapers, two hundred and thirty years later.
Then Halley on a horse. The book paid for out of one man's pocket because the Royal Society had spent its printing budget on a book about fishes. Hooke, and the sentence about standing on the shoulders of giants — and why the famous modern reading of it probably isn't true. Two frightened letters in the autumn of 1693, and a silence about them that lasted thirty-four years. The Royal Mint, and a man who turned a ceremonial post into a police force. A committee he appointed, to settle a question about himself.
And at the centre, a private paper from the early 1670s in which he sorts the whole of nature into two kinds of action — and puts gravity in the second one, in a bracket, alongside the weather.
Then the boxes: what Cambridge kept, what it sent back to the family, and two days at Sotheby's in 1936 where a lifetime of private writing sold for about nine thousand pounds. John Maynard Keynes bought back what he could, read it, and wrote the sentence this episode is named for.
A calm, unhurried telling of the record, for sleep, rest, or a long drive in the dark. Nothing here will startle you or wake you.
LANTERN & LEDGER — quiet tellings of the record, for sleep.
More from Lantern and Ledger
In a parish office in Haggerston, in the first years of the reign, a registrar sat filling in a printed form about the streets where the dying was worst. He wrote down the drainage. He wrote down the water. Then he added a third line nobody had asked him for, standing up for his neighbours — that the people there were generally of cleanly habits, and that what was wrong with their streets was not their doing.
In a farmhouse room on a small island in Nova Scotia, somewhere in the eighteen-nineties, a county historian stood looking at paper silhouettes on a wall — the cut-out profiles people made of one another before photography. One of them was of a woman who had been a servant in the Treasurer's house at Halifax. The man who built that room had been born into slavery in South Carolina, got out during the Revolution, took his owner's surname because it was the name he had, and came north with the Loyalists. His name was Samuel Ball, and no likeness of him has ever existed.
On a summer day in Hertfordshire in sixteen seventy-eight, a poor man who cut grass for a living ran after a farmer along a track beside three half-acres of ripe oats, to offer to do the work for less than he had asked a moment earlier. The farmer refused anyway, and said with a stern look and a hasty gesture that the Devil should mow it rather than he. That night, the pamphlet says, the field showed as if it were all of a flame, and in the morning the oats lay cut in a circle so neatly that no mortal man could do the like.
In the spring of nineteen hundred, sponge divers from the island of Symi sheltered from bad weather off a rock between Kythera and Crete, and one of them went down on a rope in canvas and lead and tinned copper, with his air coming down a hose from a hand pump on the deck. He had perhaps ten minutes. What he was standing on was the cargo of an ancient ship — bronze and marble statues, glass, gold, coins — and one corroded lump about the size of a thick book that nobody recognised for the better part of a year, while the beautiful things beside it were cleaned and admired and photographed.
In eighteen eighty-four, in Baltimore, two men sat at a table with a rebuilt post-office scale and a pack of shuffled playing cards, pressing weights too small to feel onto each other's fingertips. One of them marked almost every answer as a pure guess — and was right two times in three anyway.