November 4, 2015 • 37 mins
You may know the apple/gravity story, but Isaac Newton's life was so much more than that. Not only did he contribute huge concepts to physics, mathematics and astronomy, he also busted counterfeiters.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm pray Cyvie Wilson. Uh. And
today we're gonna talk about somebody and when we say
his name, you're gonna go I know about him. I'm
(00:22):
imagining having to break out my my doctored up version
of our logo that turns it into like stuff you
may have possibly missed in history class or somewhere else,
but maybe not or it's maybe not about you personally. Yeah.
But the cool thing is, as I often do, I
did one of my informal polls. I even did one
just now before we started recording with our sorcerer Noll,
(00:46):
where when I say, oh, we're going to talk about
Sir Issac Newton, and I was like, I know him,
and I'm like, but what do you know about him?
And once you get past the apple falling thing, people
get real fuzzy. But it's just physics in general. Yeah, yeah,
I mean people associate him with the theory of gravity,
but his actual life story is way bigger than that.
It's filled with twists and turns. There's some interesting um
(01:09):
you know, kind of personality quirks involved. He worked in
so many different fields and so it seems like a
good time to sit back and actually talk about the
life of this famous philosopher, mathematician, physicists, scientists and astronomer.
And truly that list is sort of a scratching the
surface situation. We are not going to go super heavy
(01:31):
on the actual science and math concepts here is that
probably is the stuff that you were taught in school theoretically,
but we will hit some of the highlights, mostly just
to give a sense of just how impactful Newton's work
was and frankly still is. So to start the place
we normally start. Isaac Newton was born on January fourth,
(01:52):
sixteen forty three, in Woolsthorpe, England. You'll often see his
birthday listed is December two. Neil de crass Tyson famously
tweeted about that being his birthday. That date is actually
also correct if you are using the old Julian calendar.
And Isaac was a premature baby. He was weak and
(02:13):
very fragile when he was born, and he was not
expected to live very long. He also never knew his father,
who he was named for, because the elder Isaac Newton
died a few months before his son was born. His mother,
Hannah Askew Newton, was a single parent for the first
three years of the young boy's life. Yeah, and she
did have the support of relatives, but in terms of
(02:34):
direct parenting, she was the one UH and isaih relationship
with his mother was really quite complicated, particularly in his
early years, and many historians have pointed out that if
you read his correspondence, it really suggests that this gave
him an ongoing issue UH in terms of personality in
(02:56):
dealing with the world. Because when he was three, Hannah
left him to live with his grandmother. She had remarried
to a man named Barnabas Smith, and she moved in
with Smith and left her child behind. As Isaac reached
school age, there were arrangements made for him to stay
with an apothecary and grant them so he could go
to King's School. There as the apothecary's lodger, Newton got
(03:19):
his first introduction to chemistry, and mother and child were
not reunited under one roof for quite some time until
Hannah's second husband, again that was Burnaby Smith, died nine
years after she married him, and at this point Isaac
was twelve and his mother opted to take him out
of school so that he could become a farmer like
(03:39):
his father, who had in fact been very successful in agriculture.
As is often the case when parents pick out a
child's vocation for them, farming did not actually work out
very well for Isaac Newton. He was bored to tears
trying to care for the family's farm, and soon it
was apparent that if he continued down that vocational path
(03:59):
he would only meet with failures. So he got to
go back to school, and once Isaac's basic education was completed,
his uncle, who was a scholar, stepped in. He wanted
to persuade Hannah that her son really should go to university.
Isaac was certainly smart enough, but there was this issue
of money to contend with. But in sixteen sixty one,
(04:20):
Isaac Newton did indeed enroll at University of Cambridge's Trinity College,
but he had to work to earn his place in
the lecture hall. He cleaned and serviced the rooms of
other students, and he waited tables, so basically he was
set up on a program that was not unlike modern
work study programs. He started out with the standard course
load for any student at Cambridge, but as his time
(04:43):
at school wore on, he was drawn more and more
to the cutting edge science that was happening at the time.
We would call this very basic science today. For the
most part, the geocentric model of the heavenly bodies, which
placed Earth at the center of all the celestial orbits,
was still being hot, but the heliocentric model, which had
(05:03):
been hinted at much earlier in the timeline and other cultures,
had really been fleshed out and promoted by Nicholas Copernicus,
Ico Brahey, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo. So while Isaac Newton
was getting this old school education in his classes and
his spare time outside of all of the various jobs
that he took on to stay in school, he spent
(05:24):
studying modern philosophy and science, and likely because he was
burning the candle at both ends and frankly in the middle. Uh,
Newton didn't really excel at university. He wasn't like a
star student or anything. He did graduate, but that graduation
didn't come with any special distinctions. Though. While he was
(05:44):
working in his self directed extracurricular study, Newton wrote an
important series of notes entitled Certain Philosophical Questions, and in
these notes, in this work that he did on his own,
really was the beginnings of what would later be called
the scientific Revolution. After his graduation, he continued to study
with a subsidy, and that was pretty much customary for
(06:07):
the people who had earned the title of scholar. He
did this until Cambridge University was forced to close temporarily
in sixteen sixty five because of the spread of the
Great Plague. After the university shuddered to wait out the
plague of London, uh, Newton continued his studies, but he
was just doing it on his own at home, which
he had already been doing in his off time anyway,
(06:27):
So presumably he was pretty uh accustomed to this whole
self directed study thing, and this would actually end up
being an incredibly important period of time for him and
in truth for humanity. This is, for example, the period
when the alleged Apple gravity revelation took place. An interesting
(06:48):
thing to note here is that while this story in
an extremely simplified form, is often told as though it's
literally the first time anyone ever in history thought about
a force pulling an apple down to Earth. What new
And was really inspired to think about was the idea
that the apple and the Earth's moon might both be
governed by the same force. And there is some debate
(07:11):
historically as to whether or not this magical apple moment
ever actually happened, But what we do know is that
Newton started to think about gravity and how it was
not only applicable to things here on Earth, but to
the other things out in the universe. And over the
course of that year and a half spent in solo education,
Newton really also so the seeds of a theory of
(07:33):
color and light uh also a concept for infinitesimal calculus,
and also a lot of significant astronomy concepts related to
the movement of the planets which were also related to gravity.
And these major lines of thinking would form the basis
of a groundbreaking publication that he would write some years later,
which we will talk about in just a bit. In
(07:55):
sixteen sixty seven, Cambridge reopened after the plague and Isaac
were tarns to the formal academic environment. As a minor
fellow at Trinity College, he got a Master of Arts
degree two years later while he was completing his graduate work,
Newton wrote a paper entitled Anna Lysi, A Treatise on
Infinite Series Mathematics. And Newton shared this work with his mentor,
(08:16):
Isaac Barrow, who in turn showed it to other members
of the mathematics community. And this really garnered Newton both
attention and quite a bit of praise. And it was
not long before Newton took over Barrow's chair at Cambridge
when the mentor stepped down. And next we're going to
talk about a small invention that garnered Newton some new attention.
But first let's pause for a brief word from one
(08:37):
of our fantastic sponsors. In sixteen sixty eight, Newton built
a reflecting telescope. It was the first of its kind,
and he did this as part of his lecture work
in optics, which gained the attention of the Royal Society.
He showed the apparatus there in sixteen seventy one. This
led to the publication of his Notes on Optics in
(08:58):
sixteen seventy two. This wasn't exactly a slam dunk in
the world of science, though. While Newton's work had led
him to believe that white light contained the entire spectrum
of colors and was composed of particles. But the more
common belief was that waves, rather than particles, made up light,
and that colors were modified forms of homogeneous white light.
(09:21):
And additionally, French physicist it may marry Out attempted to
reproduce Newton's refraction experiment and he just was unable to
do so. He could not do it. Uh So, Newton's
papers on this matter were openly criticized, so much so
that Newton, who frankly never really learned to handle criticism
very well during his life at all, and I kind
(09:42):
of identify with him in that regard. Uh He actually
waited for most of the vehement critics of this particular
line of thinking to die off before he agreed to
formally publish his notes on light in the book Optics.
Like he had published some of these notes in a
smaller sense, but not in book form, and he just
waited them out. He waited them out for three decades.
(10:05):
He just wanted them all to die so that none
of them could criticize his book when it came out. Well.
And I think my question is whether these criticisms were
criticisms or whether they were insults, because those are not
the same thing, uh, he responded to. It seems in
reading notes and biographical accounts of him, that he tended
(10:29):
to respond to challenges to his line of thinking, whether
it was genuine criticism and questioning or just an old
school that was unwilling to accept new ideas, in almost
exactly the same way. He just got really, really angry
and a little bit petulant about it. Yeah, don't do that, dude.
(10:51):
Constructive criticism is how we learn and get better. I
say that, which sounds kind of sanctimonious because we're talking
about Isaac Newton. He learned a lot of things. Yeah.
Can you imagine what would have happened had he had
he been had he figured out a way to work
with criticism. So to continue on this subject of criticism,
(11:13):
one of the most prominent and vocal critics of Isaac
Newton's optics work was Robert Hook. The two men locked
intellectual horns for years. As a result, Newton threatened to
quit the Royal Society over the rift, although other members
convinced him to stay. As the correspondence between the two
of them raged on and on and finally reached a
(11:35):
crescendo in sixty eight Newton actually had a nervous breakdown
and stopped communicating with his rival altogether. Yeah. Again, he
just struggled. This was something he never really got the
hang of, was was being able to deal with people
that wanted to challenge his work. Uh. And not long
after this breakdown, Isaac's mother, Hannah died, and as you'll recall,
(11:59):
that was a very weird and conflicted relationship and it
really really affected him deeply. So that loss, on top
of his already fragile mental state, led to a six
year withdrawal from colleagues and most social interaction. So friends
and associates, of course tried to reach out to him,
and they would get replies, but they would be very brief,
(12:19):
and instead, Isaac Newton chose to continue his own intellectual
pursuits during this time, working kind of siloed off on
his own, and he specifically focused on the areas of
planetary orbits and the way that they're influenced by gravity.
Very slowly, Newton began to correspond regularly on the topic
with none other than his former rival Robert Hook. That
(12:42):
two of them exchanged ideas, and Hook helped him work
through concepts that would lead to formulas for calculating gravity's
effect on planetary orbit. But again, although there was no
argument this time or any kind of breakdown, Newton just
abruptly stopped talking to him about it. So as easy
years of working alone and occasionally only corresponding a little
(13:03):
here and there were drawing to a close, and Isaac
Newton began to once again become a little more sociable.
Both he and Robert Hook spoke with Edmund Halley separately
though about planetary orbits, and Halle actually first spoke with Hook,
and then later he consulted with Newton about the shape
of orbits based on the formula theory that Hook had
(13:24):
described to him, and after hearing uh Isaac Newton talked
about it, Halle was convinced that Newton really was onto
something regarding his idea of elliptical orbits, and at this
point Halle became a benefactor to Newton. He basically took
care of his living expenses so that the mathematics of
orbital paths could be the exclusive focus of Newton's time.
(13:46):
In six seven, Newton published his work Prince Shipia, which
is more formally known as Mathematical Principles of Natural philosophy.
This was the result of a year and a half
of work and it was really groundbreaking. It's been five
It as the most influential of all physics books, establishing
basically all the basic concepts still used in physics today,
(14:07):
with the exception of energy. So if you remember your
high school physics, you probably can recall Newton's laws of motion,
which were part of Principia in the context of explaining
the movement of celestial bodies. And I know we wouldn't
talk a lot about the actual science and math, but
we'll just go over them because in case you don't
recognize of my name, you will once we start saying them.
One is that a stationary body will stay stationary unless
(14:30):
an external force is applied to it. Two is it
forces equal to mass times acceleration, and a change in
motion is proportional to the force applied. And three is
for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
So these are things we still talk about all the time.
And this was in Newton's work Principia. Yes, it is
like the basic basics of physics or just physical science class. Yeah,
(14:57):
So this book was and still is hugely influential and
that really just can't be overstated. It's not just about
what we learned in elementary, middle and high school and
science classes. Uh. If you wonder how on Earth astrophysicists
are able to calculate the masses of planets that are
billions of miles away, it's because of these principles that
(15:19):
were established in the seven publication. If you've ever wondered
how we figured out that tides are governed by gravity,
that is in there too, So are numerous other concepts
that are mind blowing to consider today. But Newton had
worked out the concepts back in the seventeenth century, but
again and again, tied to Robert Hook, Newton's work drew
(15:42):
some controversy, so Hook became very public about claiming that
Newton had in fact been copying his work and basically
stole it by not crediting him, and this instantly re
established the rivalry between them, and it was instantly just
as intense as it ever was. And in a similar
move as he had made in the previous round of
(16:03):
vehement bickering, Newton's threatened to basically take his ball and
bat and go home and stop working on the second
edition of principia and not play with any of the
scientific community anymore. Edmund Halley, of course, had spoken with
both of the men about planetary orbits before becoming Newton's
financial backer, so he knew that Newton's work on this
book was legitimately his own work. However, Halle also wanted
(16:27):
to find a way to make peace in the community,
so he eventually convinced Newton to insert a note in
the second edition giving credit to Hook for the concepts
that he shared in the development of the mathematics involved. Yeah,
it was basically thanking him for that correspondence back and
forth when Newton was kind of working primarily on his own,
but they were talking a little bit about gravity and
(16:48):
planetary orbits together, so you would think that would like
smooth things over. But in fact, from this point on,
Hook's life really took a downturn. He was not satisfied
by Newton's acknowledgement, and he became increasingly and openly bitter
about Newton's success, and as a consequence, the pair never
repaired their relationship after that. For Newton, the publication of
(17:11):
Princeship Head brought him to an entirely new level of fame,
it really expanded his professional and social circles quite significantly.
And we're going to talk about the new spheres and
causes that Isaac Newton found himself in as a consequence
of his growing renown in just a moment. But first,
let's pause and thank one of our great sponsors. So
(17:32):
King James the Second, who ascended to the throne of
England in six eight five for a relatively brief reign,
created a major religious upheaval in the Anglican country as
he attempted to promote Catholicism. So he advocated for religious
freedom for Catholics, but he thought that they should continue
the persecution of Presbyterian covenanters. Uh. Those are the very
(17:53):
broad strokes of the religious situation. But the reason that
King James the Second features into Newton's life story is
that the monarch wanted to make universities into Catholic institutions.
Isaac Newton firmly opposed this move, and as a very
vocal challenger to the idea, he was elected as Cambridge's
representative in Parliament in sixteen eighty nine. Newton, it should
(18:16):
be noted, was not irreligious. Over the course of his life.
He did think and write a great deal about God.
He felt strongly that understanding Judeo Christian prophecy and mysticism
was vital to understanding God. He wrote at one point
that he felt that Christianity had kind of gotten off
track in the fourth century, with incorrect doctrines regarding the
(18:39):
nature of Christ being promoted by the Council of Nicia.
And while this wasn't an announcement of religion, it was
a very unorthodox view. So he was religious. He did
believe in God, but he had a very unusual stance
on the whole thing. Newton's influence continued to expand, so
(18:59):
much so that educational reformers who wished to move away
from teaching Aristotelian ideology looked to him as their public
proponent for more modern curricula. They wanted to teach the
concepts of the physical world that were represented in Newton's writings. Yeah,
he basically promoted that for his entire life. And while
(19:20):
he was at the height of his success, however, uh,
you know, all of this was going great. He really
had a lot of respect. He was a recognized leader
in science. Isaac Newton had another nervous breakdown and this
was in sixtee and this one was marked by him
writing letters to friends and colleagues that were extremely paranoid.
(19:40):
They were really accusatory missives in a lot of ways,
you know, thinking that people were out to get him,
and in general the tone of all of his correspondence
just seemed entirely out of sorts. So his earlier breakdown
was pretty clearly caused by ongoing hostilities with Robert Hook.
The reasons for this one we're a little more nebulous.
(20:01):
He was exhausted from his work, he had a falling
out with one of his close friends. He was disappointed
in his status with King William the Third. He may
have even been dealing with mercury poisoning from years of
work in a lab. But unlike the breakdown that Newton
experienced in sixteen seventy eight, he seemed to quickly recover
(20:22):
from this one in just a matter of months, so
a far cry from the six years of seclusion that
he had receded into the first time he had a
mental break And this time he kind of came around.
As we said, he apologized to his friends in writing,
and he went right back to work as though it
had never happened, although at this point his interests had
(20:42):
suddenly largely shifted away from science and instead this is
really a time when he was intent on ruminating on
alchemy and philosophy and considering the metaphysical. This is really
when he wrote a lot about the religion that we
mentioned just a few moments ago. Once that episode behind him,
Isaac Newton's life once again got a lot brighter. He
(21:04):
had long wanted to be appointed to a government position,
and not getting one from King William the Third was
one of the things that had strained his relationship with
the monarch. But finally, in sixteen ninety six, he was
made Warden of the Mints, and this marked the end
of his time lecturing at Cambridge. So this may seem
like sort of a random position to put a renowned
(21:26):
scientist into, but here is how Newton finally won his
much coveted government job. His niece, Catherine Barton, was Lord
Halifax's mistress at the time, and it was Halifax who
used his influence to secure the position for his paramour's uncle.
To his credit, though Isaac Newton didn't just sit back
and collect this government income. He took his job as
(21:48):
the Master of the mint extremely seriously, and this happened
to be an interesting time in England in terms of currency. Yeah. So,
to set it up, in the late sixteen hundreds, English
coins were still being minted in silver. The value of
the material that was used to make the coins was
actually worth more than the currency itself, and this led
(22:09):
to a number of illicit activities. So initially the problem
was that coins were sometimes being clipped or shaved around
their edges so that they were still recognized as legal tender,
but the person doing the clipping could then amass all
of these clippings and shavings so that the silver could
be melted down for other uses and sold. Eventually, the
minting process was updated to make coins with milled edges
(22:32):
that would deter clipping and shaving practices. But what this
ended up doing was fostering a huge counterfeit and money
market in England. Would be crooks would try to fill
the gap in their incomes that they had been making
through clipping by counterfeiting instead. Yeah, they would basically cast
a mold from an actual coin, and then they would
(22:53):
just start issuing their own basically with cheaper materials and
counterfeiting coins at this point was considered treason, so it
was classified as a high crime. And by Newton's reckoning,
a full twenty of the coins in England when he
took his job as Master of the Mint were in
fact counterfeits, so that's one fifth of the circulating currency
that was not real, and he made it his mission
(23:15):
to find as many counterfeiters as he could. Newton was
not the least bit wary of venturing into very unsavory
areas and establishments. While he carried out this work, he
became kind of an expert investigator, and he applied his
rigorous scientific examination skills to his criminal investigations. He even
went so far as to become credential in law so
(23:38):
that he could perform cross examinations on suspects during their trials,
and over the course of several years, Newton was able
to successfully prosecute twenty counterfeiters. He had taken in many more,
but those are the ones that were found guilty, and
all of them were put to death for their crimes
in The French Academy of Sciences named him one of
(24:00):
eight foreign Associates. When seventeen o three he became President
of the Royal Society. In seventeen o five he was knighted,
So you would think at some point in this esteemed
career he might be free of drama. That that would
be wrong. The same year that he was knighted got freed. Leibniz,
who was a German mathematician, asserted that he had developed
(24:21):
the ideas of infinitesmal calculus years before Newton had published
his own works on the subject. Yeah, I didn't ever
find I'm sure it's out there somewhere, it just didn't
turn up in my work on this particular project. Why
he waited so long because this is quite a ways
after Newton was publishing these ideas, So we don't know
(24:43):
why Leibniz waited so long to say that it was
his work. But these accusations persisted for years until finally
in seventeen twelve. So remember it was seventeen o five
when this whole business started, so this dragged on for
seven years. Uh, this matter was finally investigated by the
Royal Society and Newton was found to be the original
(25:04):
mathematician to work on these concepts. Though we should point
out that he did have a decidedly unfair advantage in
the proceedings as he had as Royal Society President selected
the investigation committee members. I was sort of startled throughout
this at how cut through the mathematics and science world was,
at least as it swirled around Isaac Newton. This was
(25:26):
actually not the only intellectual skirmish that he had while
he was the Royal Society President. In fact, he had
a really negative reputation in that role. There were even
people who called him a tyrant. He published the notes
of astronomer Astronomer John Flamsteed without that man's permission, after
Flamsteed didn't provide him with the notes he wanted for
(25:48):
an update to the Principia as quickly as he wanted them. Yeah,
it is kind of another case of like a footstompy
kind of reaction. And we should point out that John
Flamsteed had gathered an unreal amount of data. Newton's demands
for specific notes we're probably a little bit unreasonable. That
(26:08):
would be like somebody going, hey, run to the library
and get me these three things in a library that's
massive and that they, you know, are still sorting out.
So it was kind of a a little bit of
an unreasonable demand Flamsteed eventually sought out and won a
court order demanding that Newton ceased the permission list publication
(26:29):
of his work. This is one of the few times
that in all of these skirmishes that Newton got into
with other people that he actually kind of came out
on the losing end. And his eighties, Newton started experiencing
poor health, specifically digestive problems, and this took its hole
on his overall well being. On March seventy seven, he
(26:49):
got a really severe pain in his abdomen and he
blacked out shortly thereafter. He remained unconscious until he died
the next day at the age of eighty four. He
held the position of Master of the Mint until he
the day that he died. He was also still the
President of the Royal Society, having been re elected every
year in spite of sentiments that he was sometimes abusing
(27:12):
his power in that position, and he was buried in
Westminster Abbey in a very lavish ceremony. While he was
lauded as a genius both before and after his death
and even still today, the sad truth is that Isaac
Newton was likely very lonely. He never married. He didn't
have many close friends. He seemed to have some issues
(27:33):
of insecurity, possibly tied to the absence of parents in
his life as a child. Because he was mired in
so many plagiarism battles, he never really became comfortable with
the idea of collaborating with his colleagues, so he missed
out on opportunities to forge forge relationships with his peers
in the math and science community. But of course it's
(27:55):
pretty undeniable that he changed the course of science and
human history in fact with his work. In December, an
original copy of his Principia, which had been presented to
King James the Second, went up for auction with a
value range of four hundred thousand to six hundred thousand dollars.
When the bidding was over, the book sold for three
(28:17):
of its estimate, at two point five million dollars. Yeah,
that's one of those very rare and coveted items, both
within sort of a book collector's community and in the
scientific community. I did not look up or no, if
it's even available who made that purchase. But uh so,
that is the life and times a ster Isaac Newton.
I think it's it's more interesting and a little bit
(28:39):
more dramatic than people may suspect if they only know
the happy version of the apple in the tree gravity moments, right, uh,
and the scientific genius moment. Yeah. I mean he was
undoubtedly a genius, but very complicated man. Fascinating and how
he would become obsessed withvarious things at various points in
(29:01):
his life. Um. I like the part where he was
hunting down counterfeiters. How could you not? I mean, that's
a fascinating tale. So now we have two bits of
listener mail. They're related to the same thing. Um, And
do you want me to read one and you read
one and then we'll discuss That sounds great because it
(29:21):
is an important topic. Um. It's related to our discussion
in the History Mystery double feature podcast, particularly the one
where we talked about hinter Kfik. And the first one
that we received was from our listener Katie. She said, Hi,
I hate to send a correction, and I'm sure it's
been said already, but in your most recent episode, you
discussed incest in a way that unintentionally blames victims of
(29:43):
parental child incest. You referred to it as a quote
affair between the father and daughter, and this implies that
there was consent and even desire on the part of
the daughter. Even in instances where the daughter would claim consent,
there is an unfair power dynamic at play similar to
the reas and the statutory rape is illegal. This dynamic
(30:03):
makes it impossible for the victim to have full autonomy
in the interaction. I feel like you guys are such
advocates for women that you might want to be aware
of how phrasing of these topics can unintentionally victim blame.
I love your podcast and sent you another email within
the last week being a total goober fangirl about it.
Thank you so much for reading. Thank you so much
for that email, Katie, and then I will hand it
to Tracy for the other one. This one is from David,
(30:25):
and David says, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I've long enjoyed
the podcast and have recently gotten back to listening to
it after a hiatus. I appreciate the reporting, the depth
of research, and the adenda provided by listeners during the
listener mail segment, and I also love your occasional interviews
with historians. On rare occasions, hosts over the years have
mangled the pronunciations of some foreign words. We all chalk
(30:47):
that up to our different educational backgrounds. But in the
hinter k f podcast, I was shocked to hear one
of you make an insensitive comment regarding incest. Tracy said
that the hinter k Fi murders reminded her of a
more recent mass murder, and went on to say that
the daughter in that case may, as with hinter Kfek,
have been quote having an affair with the daughter. I
take issue with that phrase. Most of us would agree
(31:08):
that incestuous quote affairs can occur between consenting adults, like
the siblings on Game of Thrones, but a father does
not have an incestuous quote affair with his young daughter
that is, in fact rape. I was especially surprised to
hear this coming from a young female podcaster. I'd love
it if you would make a quick correction in an
upcoming listener male portion of the show, and at the
(31:30):
very least, please be more sensitive to such issues in
the future. They will certainly come up again at some
point if history teaches us anything. Sincerely, David, it was
me who said that I'd want to clarify first of all,
or you have you like like you want to say
a thing. Oh no, I think I may have said
the one that Katie mentioned earlier when I was talking
(31:51):
about the groupers at hinter Kafik, And then there was
a second one that came up when you mentioned a
likened scenario. Right, So we we both misspoke. Well we
both misspoke, But I also do want to make it
very clear that your your research on this. The woman
you were talking about was thirty five years old, and
(32:11):
I was speaking extemporaneously about a case that I learned
about when I was fifteen, which was twenty five years ago.
In my memory, the daughter in that case was also
an adult. Um. I actually looked up after getting David's note,
and I was expecting to find that she was in
her mid twenties when that murder happened. She actually was not.
(32:32):
She was younger than that, which I had completely remembered Wrongly.
That's definitely not language I would use when talking about
a father and a child. But like in my memory,
this was a father and an adult, which is still
definitely taboo. There is still definitely a train of thought
that no person can ever consent to sexual activity with
(32:55):
a parent because of the power dynamic. I don't. I
don't think that's a you of burstell idea, but it
is definitely one that exists. But yeah, I absolutely would
not have framed it that way if I had remembered
correctly that the daughter in that case was only seventeen.
I remembered her as being a grown up. Uh, probably
(33:15):
because she was older than I was when I read
the book about that murder when I was fifteen, Right,
So yeah, I mean, I apologize for having dismayed anyone
or or victim. Believe that certainly would not be either
of our intense. There was definitely some stuff that I found,
and you may recall if you listen to that podcast
that I mentioned at the end that some of the
(33:36):
stuff I was looking at was online but was Bavarian
legal records, and one of them was, but I couldn't
verify that it was legitimate, which is why I did
not bring it up on the podcast, but it completely
seated in my brain. Um, there was one that claimed
that in fact, Victoria and her father had been charged
(33:57):
with incest and it went through an actual like trial
situation and they were both found guilty. So I think
in my head that automatically gave her a level of
I don't want to say blame, That's not what I'm saying,
but uh more of an equal footing because they both
were found guilty in the same way, even though that
(34:17):
may not have been the actual situation. I think my
brain just went and moved on. I didn't want to Um. Yeah,
I certainly would not, and I recognize that even if
you were a thirty five year old woman, you still
are not probably equal in the power dynamic to your father,
and especially when there is this overlay of sexuality to
the whole thing. It's a very complicated issue. So again
(34:40):
well created by the fact that the period of time
when we were talking about, as a general rule, all
women were in a subordinate power position to to all men.
I mean all is probably too strong a word, but
overwhelmingly like women in general not have the same lafe
(35:01):
level of agency that women do today. And so the
way we talk about consent a hundred years ago has
to be different in some ways because sort of the
base level of of agency involved in being able to
make consent was much different than it is now. So yeah,
neither of us intended to to make light of um
(35:25):
of incest, especially when it involves children or to the
victim blame. Um, I genuinely thought I was talking about
a grown up. Yeah, So thank you so much. Katie
and David. You are the only two that we heard
from on the subject. But you both presented it so
smartly and intelligently and kindly. It was not uh screaming
at all. So even if it were screaming, I mean,
(35:47):
I feel like that's the thing that is worth being
screaming about. Uh. And based on past experience, I am
sure that in the window of time between us recording
this today and the episode coming out, we will probably
ten or fifteen more emails about it, because that's sort
of how it how it goes. But yeah, yeah, I
apologize for having been insensitive. Likewise, I do as well.
(36:10):
Apologies all around. Um. Back to lighter notes, though, If
you would like to write to us, you can do that.
We're at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com.
You can also find us at Facebook dot com, slash
missed in History, on Twitter at mist in History, at
pinterest dot com, slash missed in History at missed in
History dot tumbler dot com, and on Instagram at mist
(36:30):
in history. If you would like to learn a little
bit more about what we talked about today. Go to
our parents site, how stuff Works. Type in Isaac Newton's
name into the search bar and you will get an
article called how Isaac Newton Works. You will also get
an article questioning whether or not the Apple situation was real.
You can also visit us online at missed in history
dot com, where you'll find all of our episodes all
(36:50):
the way back to when the podcast began and they
were only three minutes long to present day. You'll find
show notes on all of the episodes Tracy and I
have worked on, and you will occasionally get some other
goodies here and there. So we encourage you to come
and visit us at Miston history dot com and how
stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
(37:12):
of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com.
M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm pray Cyvie Wilson. Uh. And
today we're gonna talk about somebody and when we say
his name, you're gonna go I know about him. I'm
(00:22):
imagining having to break out my my doctored up version
of our logo that turns it into like stuff you
may have possibly missed in history class or somewhere else,
but maybe not or it's maybe not about you personally. Yeah.
But the cool thing is, as I often do, I
did one of my informal polls. I even did one
just now before we started recording with our sorcerer Noll,
(00:46):
where when I say, oh, we're going to talk about
Sir Issac Newton, and I was like, I know him,
and I'm like, but what do you know about him?
And once you get past the apple falling thing, people
get real fuzzy. But it's just physics in general. Yeah, yeah,
I mean people associate him with the theory of gravity,
but his actual life story is way bigger than that.
It's filled with twists and turns. There's some interesting um
(01:09):
you know, kind of personality quirks involved. He worked in
so many different fields and so it seems like a
good time to sit back and actually talk about the
life of this famous philosopher, mathematician, physicists, scientists and astronomer.
And truly that list is sort of a scratching the
surface situation. We are not going to go super heavy
(01:31):
on the actual science and math concepts here is that
probably is the stuff that you were taught in school theoretically,
but we will hit some of the highlights, mostly just
to give a sense of just how impactful Newton's work
was and frankly still is. So to start the place
we normally start. Isaac Newton was born on January fourth,
(01:52):
sixteen forty three, in Woolsthorpe, England. You'll often see his
birthday listed is December two. Neil de crass Tyson famously
tweeted about that being his birthday. That date is actually
also correct if you are using the old Julian calendar.
And Isaac was a premature baby. He was weak and
(02:13):
very fragile when he was born, and he was not
expected to live very long. He also never knew his father,
who he was named for, because the elder Isaac Newton
died a few months before his son was born. His mother,
Hannah Askew Newton, was a single parent for the first
three years of the young boy's life. Yeah, and she
did have the support of relatives, but in terms of
(02:34):
direct parenting, she was the one UH and isaih relationship
with his mother was really quite complicated, particularly in his
early years, and many historians have pointed out that if
you read his correspondence, it really suggests that this gave
him an ongoing issue UH in terms of personality in
(02:56):
dealing with the world. Because when he was three, Hannah
left him to live with his grandmother. She had remarried
to a man named Barnabas Smith, and she moved in
with Smith and left her child behind. As Isaac reached
school age, there were arrangements made for him to stay
with an apothecary and grant them so he could go
to King's School. There as the apothecary's lodger, Newton got
(03:19):
his first introduction to chemistry, and mother and child were
not reunited under one roof for quite some time until
Hannah's second husband, again that was Burnaby Smith, died nine
years after she married him, and at this point Isaac
was twelve and his mother opted to take him out
of school so that he could become a farmer like
(03:39):
his father, who had in fact been very successful in agriculture.
As is often the case when parents pick out a
child's vocation for them, farming did not actually work out
very well for Isaac Newton. He was bored to tears
trying to care for the family's farm, and soon it
was apparent that if he continued down that vocational path
(03:59):
he would only meet with failures. So he got to
go back to school, and once Isaac's basic education was completed,
his uncle, who was a scholar, stepped in. He wanted
to persuade Hannah that her son really should go to university.
Isaac was certainly smart enough, but there was this issue
of money to contend with. But in sixteen sixty one,
(04:20):
Isaac Newton did indeed enroll at University of Cambridge's Trinity College,
but he had to work to earn his place in
the lecture hall. He cleaned and serviced the rooms of
other students, and he waited tables, so basically he was
set up on a program that was not unlike modern
work study programs. He started out with the standard course
load for any student at Cambridge, but as his time
(04:43):
at school wore on, he was drawn more and more
to the cutting edge science that was happening at the time.
We would call this very basic science today. For the
most part, the geocentric model of the heavenly bodies, which
placed Earth at the center of all the celestial orbits,
was still being hot, but the heliocentric model, which had
(05:03):
been hinted at much earlier in the timeline and other cultures,
had really been fleshed out and promoted by Nicholas Copernicus,
Ico Brahey, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo. So while Isaac Newton
was getting this old school education in his classes and
his spare time outside of all of the various jobs
that he took on to stay in school, he spent
(05:24):
studying modern philosophy and science, and likely because he was
burning the candle at both ends and frankly in the middle. Uh,
Newton didn't really excel at university. He wasn't like a
star student or anything. He did graduate, but that graduation
didn't come with any special distinctions. Though. While he was
(05:44):
working in his self directed extracurricular study, Newton wrote an
important series of notes entitled Certain Philosophical Questions, and in
these notes, in this work that he did on his own,
really was the beginnings of what would later be called
the scientific Revolution. After his graduation, he continued to study
with a subsidy, and that was pretty much customary for
(06:07):
the people who had earned the title of scholar. He
did this until Cambridge University was forced to close temporarily
in sixteen sixty five because of the spread of the
Great Plague. After the university shuddered to wait out the
plague of London, uh, Newton continued his studies, but he
was just doing it on his own at home, which
he had already been doing in his off time anyway,
(06:27):
So presumably he was pretty uh accustomed to this whole
self directed study thing, and this would actually end up
being an incredibly important period of time for him and
in truth for humanity. This is, for example, the period
when the alleged Apple gravity revelation took place. An interesting
(06:48):
thing to note here is that while this story in
an extremely simplified form, is often told as though it's
literally the first time anyone ever in history thought about
a force pulling an apple down to Earth. What new
And was really inspired to think about was the idea
that the apple and the Earth's moon might both be
governed by the same force. And there is some debate
(07:11):
historically as to whether or not this magical apple moment
ever actually happened, But what we do know is that
Newton started to think about gravity and how it was
not only applicable to things here on Earth, but to
the other things out in the universe. And over the
course of that year and a half spent in solo education,
Newton really also so the seeds of a theory of
(07:33):
color and light uh also a concept for infinitesimal calculus,
and also a lot of significant astronomy concepts related to
the movement of the planets which were also related to gravity.
And these major lines of thinking would form the basis
of a groundbreaking publication that he would write some years later,
which we will talk about in just a bit. In
(07:55):
sixteen sixty seven, Cambridge reopened after the plague and Isaac
were tarns to the formal academic environment. As a minor
fellow at Trinity College, he got a Master of Arts
degree two years later while he was completing his graduate work,
Newton wrote a paper entitled Anna Lysi, A Treatise on
Infinite Series Mathematics. And Newton shared this work with his mentor,
(08:16):
Isaac Barrow, who in turn showed it to other members
of the mathematics community. And this really garnered Newton both
attention and quite a bit of praise. And it was
not long before Newton took over Barrow's chair at Cambridge
when the mentor stepped down. And next we're going to
talk about a small invention that garnered Newton some new attention.
But first let's pause for a brief word from one
(08:37):
of our fantastic sponsors. In sixteen sixty eight, Newton built
a reflecting telescope. It was the first of its kind,
and he did this as part of his lecture work
in optics, which gained the attention of the Royal Society.
He showed the apparatus there in sixteen seventy one. This
led to the publication of his Notes on Optics in
(08:58):
sixteen seventy two. This wasn't exactly a slam dunk in
the world of science, though. While Newton's work had led
him to believe that white light contained the entire spectrum
of colors and was composed of particles. But the more
common belief was that waves, rather than particles, made up light,
and that colors were modified forms of homogeneous white light.
(09:21):
And additionally, French physicist it may marry Out attempted to
reproduce Newton's refraction experiment and he just was unable to
do so. He could not do it. Uh So, Newton's
papers on this matter were openly criticized, so much so
that Newton, who frankly never really learned to handle criticism
very well during his life at all, and I kind
(09:42):
of identify with him in that regard. Uh He actually
waited for most of the vehement critics of this particular
line of thinking to die off before he agreed to
formally publish his notes on light in the book Optics.
Like he had published some of these notes in a
smaller sense, but not in book form, and he just
waited them out. He waited them out for three decades.
(10:05):
He just wanted them all to die so that none
of them could criticize his book when it came out. Well.
And I think my question is whether these criticisms were
criticisms or whether they were insults, because those are not
the same thing, uh, he responded to. It seems in
reading notes and biographical accounts of him, that he tended
(10:29):
to respond to challenges to his line of thinking, whether
it was genuine criticism and questioning or just an old
school that was unwilling to accept new ideas, in almost
exactly the same way. He just got really, really angry
and a little bit petulant about it. Yeah, don't do that, dude.
(10:51):
Constructive criticism is how we learn and get better. I
say that, which sounds kind of sanctimonious because we're talking
about Isaac Newton. He learned a lot of things. Yeah.
Can you imagine what would have happened had he had
he been had he figured out a way to work
with criticism. So to continue on this subject of criticism,
(11:13):
one of the most prominent and vocal critics of Isaac
Newton's optics work was Robert Hook. The two men locked
intellectual horns for years. As a result, Newton threatened to
quit the Royal Society over the rift, although other members
convinced him to stay. As the correspondence between the two
of them raged on and on and finally reached a
(11:35):
crescendo in sixty eight Newton actually had a nervous breakdown
and stopped communicating with his rival altogether. Yeah. Again, he
just struggled. This was something he never really got the
hang of, was was being able to deal with people
that wanted to challenge his work. Uh. And not long
after this breakdown, Isaac's mother, Hannah died, and as you'll recall,
(11:59):
that was a very weird and conflicted relationship and it
really really affected him deeply. So that loss, on top
of his already fragile mental state, led to a six
year withdrawal from colleagues and most social interaction. So friends
and associates, of course tried to reach out to him,
and they would get replies, but they would be very brief,
(12:19):
and instead, Isaac Newton chose to continue his own intellectual
pursuits during this time, working kind of siloed off on
his own, and he specifically focused on the areas of
planetary orbits and the way that they're influenced by gravity.
Very slowly, Newton began to correspond regularly on the topic
with none other than his former rival Robert Hook. That
(12:42):
two of them exchanged ideas, and Hook helped him work
through concepts that would lead to formulas for calculating gravity's
effect on planetary orbit. But again, although there was no
argument this time or any kind of breakdown, Newton just
abruptly stopped talking to him about it. So as easy
years of working alone and occasionally only corresponding a little
(13:03):
here and there were drawing to a close, and Isaac
Newton began to once again become a little more sociable.
Both he and Robert Hook spoke with Edmund Halley separately
though about planetary orbits, and Halle actually first spoke with Hook,
and then later he consulted with Newton about the shape
of orbits based on the formula theory that Hook had
(13:24):
described to him, and after hearing uh Isaac Newton talked
about it, Halle was convinced that Newton really was onto
something regarding his idea of elliptical orbits, and at this
point Halle became a benefactor to Newton. He basically took
care of his living expenses so that the mathematics of
orbital paths could be the exclusive focus of Newton's time.
(13:46):
In six seven, Newton published his work Prince Shipia, which
is more formally known as Mathematical Principles of Natural philosophy.
This was the result of a year and a half
of work and it was really groundbreaking. It's been five
It as the most influential of all physics books, establishing
basically all the basic concepts still used in physics today,
(14:07):
with the exception of energy. So if you remember your
high school physics, you probably can recall Newton's laws of motion,
which were part of Principia in the context of explaining
the movement of celestial bodies. And I know we wouldn't
talk a lot about the actual science and math, but
we'll just go over them because in case you don't
recognize of my name, you will once we start saying them.
One is that a stationary body will stay stationary unless
(14:30):
an external force is applied to it. Two is it
forces equal to mass times acceleration, and a change in
motion is proportional to the force applied. And three is
for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
So these are things we still talk about all the time.
And this was in Newton's work Principia. Yes, it is
like the basic basics of physics or just physical science class. Yeah,
(14:57):
So this book was and still is hugely influential and
that really just can't be overstated. It's not just about
what we learned in elementary, middle and high school and
science classes. Uh. If you wonder how on Earth astrophysicists
are able to calculate the masses of planets that are
billions of miles away, it's because of these principles that
(15:19):
were established in the seven publication. If you've ever wondered
how we figured out that tides are governed by gravity,
that is in there too, So are numerous other concepts
that are mind blowing to consider today. But Newton had
worked out the concepts back in the seventeenth century, but
again and again, tied to Robert Hook, Newton's work drew
(15:42):
some controversy, so Hook became very public about claiming that
Newton had in fact been copying his work and basically
stole it by not crediting him, and this instantly re
established the rivalry between them, and it was instantly just
as intense as it ever was. And in a similar
move as he had made in the previous round of
(16:03):
vehement bickering, Newton's threatened to basically take his ball and
bat and go home and stop working on the second
edition of principia and not play with any of the
scientific community anymore. Edmund Halley, of course, had spoken with
both of the men about planetary orbits before becoming Newton's
financial backer, so he knew that Newton's work on this
book was legitimately his own work. However, Halle also wanted
(16:27):
to find a way to make peace in the community,
so he eventually convinced Newton to insert a note in
the second edition giving credit to Hook for the concepts
that he shared in the development of the mathematics involved. Yeah,
it was basically thanking him for that correspondence back and
forth when Newton was kind of working primarily on his own,
but they were talking a little bit about gravity and
(16:48):
planetary orbits together, so you would think that would like
smooth things over. But in fact, from this point on,
Hook's life really took a downturn. He was not satisfied
by Newton's acknowledgement, and he became increasingly and openly bitter
about Newton's success, and as a consequence, the pair never
repaired their relationship after that. For Newton, the publication of
(17:11):
Princeship Head brought him to an entirely new level of fame,
it really expanded his professional and social circles quite significantly.
And we're going to talk about the new spheres and
causes that Isaac Newton found himself in as a consequence
of his growing renown in just a moment. But first,
let's pause and thank one of our great sponsors. So
(17:32):
King James the Second, who ascended to the throne of
England in six eight five for a relatively brief reign,
created a major religious upheaval in the Anglican country as
he attempted to promote Catholicism. So he advocated for religious
freedom for Catholics, but he thought that they should continue
the persecution of Presbyterian covenanters. Uh. Those are the very
(17:53):
broad strokes of the religious situation. But the reason that
King James the Second features into Newton's life story is
that the monarch wanted to make universities into Catholic institutions.
Isaac Newton firmly opposed this move, and as a very
vocal challenger to the idea, he was elected as Cambridge's
representative in Parliament in sixteen eighty nine. Newton, it should
(18:16):
be noted, was not irreligious. Over the course of his life.
He did think and write a great deal about God.
He felt strongly that understanding Judeo Christian prophecy and mysticism
was vital to understanding God. He wrote at one point
that he felt that Christianity had kind of gotten off
track in the fourth century, with incorrect doctrines regarding the
(18:39):
nature of Christ being promoted by the Council of Nicia.
And while this wasn't an announcement of religion, it was
a very unorthodox view. So he was religious. He did
believe in God, but he had a very unusual stance
on the whole thing. Newton's influence continued to expand, so
(18:59):
much so that educational reformers who wished to move away
from teaching Aristotelian ideology looked to him as their public
proponent for more modern curricula. They wanted to teach the
concepts of the physical world that were represented in Newton's writings. Yeah,
he basically promoted that for his entire life. And while
(19:20):
he was at the height of his success, however, uh,
you know, all of this was going great. He really
had a lot of respect. He was a recognized leader
in science. Isaac Newton had another nervous breakdown and this
was in sixtee and this one was marked by him
writing letters to friends and colleagues that were extremely paranoid.
(19:40):
They were really accusatory missives in a lot of ways,
you know, thinking that people were out to get him,
and in general the tone of all of his correspondence
just seemed entirely out of sorts. So his earlier breakdown
was pretty clearly caused by ongoing hostilities with Robert Hook.
The reasons for this one we're a little more nebulous.
(20:01):
He was exhausted from his work, he had a falling
out with one of his close friends. He was disappointed
in his status with King William the Third. He may
have even been dealing with mercury poisoning from years of
work in a lab. But unlike the breakdown that Newton
experienced in sixteen seventy eight, he seemed to quickly recover
(20:22):
from this one in just a matter of months, so
a far cry from the six years of seclusion that
he had receded into the first time he had a
mental break And this time he kind of came around.
As we said, he apologized to his friends in writing,
and he went right back to work as though it
had never happened, although at this point his interests had
(20:42):
suddenly largely shifted away from science and instead this is
really a time when he was intent on ruminating on
alchemy and philosophy and considering the metaphysical. This is really
when he wrote a lot about the religion that we
mentioned just a few moments ago. Once that episode behind him,
Isaac Newton's life once again got a lot brighter. He
(21:04):
had long wanted to be appointed to a government position,
and not getting one from King William the Third was
one of the things that had strained his relationship with
the monarch. But finally, in sixteen ninety six, he was
made Warden of the Mints, and this marked the end
of his time lecturing at Cambridge. So this may seem
like sort of a random position to put a renowned
(21:26):
scientist into, but here is how Newton finally won his
much coveted government job. His niece, Catherine Barton, was Lord
Halifax's mistress at the time, and it was Halifax who
used his influence to secure the position for his paramour's uncle.
To his credit, though Isaac Newton didn't just sit back
and collect this government income. He took his job as
(21:48):
the Master of the mint extremely seriously, and this happened
to be an interesting time in England in terms of currency. Yeah. So,
to set it up, in the late sixteen hundreds, English
coins were still being minted in silver. The value of
the material that was used to make the coins was
actually worth more than the currency itself, and this led
(22:09):
to a number of illicit activities. So initially the problem
was that coins were sometimes being clipped or shaved around
their edges so that they were still recognized as legal tender,
but the person doing the clipping could then amass all
of these clippings and shavings so that the silver could
be melted down for other uses and sold. Eventually, the
minting process was updated to make coins with milled edges
(22:32):
that would deter clipping and shaving practices. But what this
ended up doing was fostering a huge counterfeit and money
market in England. Would be crooks would try to fill
the gap in their incomes that they had been making
through clipping by counterfeiting instead. Yeah, they would basically cast
a mold from an actual coin, and then they would
(22:53):
just start issuing their own basically with cheaper materials and
counterfeiting coins at this point was considered treason, so it
was classified as a high crime. And by Newton's reckoning,
a full twenty of the coins in England when he
took his job as Master of the Mint were in
fact counterfeits, so that's one fifth of the circulating currency
that was not real, and he made it his mission
(23:15):
to find as many counterfeiters as he could. Newton was
not the least bit wary of venturing into very unsavory
areas and establishments. While he carried out this work, he
became kind of an expert investigator, and he applied his
rigorous scientific examination skills to his criminal investigations. He even
went so far as to become credential in law so
(23:38):
that he could perform cross examinations on suspects during their trials,
and over the course of several years, Newton was able
to successfully prosecute twenty counterfeiters. He had taken in many more,
but those are the ones that were found guilty, and
all of them were put to death for their crimes
in The French Academy of Sciences named him one of
(24:00):
eight foreign Associates. When seventeen o three he became President
of the Royal Society. In seventeen o five he was knighted,
So you would think at some point in this esteemed
career he might be free of drama. That that would
be wrong. The same year that he was knighted got freed. Leibniz,
who was a German mathematician, asserted that he had developed
(24:21):
the ideas of infinitesmal calculus years before Newton had published
his own works on the subject. Yeah, I didn't ever
find I'm sure it's out there somewhere, it just didn't
turn up in my work on this particular project. Why
he waited so long because this is quite a ways
after Newton was publishing these ideas, So we don't know
(24:43):
why Leibniz waited so long to say that it was
his work. But these accusations persisted for years until finally
in seventeen twelve. So remember it was seventeen o five
when this whole business started, so this dragged on for
seven years. Uh, this matter was finally investigated by the
Royal Society and Newton was found to be the original
(25:04):
mathematician to work on these concepts. Though we should point
out that he did have a decidedly unfair advantage in
the proceedings as he had as Royal Society President selected
the investigation committee members. I was sort of startled throughout
this at how cut through the mathematics and science world was,
at least as it swirled around Isaac Newton. This was
(25:26):
actually not the only intellectual skirmish that he had while
he was the Royal Society President. In fact, he had
a really negative reputation in that role. There were even
people who called him a tyrant. He published the notes
of astronomer Astronomer John Flamsteed without that man's permission, after
Flamsteed didn't provide him with the notes he wanted for
(25:48):
an update to the Principia as quickly as he wanted them. Yeah,
it is kind of another case of like a footstompy
kind of reaction. And we should point out that John
Flamsteed had gathered an unreal amount of data. Newton's demands
for specific notes we're probably a little bit unreasonable. That
(26:08):
would be like somebody going, hey, run to the library
and get me these three things in a library that's
massive and that they, you know, are still sorting out.
So it was kind of a a little bit of
an unreasonable demand Flamsteed eventually sought out and won a
court order demanding that Newton ceased the permission list publication
(26:29):
of his work. This is one of the few times
that in all of these skirmishes that Newton got into
with other people that he actually kind of came out
on the losing end. And his eighties, Newton started experiencing
poor health, specifically digestive problems, and this took its hole
on his overall well being. On March seventy seven, he
(26:49):
got a really severe pain in his abdomen and he
blacked out shortly thereafter. He remained unconscious until he died
the next day at the age of eighty four. He
held the position of Master of the Mint until he
the day that he died. He was also still the
President of the Royal Society, having been re elected every
year in spite of sentiments that he was sometimes abusing
(27:12):
his power in that position, and he was buried in
Westminster Abbey in a very lavish ceremony. While he was
lauded as a genius both before and after his death
and even still today, the sad truth is that Isaac
Newton was likely very lonely. He never married. He didn't
have many close friends. He seemed to have some issues
(27:33):
of insecurity, possibly tied to the absence of parents in
his life as a child. Because he was mired in
so many plagiarism battles, he never really became comfortable with
the idea of collaborating with his colleagues, so he missed
out on opportunities to forge forge relationships with his peers
in the math and science community. But of course it's
(27:55):
pretty undeniable that he changed the course of science and
human history in fact with his work. In December, an
original copy of his Principia, which had been presented to
King James the Second, went up for auction with a
value range of four hundred thousand to six hundred thousand dollars.
When the bidding was over, the book sold for three
(28:17):
of its estimate, at two point five million dollars. Yeah,
that's one of those very rare and coveted items, both
within sort of a book collector's community and in the
scientific community. I did not look up or no, if
it's even available who made that purchase. But uh so,
that is the life and times a ster Isaac Newton.
I think it's it's more interesting and a little bit
(28:39):
more dramatic than people may suspect if they only know
the happy version of the apple in the tree gravity moments, right, uh,
and the scientific genius moment. Yeah. I mean he was
undoubtedly a genius, but very complicated man. Fascinating and how
he would become obsessed withvarious things at various points in
(29:01):
his life. Um. I like the part where he was
hunting down counterfeiters. How could you not? I mean, that's
a fascinating tale. So now we have two bits of
listener mail. They're related to the same thing. Um, And
do you want me to read one and you read
one and then we'll discuss That sounds great because it
(29:21):
is an important topic. Um. It's related to our discussion
in the History Mystery double feature podcast, particularly the one
where we talked about hinter Kfik. And the first one
that we received was from our listener Katie. She said, Hi,
I hate to send a correction, and I'm sure it's
been said already, but in your most recent episode, you
discussed incest in a way that unintentionally blames victims of
(29:43):
parental child incest. You referred to it as a quote
affair between the father and daughter, and this implies that
there was consent and even desire on the part of
the daughter. Even in instances where the daughter would claim consent,
there is an unfair power dynamic at play similar to
the reas and the statutory rape is illegal. This dynamic
(30:03):
makes it impossible for the victim to have full autonomy
in the interaction. I feel like you guys are such
advocates for women that you might want to be aware
of how phrasing of these topics can unintentionally victim blame.
I love your podcast and sent you another email within
the last week being a total goober fangirl about it.
Thank you so much for reading. Thank you so much
for that email, Katie, and then I will hand it
to Tracy for the other one. This one is from David,
(30:25):
and David says, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I've long enjoyed
the podcast and have recently gotten back to listening to
it after a hiatus. I appreciate the reporting, the depth
of research, and the adenda provided by listeners during the
listener mail segment, and I also love your occasional interviews
with historians. On rare occasions, hosts over the years have
mangled the pronunciations of some foreign words. We all chalk
(30:47):
that up to our different educational backgrounds. But in the
hinter k f podcast, I was shocked to hear one
of you make an insensitive comment regarding incest. Tracy said
that the hinter k Fi murders reminded her of a
more recent mass murder, and went on to say that
the daughter in that case may, as with hinter Kfek,
have been quote having an affair with the daughter. I
take issue with that phrase. Most of us would agree
(31:08):
that incestuous quote affairs can occur between consenting adults, like
the siblings on Game of Thrones, but a father does
not have an incestuous quote affair with his young daughter
that is, in fact rape. I was especially surprised to
hear this coming from a young female podcaster. I'd love
it if you would make a quick correction in an
upcoming listener male portion of the show, and at the
(31:30):
very least, please be more sensitive to such issues in
the future. They will certainly come up again at some
point if history teaches us anything. Sincerely, David, it was
me who said that I'd want to clarify first of all,
or you have you like like you want to say
a thing. Oh no, I think I may have said
the one that Katie mentioned earlier when I was talking
(31:51):
about the groupers at hinter Kafik, And then there was
a second one that came up when you mentioned a
likened scenario. Right, So we we both misspoke. Well we
both misspoke, But I also do want to make it
very clear that your your research on this. The woman
you were talking about was thirty five years old, and
(32:11):
I was speaking extemporaneously about a case that I learned
about when I was fifteen, which was twenty five years ago.
In my memory, the daughter in that case was also
an adult. Um. I actually looked up after getting David's note,
and I was expecting to find that she was in
her mid twenties when that murder happened. She actually was not.
(32:32):
She was younger than that, which I had completely remembered Wrongly.
That's definitely not language I would use when talking about
a father and a child. But like in my memory,
this was a father and an adult, which is still
definitely taboo. There is still definitely a train of thought
that no person can ever consent to sexual activity with
(32:55):
a parent because of the power dynamic. I don't. I
don't think that's a you of burstell idea, but it
is definitely one that exists. But yeah, I absolutely would
not have framed it that way if I had remembered
correctly that the daughter in that case was only seventeen.
I remembered her as being a grown up. Uh, probably
(33:15):
because she was older than I was when I read
the book about that murder when I was fifteen, Right,
So yeah, I mean, I apologize for having dismayed anyone
or or victim. Believe that certainly would not be either
of our intense. There was definitely some stuff that I found,
and you may recall if you listen to that podcast
that I mentioned at the end that some of the
(33:36):
stuff I was looking at was online but was Bavarian
legal records, and one of them was, but I couldn't
verify that it was legitimate, which is why I did
not bring it up on the podcast, but it completely
seated in my brain. Um, there was one that claimed
that in fact, Victoria and her father had been charged
(33:57):
with incest and it went through an actual like trial
situation and they were both found guilty. So I think
in my head that automatically gave her a level of
I don't want to say blame, That's not what I'm saying,
but uh more of an equal footing because they both
were found guilty in the same way, even though that
(34:17):
may not have been the actual situation. I think my
brain just went and moved on. I didn't want to Um. Yeah,
I certainly would not, and I recognize that even if
you were a thirty five year old woman, you still
are not probably equal in the power dynamic to your father,
and especially when there is this overlay of sexuality to
the whole thing. It's a very complicated issue. So again
(34:40):
well created by the fact that the period of time
when we were talking about, as a general rule, all
women were in a subordinate power position to to all men.
I mean all is probably too strong a word, but
overwhelmingly like women in general not have the same lafe
(35:01):
level of agency that women do today. And so the
way we talk about consent a hundred years ago has
to be different in some ways because sort of the
base level of of agency involved in being able to
make consent was much different than it is now. So yeah,
neither of us intended to to make light of um
(35:25):
of incest, especially when it involves children or to the
victim blame. Um, I genuinely thought I was talking about
a grown up. Yeah, So thank you so much. Katie
and David. You are the only two that we heard
from on the subject. But you both presented it so
smartly and intelligently and kindly. It was not uh screaming
at all. So even if it were screaming, I mean,
(35:47):
I feel like that's the thing that is worth being
screaming about. Uh. And based on past experience, I am
sure that in the window of time between us recording
this today and the episode coming out, we will probably
ten or fifteen more emails about it, because that's sort
of how it how it goes. But yeah, yeah, I
apologize for having been insensitive. Likewise, I do as well.
(36:10):
Apologies all around. Um. Back to lighter notes, though, If
you would like to write to us, you can do that.
We're at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com.
You can also find us at Facebook dot com, slash
missed in History, on Twitter at mist in History, at
pinterest dot com, slash missed in History at missed in
History dot tumbler dot com, and on Instagram at mist
(36:30):
in history. If you would like to learn a little
bit more about what we talked about today. Go to
our parents site, how stuff Works. Type in Isaac Newton's
name into the search bar and you will get an
article called how Isaac Newton Works. You will also get
an article questioning whether or not the Apple situation was real.
You can also visit us online at missed in history
dot com, where you'll find all of our episodes all
(36:50):
the way back to when the podcast began and they
were only three minutes long to present day. You'll find
show notes on all of the episodes Tracy and I
have worked on, and you will occasionally get some other
goodies here and there. So we encourage you to come
and visit us at Miston history dot com and how
stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
(37:12):
of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com.
M
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.