This is an I heart original Newgate Jail was built into the old Roman walls that had once bounded the city of London. It had been a fixture of the landscape since, and the interviewing years hadn't done much to change its essential nature. Newgate was a horrible, horrible place, full of desperation, damp, and disease. It was home to highwaymen and murderers, rapists and thieves, as well as petty criminals, pickpockets,
and political activists who had fallen afoul of the establishment. Men, women and children were crowded into the same words, and there was no distinction between crimes. When William Challoner shuffled into Newgate in August, heavy iron shackles at his ankles and wrists, it was at least his third day in London's most notorious prison, and by now he knew his way around. Chalder's first objective would have been to get some coins, some real, actual coin, into the hands of
the jailer. To get those shackles off easy enough. Newgate was so corrupt that the guards would allow robbers out at night to go thieving in exchange for a cut of the profits. Chalder's next job would have been to sort out the basic necessities. Newgate was said to be so filthy, so disgusting, that the floors were carpeted in lice and bed bugs, and open sewer flowed through the middle of it, and people sometimes tried to escape that way, but not everyone survived. Typhus was so endemic, but it
was called jail fever. In the main cells, there were no beds, just to fit a bare board or straw to sleep on. The water was tainted, the food was spoiled, and everywhere was cold, dark and airless. Chaloner would have spent some more coin to procure a real betting and better food, and maybe even some wine or beer. He might have even gotten a cell to himself, depending on how much of his ill gotten coin he wanted to
part with. That sorted, his next step was obvious, sit down and figure out exactly what kind of mess he was in and how to get out of it. There would be a trial soon, maybe in a few months time, and challenger, of course, had no defense attorney, no one did he knew. The warden's case rested on the testimony of Thomas Holloway, and though Halloway was his friend, his long time accomplice, Chaloner knew that loyalty only went so far. Certainly,
Chaloner was loyal to no one but himself. But Joner also knew that, beyond Holloway's testimony, the evidence Student had on him was thin. Challenger's first move was to start talking in the hopes of earning and out the same way most other people did, informing he accused Aubrey Price of several criminal acts, counterfeiting among them. Price had been part of that convoluted plan that led to Challenger's arrest. But the problem was Aubrey Price was already in prison,
a man of quote good parentage but poor morals. Evidently, he was later executed for forging banknotes, which was a capital offense. So that didn't work. But Chaloner had another plan, one that involved removing Thomas Holloway from the picture. For I Heart Radio, I'm Linda Rodriguez, Mcrabbie and this is Newton's Law and I heard original podcast episode six Quicksilver,
Act one Rotten Apple. While Shanoner was trying to figure a way out of his current jam, Newton was just a three mile walk away through London's crooked, smoky, filthy streets. He now lived in Westminster, much quieter, less smelly than his home at the Mint had been. He sat alone thinking. Newton could have been reviewing all the depositions, all the information he'd collected since he'd first scotten wind of challengers Eggam operation. He would have been looking for something, anything,
that would give him leverage. If Chaloner knew that Newton's case against him was thin, then Newton certainly did too. Or maybe his mind drifted a bit. He might have been thinking about his work on optics, for example, experiments and research that had talled somewhat since he arrived in London. He might have been thinking about his theological studies, ideas that sometimes took him to the brink and beyond of heresy.
Or he might have been thinking about how he Isaac Newton, born on a lincoature farm to rise to scholarly fame, had gotten here sitting in his London study, struggling with a different kind of problem, how to nail down a
slippery criminal mastermind. Newton was no stranger to introspection as a teenager, and in his first years at Cambridge he the ledger of his quote sins making Pies on Sunday night, missing chapel, twisting accord on Sunday morning, using Wilford's towel to spare my own wishing death and hoping it to some striking many having on clean thoughts, words and actions and dreams. Also on the list, trying to spend a bronze and therefore counterfeit groat, which is well ironic. Newton's
childhood and adolescence hadn't been exactly pleasant. His father was a relatively well off farmer who died before Newton was born. His mother remarried when little Isaac was just about three years old. Her new husband was more than twice her age, a widower, and as part of their marriage contract, she was meant to move in with him alone. Little Isaac was to be left in the care of his grandparents
at the farmhouse where was born. When her second husband died eight years later, his mother returned with three smaller children into Biographers have suggested that this early perceived rejection by his mother left Isaac Newton with a few issues. Punching my sister, rubbing my mother's box of plums and sugar, threatening my father and mother to burn them. I'm the househover them with my mother, with my sister. Newton's brilliance
carried him into university. His years in academia were characterized by intense study and also by a lack of connection with other people. During his Cambridge years, he rarely left his rooms at the college, and when he did, he was usually unkempt, with his hair uncombed, and he tended to draw mathematical equations in the dust by the river cam that sort of thing. Newton wasn't exactly happy in his solitude, but neither did he particularly enjoy the company
of other people. For I see not what there is desirable in public esteem. Where I able to acquire and maintain it, it would perhaps increase my acquaintance the thing which I chiefly study to decline. Still, Newton could only stand the intellectual isolation for so long. Newton had been restless in his last few years at Trainee College, around the time that he was looking for another job in
a way out of Cambridge. But that wasn't the only explanation for his abrupt departure from academic life for London. In the Mint in the years before he left, Newton was behaving erratically. I am extremely troubled at the embroilment. I am in. I have neither ate nor slept well this twelve month, nor have my former consistency of mind. Newton confessed this to his friend, the ubiquitous Samuel Peeps
in a letter from sixty nine three. Not sleeping or eating is a bad sign, even from Newton, who tended to be too distracted by work to do either consistently. But there was more. I must withdraw from your acquaintance, and seeing neither you nor the rest of my friends anymore, if I may leave them quietly. Newton did have a reputation for being quick to lose people if they offended him. He once stitched a friend for telling a dirty joke about a nun, even though he definitely wasn't Catholic and
didn't seem to have any particular respect for nuns. And Newton could be for sure petty and vindictive. He fought with many of the leading scientists of the day, in some cases physically. In the sixteen nineties, Newton visited John Flamsteed, the first astronomer Royal, out at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and the two got into an actual wrestling match over one of Flamsteed's Instruments. Flamsteed says that Newton called him all the names that he could think of. Poppy was
the most innocent of them. But Newton's declaration that he intended tosevered ties with peeps and others was strange worrying. Just three days after his letter to Peep's, Newton wrote to philosopher John Locke, one of his closest allies, being off opinion that you endeavored to embroil me with women and by other means. I was so affected with it that when one told me you were sickly and would not live, I answered to a better if you were dead.
Locke's reply was graceful and kind, and he clearly forgave Newton. But Newton's response to that was, if anything more worrying, sir, the last winter, by sleeping too often by my fire, I got an ill habit of sleeping, and a distemper which this summer has been epidemical, put me farther out of order, so that when I wrote to you, I had not up to an hour and night for a fortnight together, and for five days together. Not a wink I remember, I wrote to you. But what I said,
of your book, I remember not. Newton's letters worried peeps so much that peeps wrote to another Cambridge academic, John Millington. I had lately received a letter from him, so surprising to me, for the inconsistency of every part of it, as to be put into great disorder by it, for the concernment I have for him, I mean a discomposure in head or mind or both. Peeps asked Millington to
check in on Newton discreetly. It wouldn't do anyone any good, at least of all Newton, to have people start suspecting that the great genius of Trinity was having a breakdown. For I own too great an esteem for Mr Newton as for a public good to be able to let any doubt in me of this kind concerning him lie a moment uncleared where I can have any hopes of
helping it. New news quote frenzied state, and the flurry of paranoid letters coming from him prompted all kinds of schaden freda, as well as real concern from the gossipy grades. At the time, Dutch physicist Christian Hygens heard it from his friends in England. He told mathematician and philosopher Godfried Wilhelm von Leibnez, who spread it around to his circle.
By the time Newton's frenzy made it back to England via German philosopher Johann Christoph Sturm to a Dr. Wallace, Newton had been quote reduced to very ill circumstances by a quote disturbance of mind caused by a supposed fire that destroyed his lab, his home, and all of his worldly possessions. It was like the longest game of telephone ever. Have you heard of Newton's frenzied state that newton fancies pace?
I'm concerned about Newton's dancing. Wait, okay, so there hadn't been in a lab destroying fire in Newton, unlike many other educated people in his time, didn't believe that his periods of frenzy were the product of the influence of the devil or evil spirits. But there was definitely something
going on in Newton's head Act two. The alchemist. Newton had, according to some sources, struggled with depression at several points in his life, times when he'd retreat to his inner world and cut off what few ties he had with friends and fellow academics, But this particular episode seemed so much more profound and incomprehensible to his worried friends. Something was going on, and it's possible that something was mercury poisoning. Newton had for years been a semi secret practicing alchemist.
Alchemy was an ancient science with roots in Eastern cultures. It was largely concerned with pulling substances of heart and trying to put them back together in more valuable ways, for example, transforming lead into gold. In the seventeenth century, alchemy was branching in two directions. There was a branch that would eventually become what we'd consider chemistry today, and the branch that stuck with the more metaphysical stuff that's kind of alchemy was regarded as more or less madness.
Newton was sort of between the two branches. He was, as John Maynard Keynes later wrote, The Last of the Magicians, But he wasn't interested in power or living forever. Rather, Newton was trying to find God in his work. All of his work. He had written the Principia, he said, not with it design of betting defiance, but to enforce and demonstrate the power and superintendency of the Supreme Being.
Many of Newton's meticulous notes on his alchemical experiments survive one million handwritten words describing his interpretations of scripture, of the essences of elements, the movements of the heavens. Arcane potions meant to prolonged life, but Newton's search for divinity through experimentation also meant messing about with some fairly toxic substances, like mercury. Mercury is an element number eighty on the periodic table, although the periodic table wouldn't actually be created
for another hundred and seventy years. It's the only metallic element that's a liquid at room temperature, giving it the historic and popular name quicksilver. If you've ever accidentally cracked up in a thermometer, young people, thermometers used to have mercury inside them. True story, you probably remember the way that the silvery liquid coalesced into little blobs like a
bad guy in Terminator two. For eighteen years, Newton carried out hundreds of experiments involving all kinds of metals gold, silver, lead, and mercury. He would often heat things up and then intentionally breathe in their fumes or even taste the results once they cooled. When he was on an experimental bender, he tended to sleep in his laboratory by the fire while his experiments bubbled merrily away, releasing fumes into the air.
Newton used quicksilver so much in his experiments that he once joked, quite possibly his only joke ever, that his hair had turned prematurely silver because of it. But mercury is toxic, hence why thermometers aren't made with mercury anymore. Exposure to mercury can lead to mercury poisoning. The mercury builds of in your system over time, eventually resulting in
serious neurological issues. You can suffer ill effects from ingesting mercury, of course, although nineteenth century doctors used to prescribe it as a laxative because it's so dense it just moves right through you. But it's most damaging when it's inhaled in vapor form, moving quickly from the lungs into the blood into the brain. The symptoms of mercury poisoning we know now include irritability, depression, anxiety, problems with memory. I remember I wrote to you, but what I said of
your book, I remember not insomnia. I had not slipped an hour and night for a fortnight together. In quote pathological shyness, I must withdraw from your acquaintance. Researchers are divided on the impact of mercury on Newton's health, certainly, and it's never a really good idea to diagnose the physical and mental problems with someone who died nearly three years ago. But if we're looking for a suspect and the quote madness of Isaac Newton, mercury poisoning seems like
a prime one. But that wasn't all that was going on in Newton's life right now. His mind was traveled, and so is his heart. Newton had never married or seemed to show the slightest romantic interest in anyone at all, but it's possible that in six Newton was dealing with a romance, or at least a very strong emotional attachment that ended badly. A few years earlier, Newton had begun paying a lot of attention to a young Swiss mathematician
and philosopher called Nicola Fatiou to Julie. Newton wrote to Fatio with a kind of warmth that he rarely showed in letters to other people, not even to his own relatives, and Fatio seemed to return his regard. I could wish to live all my life, or the greatest part of it, with you, if it was possible. When Newton found out that Fattio was desperately ill in September, he was truly distraught. Ah last night received your letter with which how much
I was affected. I cannot express pray, procure the advice and assistance of physician before it is too late, And if you want any money, I will supply you with my prayers for your recovery. I rest he signed it your most affectionate and faithful friend to serve you. Newton tried to send presidents, medical remedies, even money, but Fattier didn't take them. In February nine three, Newton even suggested that Fattio come live with him in Cambridge so that
Newton could take care of him. Fattia refused, saying he didn't want to be a burden, and then Fattio seemed to end it. Fatio wrote Newton to say that he had made a new friend in London, a good and upright man. Newton rushed to London. But what happened there we can only guess. After that, letters between the two largely ceased. It's possible that Newton was in love with Fatio, although there was no indication that this relationship was ever physical or sexual. A much older Newton later told a
relative that he had quote never violated chastity with anyone. Ever, the way to chastity is not to struggle with incontinent thoughts, but to avert the thoughts by some employment, or by reading, or by conversation, or by meditating on other things. But whatever his attachment to Fatio, it appeared to be one of the very few deep relationships Newton had ever been able to form with another human being, and its loss
would have cut him to the bone. Later in s John Millington, Newton's Cambridge colleague, paid Newton a visit at Peeves's request. Millington reported back to Peep's that Newton seemed fine. At least Newton still seemed to have his intellect. He is now very well, and though I fear he is under some small degree of melancholy, yet I think there is no reason to suspect it hath at all touched
his understanding and I hope it never will. But Millington's response contained another clue as to what was grieving Newton. Millington said that it was a sign, not a good one. It seemed of how much the love of learning and the honor of the nation was looked after. When such a person as Mr Newton lies so neglected by those
in power, Newton was feeling overlooked, less relevant. Though the publication of Brinkipia had been a triumph that was now behind him, and his work following Principia wasn't a failure by any means, but he was conscious that it wasn't, you know, explaining the universe. At the same time, his friends, people like Peeps in Locke, had long been trying to find him work outside of Cambridge, with little success. What it all added up to was a crisis. Dr Patricia Farah.
He certainly does seem to have had some sort of breakdown. I imagine life was a bit difficult for him. He perhaps wasn't the easiest man in the world to get on with. Perhaps he was worried about his failing mathematical paths. That's something that a lot of mathematicians talking about when they get to the age about forty or fifty that
there past their creative best. I don't think there's any single reason, and I'm not sure we even really know exactly why, so new to this period of disordered mind. Could have been a lifelong struggle with depression compounded by mercury pois ning. Or it could have been a love affair gone south. Or it could have just been a regular old midlife crisis. He was in his early fifties, after all, and he'd been trying for years to get out of Cambridge, where it could have been all of
the above. But whatever it was, Newton needed a new purpose, finding counterfeiters and sending them to the gallows. Well maybe that was it. Act three, no face, no Case. In s and Pillsbury, a poor woman who lived in Westminster went to a bakery with her young daughter to buy food. A night near bread please, and a night me a chase. The shop, however, was run by an informant of Newton's, and he believed that the sixpence that she tried to pay with was fake. You consider me a fool. He's
not legitimate coin of the crown. The informants searched her right there in the shop, finding a good sixpence between her bodice and stomach, evidence that she knew she had been passing bad coin, as well as evidence of the shop owner wasn't at all concerned about being brought up on sexual assault charges or humiliating poor Anne. He then
brought her to Newton himself. Newton ordered her and her daughter searched again, well, search again, both of them, this time finding more counterfeit coins wrapped in paper and hidden in the child's clothing. You dare embroyal the girl in your petty scheme, please, sir. The bat six pinches off
a person? What sells linen cloth in streets? They made it, and that was There's no word on what happened to Anne and her daughter next, but it's possible, and I really hope this is the case, that she became another of Newton's informants rather than being packed off to Newgate. Patricia Farra again, I mean, these people who were being persecuted as criminals were often living on the edge of poverty.
They were very ignorant, they hadn't got any work. And although there was the most criminals like Challoner who managed to become quite rich, a lot of the petty theft going on was just so that people could survive. Newton was not moved by the plight of the people he squeezed for information or even sent to the gallows, and his industriousness in pursuing counterfeiters and clippers might have been fueled or at least aided by this darker side of
his personality. But as it turns out, it was precisely this unforgiving character, combined with his laser like focus, that made him so good at being a cop. And in William Chaloner, Newton had found his equal and opposite, so to speak. Where Challenger was garrulous, charming and friend lee, Newton was terse, introspective, quick to anger, where Challenger seemed
too so anarchy. Newton wanted to order, He wanted to use his scientific abilities to fix things, where Challenger was happy to twist and bend the law to break it. Newton was devoted to the oath he took to protect the mint and its machines. Tom Levinson m I T. Science writer and author of Newton and the Counterfeiter Does
he really see him? I think in this as as as one three dimensional person rather than as Newton the scientists new in the mathematician, ding the magician, whatever it may be, because you really see the two to me dominant characteristics of Newton's mind at playing in his confrontation with Chaloner. On the one hand, he's just really smart. He has a disciplined mind, He defines problems, all that kind of stuff that you think of as Newton, the
great mind that we know him as. But I think you also see something that is often underestimated in the lives of great scientists. They are persistent and focused in a way that most other people are not. They have power of concentration combined with stamina that's really distinctive. And Newton stayed with the problems over months and years and with Challenger, and Challenger was a problem. In March, Newton received a pleading letter from Thomas Carter, one of challengers colleagues,
who was then languishing in Newgate jail. Carter promised, all kinds of information, I should have the irons put on me tomorrow if your worship not older. The contrary, being clapped in irons sounds like something that happened to pirates because it was, but it was also extremely painful. Heavy iron shackles were secured around the prisoners ankles, leaving bruises, broken skin sores. It sounds a lot like torture. Newton was undoubtedly willing to let people be hurt in his
pursuit of justice. He once said, of a counterfeiter in prison, better to let him. But to be fair, there's not a lot of evidence that Newton was torturing people to get his information. That reference is the only one that survives, although he did burn much of his records concerning counterfeiters. The idea of Newton as this aggressive, sadistic inquisitor comes in part from a biography of him written by Frank Manuel In that read his role as warden through a
union psychoanalytical lens. Manuel saw Newton's evident zeal for the job as working out his anger with his deceased stepfather on a socially acceptable object, the treason his coiner that's probably not really merited at all. Manuel suggested that Newton was unusual in his passion, but the fact was not a day went by in the late sixteen nineties of the government wasn't talking about counterfeiters. In some way, Newton's interest was an excessive, nor were his methods of getting information.
The pressure Newton applied was already there. Many of his informants were already facing the gallows, and irons were part of the prison toolkit. Newton's attitude was shared by his contemporaries. But where Newton did differ was in just how dogged, thorough and analytical his pursuit of coiners was, and just how much they hated him for it. Tom Levinson, again, Chaloner, like many others, really underestimated Isaac when he came to London.
They would have seen this Cambridge professor, this mathematician, this person whose mind was in the stars, who wouldn't stand a chance, wouldn't last a week in the rough and tumble real world of you know, London and all its bustle and joyous crime and exuberance and misery. Well they were wrong. Newton did just fine. He had no problem
dealing with the real world. And I think Chaloner was was really unprepared to confront somebody who wasn't the sort of airy, fairy boffin that he may have imagined he was facing. Newton so far had proven a lot tougher, a lot more ruthless, a lot more tenacious than Challenger had imagined. But that didn't mean that Challenger was done. Thomas Holloway was out of jail. He was to be Newton's star witness in just a few weeks, whenever the
next sessions of trials were to be held. He sat in a quiet corner of the Bolt and Ton Inn on Fleet Street, just around the corner from where William Challenger sat in his Newgate cell. He waited, tankred a veil in front of him for a man called Michael gilling Him. Gilling Him was a longtime associated Challengers. He was a useful publican who kept an ale house by Charing Cross Road and who did jobs for local criminals. He'd even done a bit of counterfeiting himself. The rumors said.
Chaloner had passed word to Gillingham, probably through one of Newgate's notoriously corruptible jailers, to find Holloway and get him out of the picture. No, he wasn't gonna have him killed. Challoner is a con man, He's not a murderer. This isn't going to turn into that kind of podcast. What Challoner wanted was for Holloway and his family, including his wife Elizabeth and their five children, plus their maid servant
to just disappear for a while. He offered Holloway, through gilling him twenty pounds to make a run for Scotland. Despite sharing a monarch, England and Scotland were separate kingdoms still, so making a run for Scotland meant that English law couldn't touch him there, though, Challoner was offering a fairly substantial some of money. Fairly substantial, about four thousand pounds today, enough to buy then like three horses, or pay for the Halloways expenses for a bit. Halloween didn't take it
at first. Maybe he liked having a bit of power over Challenger. Maybe he was holding out for a bit more. Maybe he just didn't want to leave the city he called home for an uncertain journey north. Maybe he was worried about his family. Challenger, however, wasn't a man to be trifled with. He was playing nice now, offering money, but he could just as easily flip the script turn informant on Holloway. Halloway's wife, Elizabeth, she was also embroiled
in this too. She had been challengers utterer. She had passed fake coins into circulation and It's not like Challenger hadn't snitched people right into the gallows before, wasn't trying to do so right now with Aubrey price. A few weeks went by, and the trial was getting closer and closer. In at October, Halloway finally agreed, but he refused to make a promise until he and gilling Him were in
front of a man called Henry Saunders. Holloway evidently trusted Saunders and wanted to make sure that there were witnesses to the deal he was making with gilling Him and Chaloner. Holloway, gilling Him, and Saunders met at yet another pub, the Turk's Head and Whopping near the river. This was where condemned men about to hang at execution docks. They're like buccaneers and pirates and smugglers and mutineers would have their last pint at the Turk's Head. Halloway went over the plan.
Gilling Him would take care of the kids and the maid servant for a few weeks while Halloway and his wife got on some horses and rode north. He'd send the children and the maid up the coast by boat, paid for of course, by William Chaloner. Gilling Him paid Holloway part up front, and then a few days later, gilling Him and Saunders escorted Holloway and his wife to the livery, where they collected their horses, mounted up and left town. Gilling Him and Saunders went Newgate that day
to tell Challenger the news. Charleona then seemed to be very joyful and said a fault for the world. Challenger declaring a fart for the world was actually in the deposition of Saunders that Newton took as in this Saunders person told Newton directly that Challenger said, quote a fart for the world. I don't even know what that means.
The Halloways were now out of the picture, and Newton's most important witness was gone because two other witnesses recanted, although exactly how Challenger threatened or bought them off is unclear. Tom Levinson, you know, it is a classic sort of mafia what we now think of as mafia organized crime techniques, of just systematically dismantling the case that's about to be presented against you until there was nothing left. And that's
what happens Newton. He had the case just fell apart, went to trial by late October Newton's case against Challenger had crumbled. The judge overseeing the case dismissed the charges. Newton was fuming. He knew it was a weak case from the start, but he'd been pressured by the Lord's justices to pursue it. And Newton hated losing, hated it if he got on the wrong side of it. Took heroic efforts to sort of heal the breach, and and
and most and most often people didn't. And so Challenger had come along this you know, this criminal, this blaggard um, this this you know, annoying horse fly nipping at at Newton's flanks. In November, that annoying horse fly buzzed out of Newgate Jail a mostly freeman. Now we know that Challenger is not a man content to slink away and feel lucky to have escaped this brush with the law
in certain death. We also know that seven weeks in jail, paying jailers for basic necessities, paying off the witnesses against him, had left Chaloner pretty much broke. He needed money, but luckily he had a plan, the word three coming up on Newton's law. Ask no questions, but if you knew who my friend was you'd allow he was as great a master as Charlonough In June or July law, Mr Challoner, I, Mr Davis came to my mistress's lodging and Mr Challon
and locked himself in a room upstairs. Well I was curious, so well, I don't through the Kale. Newton's Law is a production of I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me Linda Rodriguez mccrobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our producer is Emily Marina. Our executive producer is Jason English. Original music by Alice McCoy with editing help from Mary Do. Sound design and mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research and fact checking by Me and Jocelyn Sears. Voice acting by Keith Fleming,
Robbie Jack, Ruthie Stevens and Paul Tinto. Special thanks to Dr Patricia Farah and Tom Levinson. Our show logo is designed by Lucy Cantonia. Thanks for listening.