Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers: Eight Scientific Rivalries That Changed the World

Chapter One

Second Inventors Count for Nothing

Great men are like women, who never give up their lovers except with the utmost chagrin and mortal anger. And that, gentlemen, is where your opinions have got you.

— Caroline of Ansbach to Gottfried Leibniz
London, October 1711 The astronomer royal, john flamsteed, would have liked to run up the stairs of the Royal Society to punch Newton's nose, but gout prevented him. Instead, assisted by his servant, he slowly ascended the grand staircase and entered the meeting room where Newton was waiting for him.

In 1711, Sir Isaac Newton was the most famous scientist in the world. Knighted six years earlier, he was both scientific megalith and public servant, president of the Royal Society and master of the Royal Mint. The society he presided over was growing in power and influence, and only two months earlier it had moved into its first independent home, a beautiful town house in Crane Court, in the heart of the City of London.

With a public credo that served as one of the earliest models for cooperation between natural philosophers,* it was nevertheless a society of wealthy gentlemen who liked to argue. The Royal Society dedicated itself to: "the advancement of the knowledge of natural things and useful arts by experiments, to the glory of God the creator and for application to the good of mankind." In this it served science well, but many of the individuals who contributed to the life of the Royal Society despised one another, and some could barely bring themselves to sit in the same room as their scientific colleagues.

Newton andFlamsteed were just such individuals. They rarely spoke, and by 1711 each went out of his way to hinder the work of the other and to embarrass and humiliate the other whenever possible. Newton had summoned Flamsteed to Crane Court on this October afternoon as though the astronomer royal was an errant schoolboy, and Flamsteed had taken his time to appear there, deliberately antagonizing the president. Newton was charging Flamsteed with withholding data from his government-funded observatory and claimed that the astronomer should willingly share his findings with the scientific community. But this was merely the tail end of a dispute that had dragged on for almost two decades. Flamsteed knew that Newton merely wanted the data to include in his new edition of the Principia mathematica. Furthermore, the astronomer royal felt used, and believed he had been paid a pittance for a lifetime of dedicated effort, thanks in part to the powerful influence Newton exerted over decisions made throughout the scientific establishment.

In the grand first-floor Council Chamber, with its tall windows offering a view of the narrow courtyard beyond, Flamsteed settled himself carefully into a chair to face the president. He eyed him defiantly.

Newton immediately asked him if he had at last brought with him the required data. Flamsteed merely smiled and said he had not. Then, raising his voice, he added bitterly: "I was robbed of the fruits of my labours."

"We are then robbers of your labours?" Newton shouted back.1 Flamsteed, seething from years of what he believed to be ill treatment, could not restrain himself, and there followed one of the most furious rows the Royal Society had ever seen. As lesser figures huddled outside the doors to eavesdrop and the late October sun set in the west, Newton called Flamsteed "a puppy" and the astronomer royal shouted back that the sixty-nine-year-old Sir Isaac was an "abominable thief." They argued for hours. Flamsteed claimed Newton was trying to acquire data from his observatory by illicit means, and Newton retaliated that he had royal permission to obtain such information. After the two had exhausted themselves, Flamsteed stormed out to his personal kingdom at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, defiant and unbowed, and Newton turned to searching for new schemes to bend the astronomer's will to his own.

Although this was one of the more dramatic episodes in Newton's long succession of clashes with other scientists of his day, it was neither the most heartfelt nor the most protracted. This dubious honor goes to the three-decade-long dispute between Britain's greatest scientist and his European counterpart, the "Continental Newton," Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, over who could claim priority for the invention of a mathematical technique called the calculus. But to understand how this conflict arose, as well as its significance for the evolution of science, we must first look at the characters of the two men at the heart of the battle and the social climate that led to their clash.Isaac newton was an only child born on Christmas Day 1642 in the tiny village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. His father had died before Isaac's birth, and his mother was left to run the family's small farm. They were not a wealthy family but lived well for the time, approximately a middle-income, home-owning family today. In fact, young Isaac's life could have been idyllic except that when he was three years old his mother, Hannah, decided to remarry, and the boy was left in the care of his elderly grandparents in the Woolsthorpe manor house that had been the family home for four generations.

This traumatized Newton. Years later he would write of his hatred for his stepfather, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, who at sixty-three was more than thirty years older than Newton's mother. Psychologists and historians have long pondered Newton's writings in his private notebooks and pointed to evidence that, as a young man at Cambridge University, he still cherished dreams of killing Smith and his mother for what they had done to him. He spewed bile onto the page, bile infected with contempt and hatred for his half siblings, the three children Hannah bore Smith before his death eight years after their marriage.

In a confessional account now known as the Fitzwilliam Notebook and started soon after Newton began his degree, Newton listed his sins, which included "threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them" and "wishing death and hoping it to some."

Newton's distress is understandable. Smith showed little interest in his stepson and insisted his wife devote her energies to her new family. From Isaac's perspective, his mother had simply been taken from him. The boy must have assumed he had done something terribly wrong to precipitate her unexpected departure, Isaac grew confused further by her short-lived and infrequent visits and unannounced disappearances. But what is both striking and pertinent to his later behavior toward his contemporaries is that time seems to have exacerbated his pain. These notebooks prove that, rather than gain emotional distance from the events of his childhood, over the years he merely calcified his bitterness.

Of Newton's later epoch-making genius little could be seen from his earliest years. Among his contemporaries at the king's school in the largest town of the area, Grantham, he was renowned for making models of windmills and lanterns, for kites and sundials, but for the most part he was viewed as a morose character who did not excel academically until he was about thirteen or fourteen years old. The story goes that one day on the way to school, the class bully punched Isaac in the stomach. Enraged, Newton challenged him to a fight after school. Although the other boy was much larger, Newton won the fight, apparently dragging the boy along the ground before scraping his rival's face roughly across a stone wall. Significantly, the one who had started the trouble was a place higher than Newton in the school academic ratings. As the boy lay nursing his bloodied nose, Newton leaned into his face and declared that he would not rest until he had not only overtaken him but become the best pupil in the school. And he stuck to his word. Within a year Newton was the star pupil and the apple of Headmaster Henry Stokes's eye.

How much of this is elaborated and how much is truth is not so important as the fact that this event seems to have marked a turning point in Newton's life. From this time on he relished study and could not be drawn away from his books. This greatly angered his mother, who had returned to manage the farm after Smith's death, when Newton was eleven. She saw nothing of value in academic matters and wanted her eldest son to learn the ways of the farmer so he could someday take over the estate.