The Story of Stories by Kevin Ashton

Author:Kevin Ashton [Ashton, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2026-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

3. Isaac

Monday July 13, 1936, was unseasonally cold in London’s Mayfair district: the temperature, which never rose above 6721 degrees Fahrenheit22, made the day seem antisocial, as if a ghost was wandering in the city’s yellow fog. The strange weather was perhaps appropriate for the event23 taking place at 32 New Bond Street, where Sotheby and Company24 was auctioning off a metal trunk of papers and notebooks and two death masks from a man with a notoriously chilly personality. The items were being sold25 by Viscount Lymington, the son of the eighth Earl of Portsmouth. They had been kept safe and largely undisturbed in the viscount’s family for 209 years, but the Portsmouth estate had fallen on hard times and was now liquidating its assets.

There was little interest in the auction: the papers and notebooks included ephemera like lists of the expenses of a Cambridge University undergraduate who had spent his money on “a table to set down26 ye number of my cloathes in the wash” and “at ye taverne several other times.” The documents would have been of almost no value at all had it not been for the person who wrote them: they were the personal papers of Sir Isaac Newton, acclaimed physicist, inventor of calculus, and discoverer of the laws of gravity, motion, and light, among other things.

Newton’s important scientific papers had been donated to the University of Cambridge many decades earlier, and these remaining letters, notes, and administrative records were assumed to contain nothing more than minor details that might be of scholarly biographical interest. At the time of the auction, Newton’s reputation seemed clear and secure: he was one of the most brilliant scientists of his or any other time, the harbinger of the Age of Reason, and a serious man of great and obvious intelligence.

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