book, Science: A Four Thousand Year History (2009), has been translated into nine languages. In addition to many academic publications, her popular works include Newton: The Making of Genius (2002), An Entertainment for Angels (2002), Sex, Botany and Empire (2003), Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (2004), and A Lab of One's Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War (2018). An experienced public lecturer, Fara appears regularly in TV documentaries and radio programs such as In Our Time. She also contributes articles and reviews to many journals, including History Today, BBC History, New Scientist, Nature, and the TLS.
Fara applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Life after Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career, and reported the following:
When Isaac Newton was writing the Principia, his famous book about gravity, a new word came into use: refugee. It was coined to describe French Huguenots who fled across the Channel to avoid religious persecution and helped to revive the British economy. My page 99 is about one of them, John Theophilus Desaguliers, who was supposedly smuggled over in a barrel as a baby, but grew up to become one of London’s leading engineers. Handpicked by Newton as his experimental assistant at the Royal Society, Desaguliers quashed French opposition to English science and was Grand Master of the Freemasons.Learn more about Life after Gravity at the Oxford University Press website.
Although I would not have chosen page 99 to represent my book, it does illustrate that Life after Gravity is not about falling apples and complicated equations. Instead, it analyses Newton’s three decades as a cosmopolitan man-about-town who mingled with royalty and was so rich that he owned the ultimate in Georgian luxury – two silver chamber-pots. Only five pages earlier, I explain how Newton lost a small fortune in the South Sea Bubble, making the beginner’s mistake of buying, selling, and then buying in again at a still higher price, only to watch the share value suddenly plummet. And three pages after page 99, I feature Desaguliers’s wife Joanna Pudsey: unlike conventional accounts of Newtonian science, mine includes contributions made by women.
As Master of the Royal Mint, Newton enjoyed a role roughly equivalent to being Governor of the Bank of England today. He was responsible not only for ensuring the integrity of the nation’s currency, but also for making economic decisions that permanently affected Britian’s commercial and imperial ambitions. To secure his personal wealth, Newton invested in companies shipping enslaved Africans across the Atlantic and collected a bonus for every coin that was minted from gold imported as cheaply as possible.
Newton also benefited scientifically from his influential position. In order to finetune his Principia, Newton solicited observations from traders stationed around the world. So what is now revered as the greatest book on physics incorporates information that had been gleaned from British colonizers who were both exploring and exploiting the globe.
The Page 99 Test: Erasmus Darwin.
The Page 99 Test: A Lab of One's Own.
--Marshal Zeringue
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