Isaac Newton's long-lost personal copy of Opticks was found by a collector

 

The finding was "a once-in-a-lifetime collector's occurrence," according to David DiLaura.

By Jannifer Ouellette

January 14, 2023 1:52AM IST

Long believed lost, Isaac Newton's personal copy of the Opticks second edition from 1717 has been located.

                                 Professor David DiLaura, an emeritus at the University of Colorado, was compiling a thorough bibliography of all key works in optics when he found a startling finding. It turned out that the copy of Isaac Newton's ground-breaking book Opticks that he had bought some 20 years earlier was from Newton's own personal library, which had been thought to be lost for a very long time. The book will be offered for $375,000 at the Rare Books San Francisco Fair from February 3–5, 2023.

Pom Harrington, proprietor of Peter Harrington Uncommon Books, which is arranging the auction, stated, "It's becoming increasingly rare for an author's original copy of a work of this significance to go under the radar for so many years." "Neither the buyer nor the seller knew the history of this copy when DiLaura purchased it from an English rare book dealer in West Sussex more than 20 years ago. It truly is "a once-in-a-collector's-lifetime occurrence," as DiLaura has called his discovery. Rare book traders and collectors like a good rediscovery story, especially one that actually came to light the way this one did.

Experimentum Crucis by Isaac Newton is portrayed in an engraving.

Certainly, Newton is most known for his Principia and for co-discovering calculus, but he also had a lifelong fascination with optics. One time, he documented the colourful circles and other visual phenomena he experienced after inserting a long sewing needle (called a "bodkin") into his eye socket between the eye and the bone. And while still a student at the University of Cambridge, he carried out what is referred to as his experimentum crucis, in which he darkened his chamber on a bright day and cut a hole in the window shutter to allow a little ray of sunshine to enter. He then positioned a glass prism in the sunlight to view the rainbow-colored bands of light.

The band of colours recombined into white sunshine when he positioned a second upside-down prism in front of the first, supporting his theory that white light is composed of all the colours of the spectrum put together. Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope, using reflective mirrors instead of lenses as the objective to solve that issue. Based on his theory of colour, Newton predicted that refracting telescope lenses would be plagued by chromatic aberrations (the dispersion of light into colours). In 1671, he displayed his telescope to the Royal Society.

The long-running argument over whether light was a wave or a particle also put Newton in the middle of this argument. For instance, Pythagoras was adamantly "pro-particle," whereas Aristotle's idea that light moves as waves was mocked by his contemporaries. There were discrepancies in empirical observations of the behaviour of light. On the one hand, light bounced off a reflecting surface and moved straight forward. That is the behaviour of particles. However, it might also spread outward, allowing several light beams to collide and combine. Wave-like activity, that.

By the 17th century, the majority of researchers had come to agree that light is a wave, but Newton remained a staunch opponent, insisting that light is made up of streams of particles that he called "corpuscles." Colleagues convinced Newton to publish his findings regarding the corpuscular nature of light in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1672. He appeared to believe that his theories would be universally praised, thus he was upset when Robert Hooke and Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens disagreed with his conclusions.

All of these ideas, along with others, eventually served as the foundation for Newton's final work, Opticks, which was initially released in 1704. In contrast to when Principia was released, the English astronomer John Flamsteed said that it "makes no commotion in town" at the time. It still made a significant addition to optical science, on par with Huygens' Traité de la Lumière and Johannes Kepler's Astronomiae Pars Optica. In addition, Opticks was written in English rather than Latin, making it more easier to understand than Principia.

When Newton passed away intestate in 1727, his books were sold to John Huggins, the warden of the Fleet Prison, along with the rest of his belongings. Huggins purchased the volumes as a present for his son Charles, an Oxfordshire rector, who later handed them on to Dr. James Musgrave, Charles Huggins' successor as rector. The volumes were then given to Sir James Musgrave, his son, and remained in the family for many years until 1920, when a sizable portion of their Newton collection was auctioned.

Under a James Musgrave bookplate, collector David DiLaura found a second bookplate.

According to Harrington, it is not unusual to locate copies of books from Newton's own collection on the market, but since the 1940s, copies of Newton's own works have become incredibly rare. The last time this occurred was in 2020, when the first copy of Opticks Newton gave to Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Dullier fetched 193,750 pounds ($237,000) at auction. Newton owned two copies of the 1717 second edition of Opticks, one of which is currently in the Huntington Library's collection and the other of which has long been listed by the Newton Project as being in "place unknown." Both copies are known to have been in Newton's personal library.

When DiLaura shone a bright light on the bookplate belonging to James Musgrave and saw a second bookplate belonging to Charles Huggins below, he realised his copy of Opticks could be more significant than he'd initially imagined. It is usually accepted that a book was a member of Newton's collection if it had both bookplates. But DiLaura needed more assurance, so he talked to experts on Newton at Cambridge, who came to the conclusion that this was the second lost copy of Newton's Opticks, published in 1717. The Newton Project's editorial director, Scott Mandelbrote, agreed and said DiLaura had "hit the jackpot in collecting terms."

According to Harrington, this book has a rare title page dated 1717 and is bound in rich blue Morocco leather with gilded borders and tooling. Leaf A2 is also a "cancel," which means that Newton replaced the printed leaf with a corrected one. Newton probably sent the book back to the binder with a request for the textual modifications, and the repaired book was subsequently given to him because the cancel leaf lacks gilded on its margins. The fact that the copy's pages are immaculate is proof that it was probably a presentation copy that was never sent to the intended recipient, according to Harrington.