This is an I Heart original. On March, the warden of England's Royal Mint received a letter most merciful Sir, I am going to be murdered. Perhaps you don't think so, but it's true. I shall be murdered, and the worst of all, I will be murdered in the face of justice unless I am rescued by your merciful hearts. The letter was an appeal to the warden's conscience. It went on my offending you has brought this upon me. Nobody can save me but you. I how God will move your heart with mercy and pity to do this thing for me. It was signed You're near murdered, Humble Servant. W. W. Chaloner was one William Chaloner, a con man who at one time had been the most successful counterfeit coinmaker London had ever seen. But now he was awaiting execution at Newgate Jail, the stinking hell hole of a prison built into the ancient Roman wall of the city of London. The warden, whose job it was to track down counterfeiters, and who had hunted Challenger for years, never bothered to right back. Two days after he wrote that letter, Chaloner was dragged from the jail through more than two miles of London's foul, mud filled streets to the Tyburn Tree. This was not an actual tree, but rather the name given to the wooden gallows erected at the site of the Tyburn Brook that was now Marble Arch in London. This would have been an open space, a field, and on hanging days, behaving mass of humans, all clamoring to watch the bad guys die. Challoner arrived at the gallows filthy, splattered with mud and whatever else had been thrown at him along the way. He was terrified, he was angry, and he was sober. By now, after months of living in Newgate, he didn't even have enough money to buy a swallow of gin. In his hands, Chaloner clutched a sheaf of papers fodder for a pamphlet, declaring that he was the victim of a frame up. He yelled to anyone who would listen to he was innocent. I am innocent, That he was murdered by perjury and in justice and pretense of law, and by the warden of the mint himself. It didn't matter. In his last moments, Challenger went quiet. He mounted the ladder. The cap was placed over his weeping eyes, and the noose over his head and around his neck, and as hundreds of people watched, Challenger dangled and kicked until the blood vessels in his face popped, until the breath was choked from his lungs. Gravity did its thing. After his body was pulled down from the scaffold, he was publicly disemboweled. His head might have ended up on a spike on the London Bridge. We're not entirely sure, but that's what happened to the people who were excuted for counterfeiting. And it was all because of one man, the doggedly determined, completely ruthless, utterly meticulous Warden of the Royal Mint. The Warden of the Royal Mint was the man charged with making the country's coin, the actual physical silver and gold that fueled England's engine of commerce. The warden was also charged with protecting it, with keeping it safe from counterfeiters and clippers. And this warden was very good at his job, putting dozens of people in jail, shutting down coining operations left and right, and as in the case of Mr Challoner, sending counterfeiters to the gallows without a second thought. So who was this ruthless detective, this hard bitten crook catcher, totally unmoved by the pleas of a desperate man. It was Isaac Newton. Us that Isaac Newton for I Heart Radio. I'm Linda Rodriguez mccrabbie, and this is Newton's Law and I heart original podcast you much so, Episode one, The Warden and the con Man Cool. I'm standing outside the courtyard of the British Library, just off of Houston Road. Normally this courtyard is full of people. There's a coffee shop in there, and there's loads of people usually out sitting on the benches enjoying some sun on a coffee break in between researching. Now, right now, because of coronavirus, it's only open to free book visitors. But just over the wall, I can see the giant statue of Isaac Newton. Now, this statue, I must have passed it hundreds of times going to the library to do research, and I've never really thought about it, never really noticed it. The statue depicts Newton bent over in a really rather uncomfortable looking position, and he's got a compass and he's determining the geometry of the universe. It's a testament to Newton's scientific yes, but it absolutely leaves out the other half of his life, the half of the life that most people don't really know about. What do you know about Isaac discovered gravity? He was good in physics, and he invented like the three principles of gravity. That's much signs, to be honest with me, very smart guy, smart than me, obviously. Do you know anything else about the rest of his life? I have no idea about him as personality. Did you know anything about me? In his life? After he discovered gravity? Got rich? Got rich? Well, he was making money, lots of it literally as warden of the Royal Mint, and he did get a big salary increase too. But this story is about more than just Isaac Newton's lucrative second career. Everything that Newton touched, everything that he was involved in, became part of the fabric of our modern world, and not just because we use his calculations every day to keep satellites in orbit and our smartphones running. His story unfolds at a time when the structures that we inhabit now are just being built. We're talking about, and we will be talking about in this podcast, what actually is money. We're talking about the origins of print media and its power to change political discourse and policy, and about the meaning of criminal justice in a time when there are courts but no police. But it's still a weird story. Newton made this big career change after his most consequential intellectual achievement, but arguably at a time when he still had more to give. So I started with this question, why would Isaac Newton leave the cozy confines of academia and a career of remarkable success to go chase criminals? Act one an object at rest, I keep the subject constantly before me untill the first dawnings open, slowly, little by little, into the full and clear light. Newton had been in academic since sixteen sixty one, when he first came to Trinity College at Cambridge University. At the time, he was an intellectually adventurous nineteen year old fresh of a Lincolnshire farm. Cambridge University academically did not have a good reputation during the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. That's Dr Patricia Farre, Cambridge historian and author of Life After Gravity. So foreign visitors came and they looked at Oxford and Cambridge, and they said it's just ridiculous, all the all the books and drawing moldy and the libraries. A lot of the professors scarcely gave any lectures of quite a few of them lived down in London. There weren't any female students, so the whole community was male. It was a very sort of close community. Cambridge's limitations didn't bother Newton at first. Newton was already brilliant. He'd taught himself higher order mathematics in six months. By sixteen sixty five, he'd already formulated his famous theory of gravity, although it would be years before he published it, and he wasn't bothered by the lack of social activities. If anything, he probably preferred avoiding women and drinking and other people. Honestly, Nowton was a bit of a prig. Here's what he wrote to a fellow student in sixteen sixty one. It is commonly rep WoT is that you are sick. Truly, I am sorry for that, but I am much more sorry that you got your sickness by drinking too much. I earnestly desire you to first repent of your having been drunk and then to seek to recover your health. Fun guy. What Camerid really gave Newton was time to do the one thing he wanted to do. Study to caught a glass. Take a plain glass, hold it upside downward over a candle. Newton had questions, hundreds thousands of questions about everything. Take such meat as they love as wet, and he explored those questions of notebooks and sprinkle it were birds in the manner of the extraction of roots acted powers is very much alike, especially when the attempts that let me no ambiguity all fractions. Newton was also fearless when it came to experimentation. This is a man who stuck a bodkin basically a large needle into his own eye to observe changes in his perception of color. He also spent a bit of time literally staring at the sun. I saw only the sun before me, so that I could neither write nor read, but to recover the use of my eyes, shut myself up in my chamber, made dark for three days together, and used all means to direct my imagination from the sun. Ironically, one of his notebook entries concerns things hurtful for the eyes, garlic onions, leaks, all the much lettuce, going to sudden aftermat lot wise, cold air, much sleep after meat fire, much weeping, and watching Newton's assistant during his later Cambridge years, knew him as a near recluse, as the original model of the absent minded but super focused professor. I never knew him take any recreational pastime, either in riding out to take the air, walking, bowling, or any other exercise whatever, thinking all hours lost that were not spent, any studies to which he kept so close that he seldom left his chamber. Newton's intellect set him apart. It made it difficult for him to connect with his peers or anyone else, but if he was lonely, he didn't let on. At the age of seven, he'd taken over the Lucaezian Professorship of Mathematics. These days this is one of the most prestigious professorships in the world, Like Stephen Hawking, Charles Babbage, and well Isaac Newton prostigious. He was only the second person to hold the positions, so it didn't yet have the reputation that it has now, but still it was a pretty good gig, not least because it gave him room board and a hundred twenty pounds a year in exchange for teaching one course of lectures every three terms, regardless of whether anyone showed up to hear them. By all reports, he was an absolutely appalling lecturer. There's a joke that two undergraduates saw him in the street and they nudged each other, and one of them said, there goes the man who lectures to the walls. And what they meant by that was that that he had to keep a lecture. It was compulsory, but no students bothered to attend, and so he just spoke to the empty room when he wasn't lecturing too empty rooms. Newton, among other things, designed and crafted his own telescope. This was a major accomplishment at a time when instruments like that were at the very bleeding edge of new technology. They were complicated to make and very valuable, but Newton was impatient. If I'd have waited for other people to make my tools and things, I should never have made anything of it. It was this telescope that, in six seventy two got Newton into the Royal Society, the foremost club of natural philosophers, and scientists in the country. This was a big deal. Newton was now an acknowledged genius, at least among people who knew what that looked like. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Now Newton might not have been this humble really. I mean, he did think he was smarter than everyone else, because he was. But he was also frequently plagued by self doubt, which was one of the reasons he hated publishing his work. Newton was, like most other actual human beings, complicated. Newton's appointment to the Royal Society began wrenching him out of the isolation of Cambridge, corresponding with other scholars and scientists, many in London, people who understood what he was talking about, at least most of the time, planted a seed. I do not only esteem it a duty to concur with them in the promotion of real knowledge, but a great privilege. Instead of exposing discourses to a prejudiced and censorious multitude, by which means many truths have been baffled and lost, I may, with freedom apply myself to so judicious and impartial an assembly meaning people get him. Finally, if becoming a fellow made him a genius. Then his magnum opus, Principium Mathematica made him a rock star. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground? Why should not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth center. Principia was published in six when Newton was forty four. It described his laws of motion and theory of gravity, and was as close as anyone had gotten at this point to glimpsing the inner workings of the universe. Assuredly, the reason is that the Earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter, and the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the Earth must be in the Earth center. After the book was published, he became well known amongst the Marrow group of elite mathematicians, who became known all over Europe for the brilliance of his work, but only amongst people who were mathematically powerful enough to understand the import of what he's written. The publication of Principias thrust Newton into the intellectual limelight, but back in Cambridge he was still barely understood. Newton once wrote to his knees, I overheard a student say there goes the man that has writ a book that neither he nor anybody else understands. They were talking about me. Me. Then in Newton was elected Cambridge's Member of Parliament, so he lived in London for the better part of a year. How this happened and why, well, that's another story. But when he returned to the university it was even more apparent there was nothing in Cambridge for him, not intellectually, not socially. Nothing. So by the early sixteen nineties, after thirty five years, Newton wanted out of Cambridge. I fear no one understands me. Here the books grow malty in their libraries. It is too small, too mean. But London, London, that's where everything was happening, and that's where Newton wanted to be. So Newton started looking around for a new job, or rather he got some of his powerful friends to look for him. Frankly, nobody's getting high paying jobs in the seventeenth century because they were qualified for them. Newton's first love of motion states that an object will stay at rest unless acted upon by an external force. And it was only when the Earl of Halifax wrote to him and said, I found you this wonderful job as warden of the Mint. It pays five hundred pounds a year. This new job came with a much better salary, and the Earl of Halifax promised the mint practically ran itself. And you went down to London the next day and said, yes, I would love to be warden with the Mint. He went back to Cambridge, packed up all his bags. A few weeks later he was stamped in London and hardly went back to Cambridge again. On May second, Newton left Cambridge. He never looked back. Really. Reams of letters between him and his friends and family and professional contacts still exist, but there are exactly zero from him to anyone at Cambridge after he left for London. It would have taken Isaac Newton two days maybe three to reach London by horse or stagecoach. It had been a wet winter followed by a wet spring, and the roads would have been plugged with mud. As he inched towards the city, he may have imagined his new life there. He could work a few days a week if that, devote the rest of his time to research, to spending time in coffee shops and in conversation with other brilliant people to being a universally acknowledged genius in the greatest city in the world. When he arrived, he'd no longer be a dusty Cambridge scholar. He'd emerged into the filthy, crowded air of the city, a new van, a london Man. M Act two the center of gravity. The road Newton was traveling would have become more crowded and busier the closer he got to London. From the top of one of the hills outside the city, if it had been a clear day, he might have been able to see the Tower of London, the home of the Royal Mint. London was only sixty five miles away from Cambridge, but it might as well have been in a completely different universe. London had started as a Roman settlement on the banks of the Thames in the first century, a roughly square mile planted behind defensive walls, the remains of which still gave its shape. By the time Newton arrived, however, it was already swallowing up the farms and villages outside the original walls. The fields were quickly being replaced by homes and streets and markets. Newton would have entered the old Roman city what's called the City of London with a capital C through one of the northern gates, and then he would have made his way through the winding streets to the tower. Now, the Tower of London is not a single tower. It's actually a fortified complex of stone buildings that were built on the banks of the Thames in the eleventh century. The Royal Mint had been located at the tower since twelve seventy nine, Sandwiched between the inner and outer curtain walls on the west side of the complex. The tower was a busy place. It was home to a garrison, an armory, and of course a prison for important criminals. There was even a zoo there with lions and pomas. The Mint's location at the tower meant that it could be heavily guarded. No one could enter or leave without being up and checked by armed guards. This was the image of the Mint that the government wanted to broadcast, that it was safe in the most impenetrable fortress in the country, under guard and now run by the smartest man in the world. Newton unpacked his bags and his new home inside the Mint. The job came with lodgings, at least until they could find somewhere nicer, less smelly, less noisy. But if Newton stood on the tower walls, he could have seen the murky River Thames lapping at the stone below him. Across the river to the south, he would have seen Suffolk, the pleasure district known for playhouses and prostitutes, and he would very likely not have been a frequent visitor south of the river. But take the river west further inland and he would have been in Marshy Westminster, home to Parliament and the seat of the country's political power. Go east and he'd have been in the warehouses and docks. The place is built to accommodate the country's increasingly global trade. And just outside his walls London, big, bustling, messy, beautiful London, a city where shacks hovels shared walls with palaces and mansions, where the desperately poor walked the same streets that the wealthy were carried on sedan chairs through. It was already one of the largest cities in the world, home to more than six hundred thousand people, and it was still growing. Just too close and loud in here, I can't think I must walk. If Newton left the tower and took a walk he'd see a city in the throes of modernization. London had been dealt too serious blows in the sixteen sixties when Isaac Newton was still finding his feet in Cambridge. First several bouts of the plague killed fifteen of the City of London's population, and then the Great Fire in sixteen sixty six burnt down eight percent of the city, Medieval London within the walls. But London wasn't down for long. In the years since it had rebuilt, was rebuilding. Just up the street from Newton's new digs, London's print media industry was taking root on Fleet Street. This area was buoyed by rising demand for published words and pamphlets and newspapers and broadsides, by cheaper printing technologies and increasing freedom in what could be printed. The latest broadsides and plantets redebouting here cheaper than stories. The Sussex Jacket the most terrible see se b have but including, as we'll see, attacks on the mint. I new proposal to address the deplorable state of the coiner. None of you will fight coolins good stays. But while Newton is getting to know the streets of his new home, you really ought to keep an eye on his purse. Because, of course the old industries were still there. Among them, crime and all its myriad forms. Crime had always existed in London, of course, but as the city grew, crime rates did too. This makes sense, right, more people, more opportunity, more crime. London was also a city with incredible rates of poverty, which made criminals out of people who probably wouldn't have been otherwise. But and here's the thing. While there are courts and severe punishments if you're caught, there's no agency trying to stop people from committing crimes or actively trying to catch them. So it's kind of a good time to be a criminal, especially an entrepreneurial one, like our friend, the near murdered humble servant William Chaloner. When Newton left Cambridge, craving intellectual understanding and fellowship or literally anything that wasn't Cambridge, he had no idea that the London he was moving to was Chaloner's world, a world of cutthroats and quacks, of Charlatan's and conmen and of course counterfeiters. London is the city of opportunity, and it's not just an opportunity for properly Cambridge or Oxford trained, professionally clever people. London was this magnet for the entire countryside. That's Tom Levinson, science historian and author of Newton and the Counterfeiter, the unknown detective career of the world's grayist scientist. Kids who are men and women who wanted to escape whatever whatever circumstances they were in in the agricultural world that was most of England would come to London and they would try and find work. There were more opportunities, though many of them were perhaps not viewed on with joy by the actual authorities. You look at a man like William Challoner, who would come to play quite a rolandizing. It was like he came to London and started hustling. William Chaloner, like Newton, was not a London native. He was from Warwickshire. His family was working class poor. His father was a weaver. Now we know some of what we know about William Challoner thanks to this anonymous biography, The Short View of the Life of William Challon, written about him shortly after his execution. These kinds of biographies of notable criminals were fairly common at the time. Just as they are now. But this one does a really lovely job of being simultaneously appalled and impressed by Chaloner. According to the biography, although Chaloner was evidently a bright kid, he channeled that intelligence and to quote some unlucky rogue streak or other, from early on. His father couldn't take it anymore, so he sent young William to learn a trade in Birmingham, then a fast growing market town about a hundred miles from London. Chaloner was apprenticed to a nail maker, but nail making was deadly dull, and made even more so by the increasing mechanization of the process, so a number of these board nail makers, young William included, turned to Birmingham's other versioning industry, making counterfeit coins. Birmingham makers specialized in what were called groats, silverish coins with a face value of fourpence. Groats weren't commonly made officially, that is, but they were easy to counterfeit. You could do it if you had access to blacksmithing tools and metals, usually pewter or brass, and just a little bit of silver. Chalder stayed in Birmingham long enough to pick up the basics of metal working. Armed with a new skill, although definitely not the one his father had in mind, Chaloner left Birmingham for London in the late sixteen eighties. He set out on quote St. Francis's mule, that is, on foot and probably with nothing more than the clothes on his back and his considerable capacity for robes tricks. It would have taken William Challenger much more than two days to reach London, but when he got there he was ready to forge a new future. Act three, equal and opposite. Can I interest you in a slide ruler, fousan pain, quick silt wiping, pretty silk webbing, all colors? Fine? If you can know stilk weaving him miss qui parte in six nine. In Swinging London you could buy a lot of exciting things and a ten watch somehow containing a dildo in it was one of them dildog watches. Get your tin dildo watches here. Now I have no idea what to watch containing a dildo actually looked like, or what service it was meant to provide, or who would have bought it. All of that is totally lost of time. But should you be looking for such an item, you might have bought it from William Chaloner. Kind interest you in a dildo watch, might of the fotieskin. This is where young Challenger landed after he pitched up in London looking for new opportunities. Chalder wasn't the only peddlers selling oddities, but he was one of the smarter kids on the block. Here's Tom Levinson again. He was basically a really smart street kid who started trying to make money anyway he could, and he really didn't care about legal niceties. Challender's metal working scale with the tin dildo watches was enough to get him noticed. He thereby picked up a few loose pens and looser associates, according to his biography, but Chalder had his sights set on bigger things. Not long after, he and a new found friend decided to set themselves up as his pot profits and quack doctors. Do you have a pinting in your tommy and in your head? I'll have a look at your piss and send you to bid. His pot profits were itinerant or street corner analysts for lack of a better word, who would look at the contents of your chamber pot and tell you what was wrong with you quack doctors meant then more or less what it means now, although it largely applied to people who sold what they claimed were medicines or solves. The word came from the Dutch quack solver, which means solive hawker, and it implied a lot of shouting. Challenger nailed the shouting bit, but then he set himself up as a master doctor, meaning someone who had actually studied to be a physician. Given the state of medical practice at the time, not much differentiated as Charlottean from a real physician. However, Challenger was most definitely not qualified to dispense medical advice. What Challenger did have, according to his biographer, was a gift, the greatest stock of impudence and the best neck a tongue petting. He was a talker, he was a charmer, and this gift paid off so well that he was able to get himself some fine lodgings. Quite a feat in London at the time and now for a little while, Challenger had a great side scam going where he discovers stolen goods for people who had been robbed, collecting a reward every time. He continued for some time to being suspected to be concerned in the robbery himself. He was forced to leave his fine lodgings and that learned profession and seek some old Garrett to repose his caucassin. After he had to leave his fancier days, Challenger set up in Hatton Garden, just outside the London Wall. This seems like a setback, but Challenger, according to his biographer, was in possession of a quote working brain, and it was here that Challenger learned the final skills he needed to make it big time. In his drafty Garrett, Challenger starts working as a Japanner. Asian lacquer work was all the rage of the time, but it was really pensive and rare. Japan Ing was a way of faking the shiny furniture and cabinetry. This got Challenger into gilding, applying a gold finished items, and that obviously led him straight to counterfeiting money. He's not going back to build a watch pedaling. He realized that there was this whole wonderful area of money for actual coins that were after all, just discs of metal. And if you could take a chunk of cheap metal like lead or tin or something and cover it with a skim of silver or what have you. All of a sudden you have the shilling that only cost you a penny or two. You know, that's a nice way to return. Chaloner already knew the basics after his apprenticeship in Birmingham, and he was comfortable working with hot metal. But though Challenger was proficient in making those Birmingham growths, the real money was in the higher value coins that were a lot more difficult to fake, and of course, our boy Chener is after the real money. To do that, he needed a team. It turned out that Chaloner was both good at the technical side of counterfeiting coins, and he seems to have been a reasonably successful leader of small groups. He built little gangs to help him make and distribute coins. Certainly by the late sixteen eighties and into the sixteen nineties he was a clever boy. Are William Yeah? I mean, I think William Chaloner he may be kind of like the George Clooney character in Oceans eleven, except that you know, he has no scruples whatsoever, Armed with street smarts and a charm that would give Clooney a run for his money, Challenger set up his first gang Challenger found a teacher and partner in Patrick Coffee, a London goldsmith. It's Me and Your Great Coffee taught Challenger how to prepare metal plates that would then be used to punch blanks. He taught him the art of guilding. He also taught him how to make a coin press to stamp both sides of the coin, and a mold that could produce a coin with milled edges. Chaloner could now produce the plates in the press, but he needed someone more skilled to make the dies. A die is the engraved metal stamp that presses the image into the coin, and in order for the coin to pass muster, it needed to look authentic. Challoner found his man in Thomas Taylor, Tyler yoman man. If this were a heist movie, Taylor would be the quiet guy in spectacles who looks like a librarian, but this is a podcast, so use your imagination. In his day job, Taylor was an engraver and a printmaker who made high quality maps. But printmaking wasn't very profitable, it seems, so he signed onto Challenger's crew. Taylor did the die engraving, creating reproductions of gold English guineas and French pistols, a gold coin worth about seventeen English shillings. Chaloner then tapped coffee in his own brother in law, Jack Gravener, to be the guilder's Jack, Honey you for some gilding. With the team assembled, the operation kicked into high gear. They made their first front of coins out of a silver alloy, melting the metal in secret in Challenger's lodgings and stamping them with the dies tailor Mads. Then Coffee and Gravener coated them in a thin layer of gold, and while a gold coins heavy enough and precise enough to pass. So now Challenger had thousands, thousands of pistols and guineas, all high quality and all looking as close to the real deal as possible. He now needed people to pass the coins into the market, an act called uttering. He turned to his friend Thomas Holloway and Holloway's wife Elizabeth to unload the goods on local petty criminals, setting a price of eleven shillings on each coin. Yeah, eleven shillings eight how many will you take, sir? Then he sat back and watched as the money, real, actual not fake money, poured in or as his biographer but it, and now he seemed to have found the so much thought after Philosopher's Stone, or like Dannay from Jove, had showers of gold daily falling into his lap. Everything seemed to favor his undertakings. Practically overnight, Challenger was rich, really really rich, like moved to a fancy house in a wealthy neighborhood by all new clothes. Rich life. For William Challenger and his gang, it's going very well. Indeed, now all he needs to do is keep his head down, stay ahead of the law, and keep churning out coins. And that can't be too hard. Right this season on new in his law, Newson was absolutely particulous in everything that he did. I swear that I will not reveal or discover to any person or persons whatsoever the new invention of rounding the money, So help me God. Money still continuing exceeding scarce. So the nun was paid or received, but all was untrust the mint not supplying for common necessities. So it's very ramshackle institution by this point in history. Now England have been more grieved with clipton counterfeit money than any other country. Everybody was degrading the coinage because it was in such a poor state anyway, I saw in William Challoner's brother in law's house cutters and tools instruments proper for coining. Nora might provide it with any competent assistance to enable me to grapple with an undertaking sore, vexatious and dangerous as this that despite low thing, this actual work is doing an awful lot of it in a way that you might expect from a police inspector and a judge and prosecution today. In many ways, damn my blood might have been out by now of the word for him, He's a rogue. Newton's Law is a production of I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me, Linda Rodriguez McRobie. 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 in fact checking by me and Jocelyn Sears. Voice acting by Keith Flemming, Mark McDonald, Robert Jack and Austin Rodriguez mcgrabi. Special thanks to Chris Barker, Dr Patricia Ferre and Tom Levinson. Special thanks to mangest Hat to Kudur and Fineflex Sound Studios are show logo is designed by Lucy Condonia Thanks for listening. Exotic Parrots, Exotic Birds, Exotic Birds ads, Half Fries PlayStation for miss just spell off a truck

This is an I Heart original. On March, the warden of England's Royal Mint received a letter most merciful Sir, I am going to be murdered. Perhaps you don't think so, but it's true. I shall be murdered, and the worst of all, I will be murdered in the face of justice unless I am rescued by your merciful hearts. The letter was an appeal to the warden's conscience. It went on my offending you has brought this upon me. Nobody can save me but you. I how God will move your heart with mercy and pity to do this thing for me. It was signed You're near murdered, Humble Servant. W. W. Chaloner was one William Chaloner, a con man who at one time had been the most successful counterfeit coinmaker London had ever seen. But now he was awaiting execution at Newgate Jail, the stinking hell hole of a prison built into the ancient Roman wall of the city of London. The warden, whose job it was to track down counterfeiters, and who had hunted Challenger for years, never bothered to right back. Two days after he wrote that letter, Chaloner was dragged from the jail through more than two miles of London's foul, mud filled streets to the Tyburn Tree. This was not an actual tree, but rather the name given to the wooden gallows erected at the site of the Tyburn Brook that was now Marble Arch in London. This would have been an open space, a field, and on hanging days, behaving mass of humans, all clamoring to watch the bad guys die. Challoner arrived at the gallows filthy, splattered with mud and whatever else had been thrown at him along the way. He was terrified, he was angry, and he was sober. By now, after months of living in Newgate, he didn't even have enough money to buy a swallow of gin. In his hands, Chaloner clutched a sheaf of papers fodder for a pamphlet, declaring that he was the victim of a frame up. He yelled to anyone who would listen to he was innocent. I am innocent, That he was murdered by perjury and in justice and pretense of law, and by the warden of the mint himself. It didn't matter. In his last moments, Challenger went quiet. He mounted the ladder. The cap was placed over his weeping eyes, and the noose over his head and around his neck, and as hundreds of people watched, Challenger dangled and kicked until the blood vessels in his face popped, until the breath was choked from his lungs. Gravity did its thing. After his body was pulled down from the scaffold, he was publicly disemboweled. His head might have ended up on a spike on the London Bridge. We're not entirely sure, but that's what happened to the people who were excuted for counterfeiting. And it was all because of one man, the doggedly determined, completely ruthless, utterly meticulous Warden of the Royal Mint. The Warden of the Royal Mint was the man charged with making the country's coin, the actual physical silver and gold that fueled England's engine of commerce. The warden was also charged with protecting it, with keeping it safe from counterfeiters and clippers. And this warden was very good at his job, putting dozens of people in jail, shutting down coining operations left and right, and as in the case of Mr Challoner, sending counterfeiters to the gallows without a second thought. So who was this ruthless detective, this hard bitten crook catcher, totally unmoved by the pleas of a desperate man. It was Isaac Newton. Us that Isaac Newton for I Heart Radio. I'm Linda Rodriguez mccrabbie, and this is Newton's Law and I heart original podcast you much so, Episode one, The Warden and the con Man Cool. I'm standing outside the courtyard of the British Library, just off of Houston Road. Normally this courtyard is full of people. There's a coffee shop in there, and there's loads of people usually out sitting on the benches enjoying some sun on a coffee break in between researching. Now, right now, because of coronavirus, it's only open to free book visitors. But just over the wall, I can see the giant statue of Isaac Newton. Now, this statue, I must have passed it hundreds of times going to the library to do research, and I've never really thought about it, never really noticed it. The statue depicts Newton bent over in a really rather uncomfortable looking position, and he's got a compass and he's determining the geometry of the universe. It's a testament to Newton's scientific yes, but it absolutely leaves out the other half of his life, the half of the life that most people don't really know about. What do you know about Isaac discovered gravity? He was good in physics, and he invented like the three principles of gravity. That's much signs, to be honest with me, very smart guy, smart than me, obviously. Do you know anything else about the rest of his life? I have no idea about him as personality. Did you know anything about me? In his life? After he discovered gravity? Got rich? Got rich? Well, he was making money, lots of it literally as warden of the Royal Mint, and he did get a big salary increase too. But this story is about more than just Isaac Newton's lucrative second career. Everything that Newton touched, everything that he was involved in, became part of the fabric of our modern world, and not just because we use his calculations every day to keep satellites in orbit and our smartphones running. His story unfolds at a time when the structures that we inhabit now are just being built. We're talking about, and we will be talking about in this podcast, what actually is money. We're talking about the origins of print media and its power to change political discourse and policy, and about the meaning of criminal justice in a time when there are courts but no police. But it's still a weird story. Newton made this big career change after his most consequential intellectual achievement, but arguably at a time when he still had more to give. So I started with this question, why would Isaac Newton leave the cozy confines of academia and a career of remarkable success to go chase criminals? Act one an object at rest, I keep the subject constantly before me untill the first dawnings open, slowly, little by little, into the full and clear light. Newton had been in academic since sixteen sixty one, when he first came to Trinity College at Cambridge University. At the time, he was an intellectually adventurous nineteen year old fresh of a Lincolnshire farm. Cambridge University academically did not have a good reputation during the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. That's Dr Patricia Farre, Cambridge historian and author of Life After Gravity. So foreign visitors came and they looked at Oxford and Cambridge, and they said it's just ridiculous, all the all the books and drawing moldy and the libraries. A lot of the professors scarcely gave any lectures of quite a few of them lived down in London. There weren't any female students, so the whole community was male. It was a very sort of close community. Cambridge's limitations didn't bother Newton at first. Newton was already brilliant. He'd taught himself higher order mathematics in six months. By sixteen sixty five, he'd already formulated his famous theory of gravity, although it would be years before he published it, and he wasn't bothered by the lack of social activities. If anything, he probably preferred avoiding women and drinking and other people. Honestly, Nowton was a bit of a prig. Here's what he wrote to a fellow student in sixteen sixty one. It is commonly rep WoT is that you are sick. Truly, I am sorry for that, but I am much more sorry that you got your sickness by drinking too much. I earnestly desire you to first repent of your having been drunk and then to seek to recover your health. Fun guy. What Camerid really gave Newton was time to do the one thing he wanted to do. Study to caught a glass. Take a plain glass, hold it upside downward over a candle. Newton had questions, hundreds thousands of questions about everything. Take such meat as they love as wet, and he explored those questions of notebooks and sprinkle it were birds in the manner of the extraction of roots acted powers is very much alike, especially when the attempts that let me no ambiguity all fractions. Newton was also fearless when it came to experimentation. This is a man who stuck a bodkin basically a large needle into his own eye to observe changes in his perception of color. He also spent a bit of time literally staring at the sun. I saw only the sun before me, so that I could neither write nor read, but to recover the use of my eyes, shut myself up in my chamber, made dark for three days together, and used all means to direct my imagination from the sun. Ironically, one of his notebook entries concerns things hurtful for the eyes, garlic onions, leaks, all the much lettuce, going to sudden aftermat lot wise, cold air, much sleep after meat fire, much weeping, and watching Newton's assistant during his later Cambridge years, knew him as a near recluse, as the original model of the absent minded but super focused professor. I never knew him take any recreational pastime, either in riding out to take the air, walking, bowling, or any other exercise whatever, thinking all hours lost that were not spent, any studies to which he kept so close that he seldom left his chamber. Newton's intellect set him apart. It made it difficult for him to connect with his peers or anyone else, but if he was lonely, he didn't let on. At the age of seven, he'd taken over the Lucaezian Professorship of Mathematics. These days this is one of the most prestigious professorships in the world, Like Stephen Hawking, Charles Babbage, and well Isaac Newton prostigious. He was only the second person to hold the positions, so it didn't yet have the reputation that it has now, but still it was a pretty good gig, not least because it gave him room board and a hundred twenty pounds a year in exchange for teaching one course of lectures every three terms, regardless of whether anyone showed up to hear them. By all reports, he was an absolutely appalling lecturer. There's a joke that two undergraduates saw him in the street and they nudged each other, and one of them said, there goes the man who lectures to the walls. And what they meant by that was that that he had to keep a lecture. It was compulsory, but no students bothered to attend, and so he just spoke to the empty room when he wasn't lecturing too empty rooms. Newton, among other things, designed and crafted his own telescope. This was a major accomplishment at a time when instruments like that were at the very bleeding edge of new technology. They were complicated to make and very valuable, but Newton was impatient. If I'd have waited for other people to make my tools and things, I should never have made anything of it. It was this telescope that, in six seventy two got Newton into the Royal Society, the foremost club of natural philosophers, and scientists in the country. This was a big deal. Newton was now an acknowledged genius, at least among people who knew what that looked like. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Now Newton might not have been this humble really. I mean, he did think he was smarter than everyone else, because he was. But he was also frequently plagued by self doubt, which was one of the reasons he hated publishing his work. Newton was, like most other actual human beings, complicated. Newton's appointment to the Royal Society began wrenching him out of the isolation of Cambridge, corresponding with other scholars and scientists, many in London, people who understood what he was talking about, at least most of the time, planted a seed. I do not only esteem it a duty to concur with them in the promotion of real knowledge, but a great privilege. Instead of exposing discourses to a prejudiced and censorious multitude, by which means many truths have been baffled and lost, I may, with freedom apply myself to so judicious and impartial an assembly meaning people get him. Finally, if becoming a fellow made him a genius. Then his magnum opus, Principium Mathematica made him a rock star. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground? Why should not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth center. Principia was published in six when Newton was forty four. It described his laws of motion and theory of gravity, and was as close as anyone had gotten at this point to glimpsing the inner workings of the universe. Assuredly, the reason is that the Earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter, and the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the Earth must be in the Earth center. After the book was published, he became well known amongst the Marrow group of elite mathematicians, who became known all over Europe for the brilliance of his work, but only amongst people who were mathematically powerful enough to understand the import of what he's written. The publication of Principias thrust Newton into the intellectual limelight, but back in Cambridge he was still barely understood. Newton once wrote to his knees, I overheard a student say there goes the man that has writ a book that neither he nor anybody else understands. They were talking about me. Me. Then in Newton was elected Cambridge's Member of Parliament, so he lived in London for the better part of a year. How this happened and why, well, that's another story. But when he returned to the university it was even more apparent there was nothing in Cambridge for him, not intellectually, not socially. Nothing. So by the early sixteen nineties, after thirty five years, Newton wanted out of Cambridge. I fear no one understands me. Here the books grow malty in their libraries. It is too small, too mean. But London, London, that's where everything was happening, and that's where Newton wanted to be. So Newton started looking around for a new job, or rather he got some of his powerful friends to look for him. Frankly, nobody's getting high paying jobs in the seventeenth century because they were qualified for them. Newton's first love of motion states that an object will stay at rest unless acted upon by an external force. And it was only when the Earl of Halifax wrote to him and said, I found you this wonderful job as warden of the Mint. It pays five hundred pounds a year. This new job came with a much better salary, and the Earl of Halifax promised the mint practically ran itself. And you went down to London the next day and said, yes, I would love to be warden with the Mint. He went back to Cambridge, packed up all his bags. A few weeks later he was stamped in London and hardly went back to Cambridge again. On May second, Newton left Cambridge. He never looked back. Really. Reams of letters between him and his friends and family and professional contacts still exist, but there are exactly zero from him to anyone at Cambridge after he left for London. It would have taken Isaac Newton two days maybe three to reach London by horse or stagecoach. It had been a wet winter followed by a wet spring, and the roads would have been plugged with mud. As he inched towards the city, he may have imagined his new life there. He could work a few days a week if that, devote the rest of his time to research, to spending time in coffee shops and in conversation with other brilliant people to being a universally acknowledged genius in the greatest city in the world. When he arrived, he'd no longer be a dusty Cambridge scholar. He'd emerged into the filthy, crowded air of the city, a new van, a london Man. M Act two the center of gravity. The road Newton was traveling would have become more crowded and busier the closer he got to London. From the top of one of the hills outside the city, if it had been a clear day, he might have been able to see the Tower of London, the home of the Royal Mint. London was only sixty five miles away from Cambridge, but it might as well have been in a completely different universe. London had started as a Roman settlement on the banks of the Thames in the first century, a roughly square mile planted behind defensive walls, the remains of which still gave its shape. By the time Newton arrived, however, it was already swallowing up the farms and villages outside the original walls. The fields were quickly being replaced by homes and streets and markets. Newton would have entered the old Roman city what's called the City of London with a capital C through one of the northern gates, and then he would have made his way through the winding streets to the tower. Now, the Tower of London is not a single tower. It's actually a fortified complex of stone buildings that were built on the banks of the Thames in the eleventh century. The Royal Mint had been located at the tower since twelve seventy nine, Sandwiched between the inner and outer curtain walls on the west side of the complex. The tower was a busy place. It was home to a garrison, an armory, and of course a prison for important criminals. There was even a zoo there with lions and pomas. The Mint's location at the tower meant that it could be heavily guarded. No one could enter or leave without being up and checked by armed guards. This was the image of the Mint that the government wanted to broadcast, that it was safe in the most impenetrable fortress in the country, under guard and now run by the smartest man in the world. Newton unpacked his bags and his new home inside the Mint. The job came with lodgings, at least until they could find somewhere nicer, less smelly, less noisy. But if Newton stood on the tower walls, he could have seen the murky River Thames lapping at the stone below him. Across the river to the south, he would have seen Suffolk, the pleasure district known for playhouses and prostitutes, and he would very likely not have been a frequent visitor south of the river. But take the river west further inland and he would have been in Marshy Westminster, home to Parliament and the seat of the country's political power. Go east and he'd have been in the warehouses and docks. The place is built to accommodate the country's increasingly global trade. And just outside his walls London, big, bustling, messy, beautiful London, a city where shacks hovels shared walls with palaces and mansions, where the desperately poor walked the same streets that the wealthy were carried on sedan chairs through. It was already one of the largest cities in the world, home to more than six hundred thousand people, and it was still growing. Just too close and loud in here, I can't think I must walk. If Newton left the tower and took a walk he'd see a city in the throes of modernization. London had been dealt too serious blows in the sixteen sixties when Isaac Newton was still finding his feet in Cambridge. First several bouts of the plague killed fifteen of the City of London's population, and then the Great Fire in sixteen sixty six burnt down eight percent of the city, Medieval London within the walls. But London wasn't down for long. In the years since it had rebuilt, was rebuilding. Just up the street from Newton's new digs, London's print media industry was taking root on Fleet Street. This area was buoyed by rising demand for published words and pamphlets and newspapers and broadsides, by cheaper printing technologies and increasing freedom in what could be printed. The latest broadsides and plantets redebouting here cheaper than stories. The Sussex Jacket the most terrible see se b have but including, as we'll see, attacks on the mint. I new proposal to address the deplorable state of the coiner. None of you will fight coolins good stays. But while Newton is getting to know the streets of his new home, you really ought to keep an eye on his purse. Because, of course the old industries were still there. Among them, crime and all its myriad forms. Crime had always existed in London, of course, but as the city grew, crime rates did too. This makes sense, right, more people, more opportunity, more crime. London was also a city with incredible rates of poverty, which made criminals out of people who probably wouldn't have been otherwise. But and here's the thing. While there are courts and severe punishments if you're caught, there's no agency trying to stop people from committing crimes or actively trying to catch them. So it's kind of a good time to be a criminal, especially an entrepreneurial one, like our friend, the near murdered humble servant William Chaloner. When Newton left Cambridge, craving intellectual understanding and fellowship or literally anything that wasn't Cambridge, he had no idea that the London he was moving to was Chaloner's world, a world of cutthroats and quacks, of Charlatan's and conmen and of course counterfeiters. London is the city of opportunity, and it's not just an opportunity for properly Cambridge or Oxford trained, professionally clever people. London was this magnet for the entire countryside. That's Tom Levinson, science historian and author of Newton and the Counterfeiter, the unknown detective career of the world's grayist scientist. Kids who are men and women who wanted to escape whatever whatever circumstances they were in in the agricultural world that was most of England would come to London and they would try and find work. There were more opportunities, though many of them were perhaps not viewed on with joy by the actual authorities. You look at a man like William Challoner, who would come to play quite a rolandizing. It was like he came to London and started hustling. William Chaloner, like Newton, was not a London native. He was from Warwickshire. His family was working class poor. His father was a weaver. Now we know some of what we know about William Challoner thanks to this anonymous biography, The Short View of the Life of William Challon, written about him shortly after his execution. These kinds of biographies of notable criminals were fairly common at the time. Just as they are now. But this one does a really lovely job of being simultaneously appalled and impressed by Chaloner. According to the biography, although Chaloner was evidently a bright kid, he channeled that intelligence and to quote some unlucky rogue streak or other, from early on. His father couldn't take it anymore, so he sent young William to learn a trade in Birmingham, then a fast growing market town about a hundred miles from London. Chaloner was apprenticed to a nail maker, but nail making was deadly dull, and made even more so by the increasing mechanization of the process, so a number of these board nail makers, young William included, turned to Birmingham's other versioning industry, making counterfeit coins. Birmingham makers specialized in what were called groats, silverish coins with a face value of fourpence. Groats weren't commonly made officially, that is, but they were easy to counterfeit. You could do it if you had access to blacksmithing tools and metals, usually pewter or brass, and just a little bit of silver. Chalder stayed in Birmingham long enough to pick up the basics of metal working. Armed with a new skill, although definitely not the one his father had in mind, Chaloner left Birmingham for London in the late sixteen eighties. He set out on quote St. Francis's mule, that is, on foot and probably with nothing more than the clothes on his back and his considerable capacity for robes tricks. It would have taken William Challenger much more than two days to reach London, but when he got there he was ready to forge a new future. Act three, equal and opposite. Can I interest you in a slide ruler, fousan pain, quick silt wiping, pretty silk webbing, all colors? Fine? If you can know stilk weaving him miss qui parte in six nine. In Swinging London you could buy a lot of exciting things and a ten watch somehow containing a dildo in it was one of them dildog watches. Get your tin dildo watches here. Now I have no idea what to watch containing a dildo actually looked like, or what service it was meant to provide, or who would have bought it. All of that is totally lost of time. But should you be looking for such an item, you might have bought it from William Chaloner. Kind interest you in a dildo watch, might of the fotieskin. This is where young Challenger landed after he pitched up in London looking for new opportunities. Chalder wasn't the only peddlers selling oddities, but he was one of the smarter kids on the block. Here's Tom Levinson again. He was basically a really smart street kid who started trying to make money anyway he could, and he really didn't care about legal niceties. Challender's metal working scale with the tin dildo watches was enough to get him noticed. He thereby picked up a few loose pens and looser associates, according to his biography, but Chalder had his sights set on bigger things. Not long after, he and a new found friend decided to set themselves up as his pot profits and quack doctors. Do you have a pinting in your tommy and in your head? I'll have a look at your piss and send you to bid. His pot profits were itinerant or street corner analysts for lack of a better word, who would look at the contents of your chamber pot and tell you what was wrong with you quack doctors meant then more or less what it means now, although it largely applied to people who sold what they claimed were medicines or solves. The word came from the Dutch quack solver, which means solive hawker, and it implied a lot of shouting. Challenger nailed the shouting bit, but then he set himself up as a master doctor, meaning someone who had actually studied to be a physician. Given the state of medical practice at the time, not much differentiated as Charlottean from a real physician. However, Challenger was most definitely not qualified to dispense medical advice. What Challenger did have, according to his biographer, was a gift, the greatest stock of impudence and the best neck a tongue petting. He was a talker, he was a charmer, and this gift paid off so well that he was able to get himself some fine lodgings. Quite a feat in London at the time and now for a little while, Challenger had a great side scam going where he discovers stolen goods for people who had been robbed, collecting a reward every time. He continued for some time to being suspected to be concerned in the robbery himself. He was forced to leave his fine lodgings and that learned profession and seek some old Garrett to repose his caucassin. After he had to leave his fancier days, Challenger set up in Hatton Garden, just outside the London Wall. This seems like a setback, but Challenger, according to his biographer, was in possession of a quote working brain, and it was here that Challenger learned the final skills he needed to make it big time. In his drafty Garrett, Challenger starts working as a Japanner. Asian lacquer work was all the rage of the time, but it was really pensive and rare. Japan Ing was a way of faking the shiny furniture and cabinetry. This got Challenger into gilding, applying a gold finished items, and that obviously led him straight to counterfeiting money. He's not going back to build a watch pedaling. He realized that there was this whole wonderful area of money for actual coins that were after all, just discs of metal. And if you could take a chunk of cheap metal like lead or tin or something and cover it with a skim of silver or what have you. All of a sudden you have the shilling that only cost you a penny or two. You know, that's a nice way to return. Chaloner already knew the basics after his apprenticeship in Birmingham, and he was comfortable working with hot metal. But though Challenger was proficient in making those Birmingham growths, the real money was in the higher value coins that were a lot more difficult to fake, and of course, our boy Chener is after the real money. To do that, he needed a team. It turned out that Chaloner was both good at the technical side of counterfeiting coins, and he seems to have been a reasonably successful leader of small groups. He built little gangs to help him make and distribute coins. Certainly by the late sixteen eighties and into the sixteen nineties he was a clever boy. Are William Yeah? I mean, I think William Chaloner he may be kind of like the George Clooney character in Oceans eleven, except that you know, he has no scruples whatsoever, Armed with street smarts and a charm that would give Clooney a run for his money, Challenger set up his first gang Challenger found a teacher and partner in Patrick Coffee, a London goldsmith. It's Me and Your Great Coffee taught Challenger how to prepare metal plates that would then be used to punch blanks. He taught him the art of guilding. He also taught him how to make a coin press to stamp both sides of the coin, and a mold that could produce a coin with milled edges. Chaloner could now produce the plates in the press, but he needed someone more skilled to make the dies. A die is the engraved metal stamp that presses the image into the coin, and in order for the coin to pass muster, it needed to look authentic. Challoner found his man in Thomas Taylor, Tyler yoman man. If this were a heist movie, Taylor would be the quiet guy in spectacles who looks like a librarian, but this is a podcast, so use your imagination. In his day job, Taylor was an engraver and a printmaker who made high quality maps. But printmaking wasn't very profitable, it seems, so he signed onto Challenger's crew. Taylor did the die engraving, creating reproductions of gold English guineas and French pistols, a gold coin worth about seventeen English shillings. Chaloner then tapped coffee in his own brother in law, Jack Gravener, to be the guilder's Jack, Honey you for some gilding. With the team assembled, the operation kicked into high gear. They made their first front of coins out of a silver alloy, melting the metal in secret in Challenger's lodgings and stamping them with the dies tailor Mads. Then Coffee and Gravener coated them in a thin layer of gold, and while a gold coins heavy enough and precise enough to pass. So now Challenger had thousands, thousands of pistols and guineas, all high quality and all looking as close to the real deal as possible. He now needed people to pass the coins into the market, an act called uttering. He turned to his friend Thomas Holloway and Holloway's wife Elizabeth to unload the goods on local petty criminals, setting a price of eleven shillings on each coin. Yeah, eleven shillings eight how many will you take, sir? Then he sat back and watched as the money, real, actual not fake money, poured in or as his biographer but it, and now he seemed to have found the so much thought after Philosopher's Stone, or like Dannay from Jove, had showers of gold daily falling into his lap. Everything seemed to favor his undertakings. Practically overnight, Challenger was rich, really really rich, like moved to a fancy house in a wealthy neighborhood by all new clothes. Rich life. For William Challenger and his gang, it's going very well. Indeed, now all he needs to do is keep his head down, stay ahead of the law, and keep churning out coins. And that can't be too hard. Right this season on new in his law, Newson was absolutely particulous in everything that he did. I swear that I will not reveal or discover to any person or persons whatsoever the new invention of rounding the money, So help me God. Money still continuing exceeding scarce. So the nun was paid or received, but all was untrust the mint not supplying for common necessities. So it's very ramshackle institution by this point in history. Now England have been more grieved with clipton counterfeit money than any other country. Everybody was degrading the coinage because it was in such a poor state anyway, I saw in William Challoner's brother in law's house cutters and tools instruments proper for coining. Nora might provide it with any competent assistance to enable me to grapple with an undertaking sore, vexatious and dangerous as this that despite low thing, this actual work is doing an awful lot of it in a way that you might expect from a police inspector and a judge and prosecution today. In many ways, damn my blood might have been out by now of the word for him, He's a rogue. Newton's Law is a production of I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me, Linda Rodriguez McRobie. 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 in fact checking by me and Jocelyn Sears. Voice acting by Keith Flemming, Mark McDonald, Robert Jack and Austin Rodriguez mcgrabi. Special thanks to Chris Barker, Dr Patricia Ferre and Tom Levinson. Special thanks to mangest Hat to Kudur and Fineflex Sound Studios are show logo is designed by Lucy Condonia Thanks for listening. Exotic Parrots, Exotic Birds, Exotic Birds ads, Half Fries PlayStation for miss just spell off a truck