Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm pray Cyvie Wilson. Uh. And today we're gonna talk about somebody and when we say his name, you're gonna go I know about him. I'm imagining having to break out my my doctored up version of our logo that turns it into like stuff you may have possibly missed in history class or somewhere else, but maybe not or it's maybe not about you personally. Yeah. But the cool thing is, as I often do, I did one of my informal polls. I even did one just now before we started recording with our sorcerer Noll, where when I say, oh, we're going to talk about Sir Issac Newton, and I was like, I know him, and I'm like, but what do you know about him? And once you get past the apple falling thing, people get real fuzzy. But it's just physics in general. Yeah, yeah, I mean people associate him with the theory of gravity, but his actual life story is way bigger than that. It's filled with twists and turns. There's some interesting um you know, kind of personality quirks involved. He worked in so many different fields and so it seems like a good time to sit back and actually talk about the life of this famous philosopher, mathematician, physicists, scientists and astronomer. And truly that list is sort of a scratching the surface situation. We are not going to go super heavy on the actual science and math concepts here is that probably is the stuff that you were taught in school theoretically, but we will hit some of the highlights, mostly just to give a sense of just how impactful Newton's work was and frankly still is. So to start the place we normally start. Isaac Newton was born on January fourth, sixteen forty three, in Woolsthorpe, England. You'll often see his birthday listed is December two. Neil de crass Tyson famously tweeted about that being his birthday. That date is actually also correct if you are using the old Julian calendar. And Isaac was a premature baby. He was weak and very fragile when he was born, and he was not expected to live very long. He also never knew his father, who he was named for, because the elder Isaac Newton died a few months before his son was born. His mother, Hannah Askew Newton, was a single parent for the first three years of the young boy's life. Yeah, and she did have the support of relatives, but in terms of direct parenting, she was the one UH and isaih relationship with his mother was really quite complicated, particularly in his early years, and many historians have pointed out that if you read his correspondence, it really suggests that this gave him an ongoing issue UH in terms of personality in dealing with the world. Because when he was three, Hannah left him to live with his grandmother. She had remarried to a man named Barnabas Smith, and she moved in with Smith and left her child behind. As Isaac reached school age, there were arrangements made for him to stay with an apothecary and grant them so he could go to King's School. There as the apothecary's lodger, Newton got his first introduction to chemistry, and mother and child were not reunited under one roof for quite some time until Hannah's second husband, again that was Burnaby Smith, died nine years after she married him, and at this point Isaac was twelve and his mother opted to take him out of school so that he could become a farmer like his father, who had in fact been very successful in agriculture. As is often the case when parents pick out a child's vocation for them, farming did not actually work out very well for Isaac Newton. He was bored to tears trying to care for the family's farm, and soon it was apparent that if he continued down that vocational path he would only meet with failures. So he got to go back to school, and once Isaac's basic education was completed, his uncle, who was a scholar, stepped in. He wanted to persuade Hannah that her son really should go to university. Isaac was certainly smart enough, but there was this issue of money to contend with. But in sixteen sixty one, Isaac Newton did indeed enroll at University of Cambridge's Trinity College, but he had to work to earn his place in the lecture hall. He cleaned and serviced the rooms of other students, and he waited tables, so basically he was set up on a program that was not unlike modern work study programs. He started out with the standard course load for any student at Cambridge, but as his time at school wore on, he was drawn more and more to the cutting edge science that was happening at the time. We would call this very basic science today. For the most part, the geocentric model of the heavenly bodies, which placed Earth at the center of all the celestial orbits, was still being hot, but the heliocentric model, which had been hinted at much earlier in the timeline and other cultures, had really been fleshed out and promoted by Nicholas Copernicus, Ico Brahey, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo. So while Isaac Newton was getting this old school education in his classes and his spare time outside of all of the various jobs that he took on to stay in school, he spent studying modern philosophy and science, and likely because he was burning the candle at both ends and frankly in the middle. Uh, Newton didn't really excel at university. He wasn't like a star student or anything. He did graduate, but that graduation didn't come with any special distinctions. Though. While he was working in his self directed extracurricular study, Newton wrote an important series of notes entitled Certain Philosophical Questions, and in these notes, in this work that he did on his own, really was the beginnings of what would later be called the scientific Revolution. After his graduation, he continued to study with a subsidy, and that was pretty much customary for the people who had earned the title of scholar. He did this until Cambridge University was forced to close temporarily in sixteen sixty five because of the spread of the Great Plague. After the university shuddered to wait out the plague of London, uh, Newton continued his studies, but he was just doing it on his own at home, which he had already been doing in his off time anyway, So presumably he was pretty uh accustomed to this whole self directed study thing, and this would actually end up being an incredibly important period of time for him and in truth for humanity. This is, for example, the period when the alleged Apple gravity revelation took place. An interesting thing to note here is that while this story in an extremely simplified form, is often told as though it's literally the first time anyone ever in history thought about a force pulling an apple down to Earth. What new And was really inspired to think about was the idea that the apple and the Earth's moon might both be governed by the same force. And there is some debate historically as to whether or not this magical apple moment ever actually happened, But what we do know is that Newton started to think about gravity and how it was not only applicable to things here on Earth, but to the other things out in the universe. And over the course of that year and a half spent in solo education, Newton really also so the seeds of a theory of color and light uh also a concept for infinitesimal calculus, and also a lot of significant astronomy concepts related to the movement of the planets which were also related to gravity. And these major lines of thinking would form the basis of a groundbreaking publication that he would write some years later, which we will talk about in just a bit. In sixteen sixty seven, Cambridge reopened after the plague and Isaac were tarns to the formal academic environment. As a minor fellow at Trinity College, he got a Master of Arts degree two years later while he was completing his graduate work, Newton wrote a paper entitled Anna Lysi, A Treatise on Infinite Series Mathematics. And Newton shared this work with his mentor, Isaac Barrow, who in turn showed it to other members of the mathematics community. And this really garnered Newton both attention and quite a bit of praise. And it was not long before Newton took over Barrow's chair at Cambridge when the mentor stepped down. And next we're going to talk about a small invention that garnered Newton some new attention. But first let's pause for a brief word from one of our fantastic sponsors. In sixteen sixty eight, Newton built a reflecting telescope. It was the first of its kind, and he did this as part of his lecture work in optics, which gained the attention of the Royal Society. He showed the apparatus there in sixteen seventy one. This led to the publication of his Notes on Optics in sixteen seventy two. This wasn't exactly a slam dunk in the world of science, though. While Newton's work had led him to believe that white light contained the entire spectrum of colors and was composed of particles. But the more common belief was that waves, rather than particles, made up light, and that colors were modified forms of homogeneous white light. And additionally, French physicist it may marry Out attempted to reproduce Newton's refraction experiment and he just was unable to do so. He could not do it. Uh So, Newton's papers on this matter were openly criticized, so much so that Newton, who frankly never really learned to handle criticism very well during his life at all, and I kind of identify with him in that regard. Uh He actually waited for most of the vehement critics of this particular line of thinking to die off before he agreed to formally publish his notes on light in the book Optics. Like he had published some of these notes in a smaller sense, but not in book form, and he just waited them out. He waited them out for three decades. He just wanted them all to die so that none of them could criticize his book when it came out. Well. And I think my question is whether these criticisms were criticisms or whether they were insults, because those are not the same thing, uh, he responded to. It seems in reading notes and biographical accounts of him, that he tended to respond to challenges to his line of thinking, whether it was genuine criticism and questioning or just an old school that was unwilling to accept new ideas, in almost exactly the same way. He just got really, really angry and a little bit petulant about it. Yeah, don't do that, dude. Constructive criticism is how we learn and get better. I say that, which sounds kind of sanctimonious because we're talking about Isaac Newton. He learned a lot of things. Yeah. Can you imagine what would have happened had he had he been had he figured out a way to work with criticism. So to continue on this subject of criticism, one of the most prominent and vocal critics of Isaac Newton's optics work was Robert Hook. The two men locked intellectual horns for years. As a result, Newton threatened to quit the Royal Society over the rift, although other members convinced him to stay. As the correspondence between the two of them raged on and on and finally reached a crescendo in sixty eight Newton actually had a nervous breakdown and stopped communicating with his rival altogether. Yeah. Again, he just struggled. This was something he never really got the hang of, was was being able to deal with people that wanted to challenge his work. Uh. And not long after this breakdown, Isaac's mother, Hannah died, and as you'll recall, that was a very weird and conflicted relationship and it really really affected him deeply. So that loss, on top of his already fragile mental state, led to a six year withdrawal from colleagues and most social interaction. So friends and associates, of course tried to reach out to him, and they would get replies, but they would be very brief, and instead, Isaac Newton chose to continue his own intellectual pursuits during this time, working kind of siloed off on his own, and he specifically focused on the areas of planetary orbits and the way that they're influenced by gravity. Very slowly, Newton began to correspond regularly on the topic with none other than his former rival Robert Hook. That two of them exchanged ideas, and Hook helped him work through concepts that would lead to formulas for calculating gravity's effect on planetary orbit. But again, although there was no argument this time or any kind of breakdown, Newton just abruptly stopped talking to him about it. So as easy years of working alone and occasionally only corresponding a little here and there were drawing to a close, and Isaac Newton began to once again become a little more sociable. Both he and Robert Hook spoke with Edmund Halley separately though about planetary orbits, and Halle actually first spoke with Hook, and then later he consulted with Newton about the shape of orbits based on the formula theory that Hook had described to him, and after hearing uh Isaac Newton talked about it, Halle was convinced that Newton really was onto something regarding his idea of elliptical orbits, and at this point Halle became a benefactor to Newton. He basically took care of his living expenses so that the mathematics of orbital paths could be the exclusive focus of Newton's time. In six seven, Newton published his work Prince Shipia, which is more formally known as Mathematical Principles of Natural philosophy. This was the result of a year and a half of work and it was really groundbreaking. It's been five It as the most influential of all physics books, establishing basically all the basic concepts still used in physics today, with the exception of energy. So if you remember your high school physics, you probably can recall Newton's laws of motion, which were part of Principia in the context of explaining the movement of celestial bodies. And I know we wouldn't talk a lot about the actual science and math, but we'll just go over them because in case you don't recognize of my name, you will once we start saying them. One is that a stationary body will stay stationary unless an external force is applied to it. Two is it forces equal to mass times acceleration, and a change in motion is proportional to the force applied. And three is for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So these are things we still talk about all the time. And this was in Newton's work Principia. Yes, it is like the basic basics of physics or just physical science class. Yeah, So this book was and still is hugely influential and that really just can't be overstated. It's not just about what we learned in elementary, middle and high school and science classes. Uh. If you wonder how on Earth astrophysicists are able to calculate the masses of planets that are billions of miles away, it's because of these principles that were established in the seven publication. If you've ever wondered how we figured out that tides are governed by gravity, that is in there too, So are numerous other concepts that are mind blowing to consider today. But Newton had worked out the concepts back in the seventeenth century, but again and again, tied to Robert Hook, Newton's work drew some controversy, so Hook became very public about claiming that Newton had in fact been copying his work and basically stole it by not crediting him, and this instantly re established the rivalry between them, and it was instantly just as intense as it ever was. And in a similar move as he had made in the previous round of vehement bickering, Newton's threatened to basically take his ball and bat and go home and stop working on the second edition of principia and not play with any of the scientific community anymore. Edmund Halley, of course, had spoken with both of the men about planetary orbits before becoming Newton's financial backer, so he knew that Newton's work on this book was legitimately his own work. However, Halle also wanted to find a way to make peace in the community, so he eventually convinced Newton to insert a note in the second edition giving credit to Hook for the concepts that he shared in the development of the mathematics involved. Yeah, it was basically thanking him for that correspondence back and forth when Newton was kind of working primarily on his own, but they were talking a little bit about gravity and planetary orbits together, so you would think that would like smooth things over. But in fact, from this point on, Hook's life really took a downturn. He was not satisfied by Newton's acknowledgement, and he became increasingly and openly bitter about Newton's success, and as a consequence, the pair never repaired their relationship after that. For Newton, the publication of Princeship Head brought him to an entirely new level of fame, it really expanded his professional and social circles quite significantly. And we're going to talk about the new spheres and causes that Isaac Newton found himself in as a consequence of his growing renown in just a moment. But first, let's pause and thank one of our great sponsors. So King James the Second, who ascended to the throne of England in six eight five for a relatively brief reign, created a major religious upheaval in the Anglican country as he attempted to promote Catholicism. So he advocated for religious freedom for Catholics, but he thought that they should continue the persecution of Presbyterian covenanters. Uh. Those are the very broad strokes of the religious situation. But the reason that King James the Second features into Newton's life story is that the monarch wanted to make universities into Catholic institutions. Isaac Newton firmly opposed this move, and as a very vocal challenger to the idea, he was elected as Cambridge's representative in Parliament in sixteen eighty nine. Newton, it should be noted, was not irreligious. Over the course of his life. He did think and write a great deal about God. He felt strongly that understanding Judeo Christian prophecy and mysticism was vital to understanding God. He wrote at one point that he felt that Christianity had kind of gotten off track in the fourth century, with incorrect doctrines regarding the nature of Christ being promoted by the Council of Nicia. And while this wasn't an announcement of religion, it was a very unorthodox view. So he was religious. He did believe in God, but he had a very unusual stance on the whole thing. Newton's influence continued to expand, so much so that educational reformers who wished to move away from teaching Aristotelian ideology looked to him as their public proponent for more modern curricula. They wanted to teach the concepts of the physical world that were represented in Newton's writings. Yeah, he basically promoted that for his entire life. And while he was at the height of his success, however, uh, you know, all of this was going great. He really had a lot of respect. He was a recognized leader in science. Isaac Newton had another nervous breakdown and this was in sixtee and this one was marked by him writing letters to friends and colleagues that were extremely paranoid. They were really accusatory missives in a lot of ways, you know, thinking that people were out to get him, and in general the tone of all of his correspondence just seemed entirely out of sorts. So his earlier breakdown was pretty clearly caused by ongoing hostilities with Robert Hook. The reasons for this one we're a little more nebulous. He was exhausted from his work, he had a falling out with one of his close friends. He was disappointed in his status with King William the Third. He may have even been dealing with mercury poisoning from years of work in a lab. But unlike the breakdown that Newton experienced in sixteen seventy eight, he seemed to quickly recover from this one in just a matter of months, so a far cry from the six years of seclusion that he had receded into the first time he had a mental break And this time he kind of came around. As we said, he apologized to his friends in writing, and he went right back to work as though it had never happened, although at this point his interests had suddenly largely shifted away from science and instead this is really a time when he was intent on ruminating on alchemy and philosophy and considering the metaphysical. This is really when he wrote a lot about the religion that we mentioned just a few moments ago. Once that episode behind him, Isaac Newton's life once again got a lot brighter. He had long wanted to be appointed to a government position, and not getting one from King William the Third was one of the things that had strained his relationship with the monarch. But finally, in sixteen ninety six, he was made Warden of the Mints, and this marked the end of his time lecturing at Cambridge. So this may seem like sort of a random position to put a renowned scientist into, but here is how Newton finally won his much coveted government job. His niece, Catherine Barton, was Lord Halifax's mistress at the time, and it was Halifax who used his influence to secure the position for his paramour's uncle. To his credit, though Isaac Newton didn't just sit back and collect this government income. He took his job as the Master of the mint extremely seriously, and this happened to be an interesting time in England in terms of currency. Yeah. So, to set it up, in the late sixteen hundreds, English coins were still being minted in silver. The value of the material that was used to make the coins was actually worth more than the currency itself, and this led to a number of illicit activities. So initially the problem was that coins were sometimes being clipped or shaved around their edges so that they were still recognized as legal tender, but the person doing the clipping could then amass all of these clippings and shavings so that the silver could be melted down for other uses and sold. Eventually, the minting process was updated to make coins with milled edges that would deter clipping and shaving practices. But what this ended up doing was fostering a huge counterfeit and money market in England. Would be crooks would try to fill the gap in their incomes that they had been making through clipping by counterfeiting instead. Yeah, they would basically cast a mold from an actual coin, and then they would just start issuing their own basically with cheaper materials and counterfeiting coins at this point was considered treason, so it was classified as a high crime. And by Newton's reckoning, a full twenty of the coins in England when he took his job as Master of the Mint were in fact counterfeits, so that's one fifth of the circulating currency that was not real, and he made it his mission to find as many counterfeiters as he could. Newton was not the least bit wary of venturing into very unsavory areas and establishments. While he carried out this work, he became kind of an expert investigator, and he applied his rigorous scientific examination skills to his criminal investigations. He even went so far as to become credential in law so that he could perform cross examinations on suspects during their trials, and over the course of several years, Newton was able to successfully prosecute twenty counterfeiters. He had taken in many more, but those are the ones that were found guilty, and all of them were put to death for their crimes in The French Academy of Sciences named him one of eight foreign Associates. When seventeen o three he became President of the Royal Society. In seventeen o five he was knighted, So you would think at some point in this esteemed career he might be free of drama. That that would be wrong. The same year that he was knighted got freed. Leibniz, who was a German mathematician, asserted that he had developed the ideas of infinitesmal calculus years before Newton had published his own works on the subject. Yeah, I didn't ever find I'm sure it's out there somewhere, it just didn't turn up in my work on this particular project. Why he waited so long because this is quite a ways after Newton was publishing these ideas, So we don't know why Leibniz waited so long to say that it was his work. But these accusations persisted for years until finally in seventeen twelve. So remember it was seventeen o five when this whole business started, so this dragged on for seven years. Uh, this matter was finally investigated by the Royal Society and Newton was found to be the original mathematician to work on these concepts. Though we should point out that he did have a decidedly unfair advantage in the proceedings as he had as Royal Society President selected the investigation committee members. I was sort of startled throughout this at how cut through the mathematics and science world was, at least as it swirled around Isaac Newton. This was actually not the only intellectual skirmish that he had while he was the Royal Society President. In fact, he had a really negative reputation in that role. There were even people who called him a tyrant. He published the notes of astronomer Astronomer John Flamsteed without that man's permission, after Flamsteed didn't provide him with the notes he wanted for an update to the Principia as quickly as he wanted them. Yeah, it is kind of another case of like a footstompy kind of reaction. And we should point out that John Flamsteed had gathered an unreal amount of data. Newton's demands for specific notes we're probably a little bit unreasonable. That would be like somebody going, hey, run to the library and get me these three things in a library that's massive and that they, you know, are still sorting out. So it was kind of a a little bit of an unreasonable demand Flamsteed eventually sought out and won a court order demanding that Newton ceased the permission list publication of his work. This is one of the few times that in all of these skirmishes that Newton got into with other people that he actually kind of came out on the losing end. And his eighties, Newton started experiencing poor health, specifically digestive problems, and this took its hole on his overall well being. On March seventy seven, he got a really severe pain in his abdomen and he blacked out shortly thereafter. He remained unconscious until he died the next day at the age of eighty four. He held the position of Master of the Mint until he the day that he died. He was also still the President of the Royal Society, having been re elected every year in spite of sentiments that he was sometimes abusing his power in that position, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey in a very lavish ceremony. While he was lauded as a genius both before and after his death and even still today, the sad truth is that Isaac Newton was likely very lonely. He never married. He didn't have many close friends. He seemed to have some issues of insecurity, possibly tied to the absence of parents in his life as a child. Because he was mired in so many plagiarism battles, he never really became comfortable with the idea of collaborating with his colleagues, so he missed out on opportunities to forge forge relationships with his peers in the math and science community. But of course it's pretty undeniable that he changed the course of science and human history in fact with his work. In December, an original copy of his Principia, which had been presented to King James the Second, went up for auction with a value range of four hundred thousand to six hundred thousand dollars. When the bidding was over, the book sold for three of its estimate, at two point five million dollars. Yeah, that's one of those very rare and coveted items, both within sort of a book collector's community and in the scientific community. I did not look up or no, if it's even available who made that purchase. But uh so, that is the life and times a ster Isaac Newton. I think it's it's more interesting and a little bit more dramatic than people may suspect if they only know the happy version of the apple in the tree gravity moments, right, uh, and the scientific genius moment. Yeah. I mean he was undoubtedly a genius, but very complicated man. Fascinating and how he would become obsessed withvarious things at various points in his life. Um. I like the part where he was hunting down counterfeiters. How could you not? I mean, that's a fascinating tale. So now we have two bits of listener mail. They're related to the same thing. Um, And do you want me to read one and you read one and then we'll discuss That sounds great because it is an important topic. Um. It's related to our discussion in the History Mystery double feature podcast, particularly the one where we talked about hinter Kfik. And the first one that we received was from our listener Katie. She said, Hi, I hate to send a correction, and I'm sure it's been said already, but in your most recent episode, you discussed incest in a way that unintentionally blames victims of parental child incest. You referred to it as a quote affair between the father and daughter, and this implies that there was consent and even desire on the part of the daughter. Even in instances where the daughter would claim consent, there is an unfair power dynamic at play similar to the reas and the statutory rape is illegal. This dynamic makes it impossible for the victim to have full autonomy in the interaction. I feel like you guys are such advocates for women that you might want to be aware of how phrasing of these topics can unintentionally victim blame. I love your podcast and sent you another email within the last week being a total goober fangirl about it. Thank you so much for reading. Thank you so much for that email, Katie, and then I will hand it to Tracy for the other one. This one is from David, and David says, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I've long enjoyed the podcast and have recently gotten back to listening to it after a hiatus. I appreciate the reporting, the depth of research, and the adenda provided by listeners during the listener mail segment, and I also love your occasional interviews with historians. On rare occasions, hosts over the years have mangled the pronunciations of some foreign words. We all chalk that up to our different educational backgrounds. But in the hinter k f podcast, I was shocked to hear one of you make an insensitive comment regarding incest. Tracy said that the hinter k Fi murders reminded her of a more recent mass murder, and went on to say that the daughter in that case may, as with hinter Kfek, have been quote having an affair with the daughter. I take issue with that phrase. Most of us would agree that incestuous quote affairs can occur between consenting adults, like the siblings on Game of Thrones, but a father does not have an incestuous quote affair with his young daughter that is, in fact rape. I was especially surprised to hear this coming from a young female podcaster. I'd love it if you would make a quick correction in an upcoming listener male portion of the show, and at the very least, please be more sensitive to such issues in the future. They will certainly come up again at some point if history teaches us anything. Sincerely, David, it was me who said that I'd want to clarify first of all, or you have you like like you want to say a thing. Oh no, I think I may have said the one that Katie mentioned earlier when I was talking about the groupers at hinter Kafik, And then there was a second one that came up when you mentioned a likened scenario. Right, So we we both misspoke. Well we both misspoke, But I also do want to make it very clear that your your research on this. The woman you were talking about was thirty five years old, and I was speaking extemporaneously about a case that I learned about when I was fifteen, which was twenty five years ago. In my memory, the daughter in that case was also an adult. Um. I actually looked up after getting David's note, and I was expecting to find that she was in her mid twenties when that murder happened. She actually was not. She was younger than that, which I had completely remembered Wrongly. That's definitely not language I would use when talking about a father and a child. But like in my memory, this was a father and an adult, which is still definitely taboo. There is still definitely a train of thought that no person can ever consent to sexual activity with a parent because of the power dynamic. I don't. I don't think that's a you of burstell idea, but it is definitely one that exists. But yeah, I absolutely would not have framed it that way if I had remembered correctly that the daughter in that case was only seventeen. I remembered her as being a grown up. Uh, probably because she was older than I was when I read the book about that murder when I was fifteen, Right, So yeah, I mean, I apologize for having dismayed anyone or or victim. Believe that certainly would not be either of our intense. There was definitely some stuff that I found, and you may recall if you listen to that podcast that I mentioned at the end that some of the stuff I was looking at was online but was Bavarian legal records, and one of them was, but I couldn't verify that it was legitimate, which is why I did not bring it up on the podcast, but it completely seated in my brain. Um, there was one that claimed that in fact, Victoria and her father had been charged with incest and it went through an actual like trial situation and they were both found guilty. So I think in my head that automatically gave her a level of I don't want to say blame, That's not what I'm saying, but uh more of an equal footing because they both were found guilty in the same way, even though that may not have been the actual situation. I think my brain just went and moved on. I didn't want to Um. Yeah, I certainly would not, and I recognize that even if you were a thirty five year old woman, you still are not probably equal in the power dynamic to your father, and especially when there is this overlay of sexuality to the whole thing. It's a very complicated issue. So again well created by the fact that the period of time when we were talking about, as a general rule, all women were in a subordinate power position to to all men. I mean all is probably too strong a word, but overwhelmingly like women in general not have the same lafe level of agency that women do today. And so the way we talk about consent a hundred years ago has to be different in some ways because sort of the base level of of agency involved in being able to make consent was much different than it is now. So yeah, neither of us intended to to make light of um of incest, especially when it involves children or to the victim blame. Um, I genuinely thought I was talking about a grown up. Yeah, So thank you so much. Katie and David. You are the only two that we heard from on the subject. But you both presented it so smartly and intelligently and kindly. It was not uh screaming at all. So even if it were screaming, I mean, I feel like that's the thing that is worth being screaming about. Uh. And based on past experience, I am sure that in the window of time between us recording this today and the episode coming out, we will probably ten or fifteen more emails about it, because that's sort of how it how it goes. But yeah, yeah, I apologize for having been insensitive. Likewise, I do as well. Apologies all around. Um. Back to lighter notes, though, If you would like to write to us, you can do that. We're at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. You can also find us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History, on Twitter at mist in History, at pinterest dot com, slash missed in History at missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and on Instagram at mist in history. If you would like to learn a little bit more about what we talked about today. Go to our parents site, how stuff Works. Type in Isaac Newton's name into the search bar and you will get an article called how Isaac Newton Works. You will also get an article questioning whether or not the Apple situation was real. You can also visit us online at missed in history dot com, where you'll find all of our episodes all the way back to when the podcast began and they were only three minutes long to present day. You'll find show notes on all of the episodes Tracy and I have worked on, and you will occasionally get some other goodies here and there. So we encourage you to come and visit us at Miston history dot com and how stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com. M

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm pray Cyvie Wilson. Uh. And today we're gonna talk about somebody and when we say his name, you're gonna go I know about him. I'm imagining having to break out my my doctored up version of our logo that turns it into like stuff you may have possibly missed in history class or somewhere else, but maybe not or it's maybe not about you personally. Yeah. But the cool thing is, as I often do, I did one of my informal polls. I even did one just now before we started recording with our sorcerer Noll, where when I say, oh, we're going to talk about Sir Issac Newton, and I was like, I know him, and I'm like, but what do you know about him? And once you get past the apple falling thing, people get real fuzzy. But it's just physics in general. Yeah, yeah, I mean people associate him with the theory of gravity, but his actual life story is way bigger than that. It's filled with twists and turns. There's some interesting um you know, kind of personality quirks involved. He worked in so many different fields and so it seems like a good time to sit back and actually talk about the life of this famous philosopher, mathematician, physicists, scientists and astronomer. And truly that list is sort of a scratching the surface situation. We are not going to go super heavy on the actual science and math concepts here is that probably is the stuff that you were taught in school theoretically, but we will hit some of the highlights, mostly just to give a sense of just how impactful Newton's work was and frankly still is. So to start the place we normally start. Isaac Newton was born on January fourth, sixteen forty three, in Woolsthorpe, England. You'll often see his birthday listed is December two. Neil de crass Tyson famously tweeted about that being his birthday. That date is actually also correct if you are using the old Julian calendar. And Isaac was a premature baby. He was weak and very fragile when he was born, and he was not expected to live very long. He also never knew his father, who he was named for, because the elder Isaac Newton died a few months before his son was born. His mother, Hannah Askew Newton, was a single parent for the first three years of the young boy's life. Yeah, and she did have the support of relatives, but in terms of direct parenting, she was the one UH and isaih relationship with his mother was really quite complicated, particularly in his early years, and many historians have pointed out that if you read his correspondence, it really suggests that this gave him an ongoing issue UH in terms of personality in dealing with the world. Because when he was three, Hannah left him to live with his grandmother. She had remarried to a man named Barnabas Smith, and she moved in with Smith and left her child behind. As Isaac reached school age, there were arrangements made for him to stay with an apothecary and grant them so he could go to King's School. There as the apothecary's lodger, Newton got his first introduction to chemistry, and mother and child were not reunited under one roof for quite some time until Hannah's second husband, again that was Burnaby Smith, died nine years after she married him, and at this point Isaac was twelve and his mother opted to take him out of school so that he could become a farmer like his father, who had in fact been very successful in agriculture. As is often the case when parents pick out a child's vocation for them, farming did not actually work out very well for Isaac Newton. He was bored to tears trying to care for the family's farm, and soon it was apparent that if he continued down that vocational path he would only meet with failures. So he got to go back to school, and once Isaac's basic education was completed, his uncle, who was a scholar, stepped in. He wanted to persuade Hannah that her son really should go to university. Isaac was certainly smart enough, but there was this issue of money to contend with. But in sixteen sixty one, Isaac Newton did indeed enroll at University of Cambridge's Trinity College, but he had to work to earn his place in the lecture hall. He cleaned and serviced the rooms of other students, and he waited tables, so basically he was set up on a program that was not unlike modern work study programs. He started out with the standard course load for any student at Cambridge, but as his time at school wore on, he was drawn more and more to the cutting edge science that was happening at the time. We would call this very basic science today. For the most part, the geocentric model of the heavenly bodies, which placed Earth at the center of all the celestial orbits, was still being hot, but the heliocentric model, which had been hinted at much earlier in the timeline and other cultures, had really been fleshed out and promoted by Nicholas Copernicus, Ico Brahey, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo. So while Isaac Newton was getting this old school education in his classes and his spare time outside of all of the various jobs that he took on to stay in school, he spent studying modern philosophy and science, and likely because he was burning the candle at both ends and frankly in the middle. Uh, Newton didn't really excel at university. He wasn't like a star student or anything. He did graduate, but that graduation didn't come with any special distinctions. Though. While he was working in his self directed extracurricular study, Newton wrote an important series of notes entitled Certain Philosophical Questions, and in these notes, in this work that he did on his own, really was the beginnings of what would later be called the scientific Revolution. After his graduation, he continued to study with a subsidy, and that was pretty much customary for the people who had earned the title of scholar. He did this until Cambridge University was forced to close temporarily in sixteen sixty five because of the spread of the Great Plague. After the university shuddered to wait out the plague of London, uh, Newton continued his studies, but he was just doing it on his own at home, which he had already been doing in his off time anyway, So presumably he was pretty uh accustomed to this whole self directed study thing, and this would actually end up being an incredibly important period of time for him and in truth for humanity. This is, for example, the period when the alleged Apple gravity revelation took place. An interesting thing to note here is that while this story in an extremely simplified form, is often told as though it's literally the first time anyone ever in history thought about a force pulling an apple down to Earth. What new And was really inspired to think about was the idea that the apple and the Earth's moon might both be governed by the same force. And there is some debate historically as to whether or not this magical apple moment ever actually happened, But what we do know is that Newton started to think about gravity and how it was not only applicable to things here on Earth, but to the other things out in the universe. And over the course of that year and a half spent in solo education, Newton really also so the seeds of a theory of color and light uh also a concept for infinitesimal calculus, and also a lot of significant astronomy concepts related to the movement of the planets which were also related to gravity. And these major lines of thinking would form the basis of a groundbreaking publication that he would write some years later, which we will talk about in just a bit. In sixteen sixty seven, Cambridge reopened after the plague and Isaac were tarns to the formal academic environment. As a minor fellow at Trinity College, he got a Master of Arts degree two years later while he was completing his graduate work, Newton wrote a paper entitled Anna Lysi, A Treatise on Infinite Series Mathematics. And Newton shared this work with his mentor, Isaac Barrow, who in turn showed it to other members of the mathematics community. And this really garnered Newton both attention and quite a bit of praise. And it was not long before Newton took over Barrow's chair at Cambridge when the mentor stepped down. And next we're going to talk about a small invention that garnered Newton some new attention. But first let's pause for a brief word from one of our fantastic sponsors. In sixteen sixty eight, Newton built a reflecting telescope. It was the first of its kind, and he did this as part of his lecture work in optics, which gained the attention of the Royal Society. He showed the apparatus there in sixteen seventy one. This led to the publication of his Notes on Optics in sixteen seventy two. This wasn't exactly a slam dunk in the world of science, though. While Newton's work had led him to believe that white light contained the entire spectrum of colors and was composed of particles. But the more common belief was that waves, rather than particles, made up light, and that colors were modified forms of homogeneous white light. And additionally, French physicist it may marry Out attempted to reproduce Newton's refraction experiment and he just was unable to do so. He could not do it. Uh So, Newton's papers on this matter were openly criticized, so much so that Newton, who frankly never really learned to handle criticism very well during his life at all, and I kind of identify with him in that regard. Uh He actually waited for most of the vehement critics of this particular line of thinking to die off before he agreed to formally publish his notes on light in the book Optics. Like he had published some of these notes in a smaller sense, but not in book form, and he just waited them out. He waited them out for three decades. He just wanted them all to die so that none of them could criticize his book when it came out. Well. And I think my question is whether these criticisms were criticisms or whether they were insults, because those are not the same thing, uh, he responded to. It seems in reading notes and biographical accounts of him, that he tended to respond to challenges to his line of thinking, whether it was genuine criticism and questioning or just an old school that was unwilling to accept new ideas, in almost exactly the same way. He just got really, really angry and a little bit petulant about it. Yeah, don't do that, dude. Constructive criticism is how we learn and get better. I say that, which sounds kind of sanctimonious because we're talking about Isaac Newton. He learned a lot of things. Yeah. Can you imagine what would have happened had he had he been had he figured out a way to work with criticism. So to continue on this subject of criticism, one of the most prominent and vocal critics of Isaac Newton's optics work was Robert Hook. The two men locked intellectual horns for years. As a result, Newton threatened to quit the Royal Society over the rift, although other members convinced him to stay. As the correspondence between the two of them raged on and on and finally reached a crescendo in sixty eight Newton actually had a nervous breakdown and stopped communicating with his rival altogether. Yeah. Again, he just struggled. This was something he never really got the hang of, was was being able to deal with people that wanted to challenge his work. Uh. And not long after this breakdown, Isaac's mother, Hannah died, and as you'll recall, that was a very weird and conflicted relationship and it really really affected him deeply. So that loss, on top of his already fragile mental state, led to a six year withdrawal from colleagues and most social interaction. So friends and associates, of course tried to reach out to him, and they would get replies, but they would be very brief, and instead, Isaac Newton chose to continue his own intellectual pursuits during this time, working kind of siloed off on his own, and he specifically focused on the areas of planetary orbits and the way that they're influenced by gravity. Very slowly, Newton began to correspond regularly on the topic with none other than his former rival Robert Hook. That two of them exchanged ideas, and Hook helped him work through concepts that would lead to formulas for calculating gravity's effect on planetary orbit. But again, although there was no argument this time or any kind of breakdown, Newton just abruptly stopped talking to him about it. So as easy years of working alone and occasionally only corresponding a little here and there were drawing to a close, and Isaac Newton began to once again become a little more sociable. Both he and Robert Hook spoke with Edmund Halley separately though about planetary orbits, and Halle actually first spoke with Hook, and then later he consulted with Newton about the shape of orbits based on the formula theory that Hook had described to him, and after hearing uh Isaac Newton talked about it, Halle was convinced that Newton really was onto something regarding his idea of elliptical orbits, and at this point Halle became a benefactor to Newton. He basically took care of his living expenses so that the mathematics of orbital paths could be the exclusive focus of Newton's time. In six seven, Newton published his work Prince Shipia, which is more formally known as Mathematical Principles of Natural philosophy. This was the result of a year and a half of work and it was really groundbreaking. It's been five It as the most influential of all physics books, establishing basically all the basic concepts still used in physics today, with the exception of energy. So if you remember your high school physics, you probably can recall Newton's laws of motion, which were part of Principia in the context of explaining the movement of celestial bodies. And I know we wouldn't talk a lot about the actual science and math, but we'll just go over them because in case you don't recognize of my name, you will once we start saying them. One is that a stationary body will stay stationary unless an external force is applied to it. Two is it forces equal to mass times acceleration, and a change in motion is proportional to the force applied. And three is for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So these are things we still talk about all the time. And this was in Newton's work Principia. Yes, it is like the basic basics of physics or just physical science class. Yeah, So this book was and still is hugely influential and that really just can't be overstated. It's not just about what we learned in elementary, middle and high school and science classes. Uh. If you wonder how on Earth astrophysicists are able to calculate the masses of planets that are billions of miles away, it's because of these principles that were established in the seven publication. If you've ever wondered how we figured out that tides are governed by gravity, that is in there too, So are numerous other concepts that are mind blowing to consider today. But Newton had worked out the concepts back in the seventeenth century, but again and again, tied to Robert Hook, Newton's work drew some controversy, so Hook became very public about claiming that Newton had in fact been copying his work and basically stole it by not crediting him, and this instantly re established the rivalry between them, and it was instantly just as intense as it ever was. And in a similar move as he had made in the previous round of vehement bickering, Newton's threatened to basically take his ball and bat and go home and stop working on the second edition of principia and not play with any of the scientific community anymore. Edmund Halley, of course, had spoken with both of the men about planetary orbits before becoming Newton's financial backer, so he knew that Newton's work on this book was legitimately his own work. However, Halle also wanted to find a way to make peace in the community, so he eventually convinced Newton to insert a note in the second edition giving credit to Hook for the concepts that he shared in the development of the mathematics involved. Yeah, it was basically thanking him for that correspondence back and forth when Newton was kind of working primarily on his own, but they were talking a little bit about gravity and planetary orbits together, so you would think that would like smooth things over. But in fact, from this point on, Hook's life really took a downturn. He was not satisfied by Newton's acknowledgement, and he became increasingly and openly bitter about Newton's success, and as a consequence, the pair never repaired their relationship after that. For Newton, the publication of Princeship Head brought him to an entirely new level of fame, it really expanded his professional and social circles quite significantly. And we're going to talk about the new spheres and causes that Isaac Newton found himself in as a consequence of his growing renown in just a moment. But first, let's pause and thank one of our great sponsors. So King James the Second, who ascended to the throne of England in six eight five for a relatively brief reign, created a major religious upheaval in the Anglican country as he attempted to promote Catholicism. So he advocated for religious freedom for Catholics, but he thought that they should continue the persecution of Presbyterian covenanters. Uh. Those are the very broad strokes of the religious situation. But the reason that King James the Second features into Newton's life story is that the monarch wanted to make universities into Catholic institutions. Isaac Newton firmly opposed this move, and as a very vocal challenger to the idea, he was elected as Cambridge's representative in Parliament in sixteen eighty nine. Newton, it should be noted, was not irreligious. Over the course of his life. He did think and write a great deal about God. He felt strongly that understanding Judeo Christian prophecy and mysticism was vital to understanding God. He wrote at one point that he felt that Christianity had kind of gotten off track in the fourth century, with incorrect doctrines regarding the nature of Christ being promoted by the Council of Nicia. And while this wasn't an announcement of religion, it was a very unorthodox view. So he was religious. He did believe in God, but he had a very unusual stance on the whole thing. Newton's influence continued to expand, so much so that educational reformers who wished to move away from teaching Aristotelian ideology looked to him as their public proponent for more modern curricula. They wanted to teach the concepts of the physical world that were represented in Newton's writings. Yeah, he basically promoted that for his entire life. And while he was at the height of his success, however, uh, you know, all of this was going great. He really had a lot of respect. He was a recognized leader in science. Isaac Newton had another nervous breakdown and this was in sixtee and this one was marked by him writing letters to friends and colleagues that were extremely paranoid. They were really accusatory missives in a lot of ways, you know, thinking that people were out to get him, and in general the tone of all of his correspondence just seemed entirely out of sorts. So his earlier breakdown was pretty clearly caused by ongoing hostilities with Robert Hook. The reasons for this one we're a little more nebulous. He was exhausted from his work, he had a falling out with one of his close friends. He was disappointed in his status with King William the Third. He may have even been dealing with mercury poisoning from years of work in a lab. But unlike the breakdown that Newton experienced in sixteen seventy eight, he seemed to quickly recover from this one in just a matter of months, so a far cry from the six years of seclusion that he had receded into the first time he had a mental break And this time he kind of came around. As we said, he apologized to his friends in writing, and he went right back to work as though it had never happened, although at this point his interests had suddenly largely shifted away from science and instead this is really a time when he was intent on ruminating on alchemy and philosophy and considering the metaphysical. This is really when he wrote a lot about the religion that we mentioned just a few moments ago. Once that episode behind him, Isaac Newton's life once again got a lot brighter. He had long wanted to be appointed to a government position, and not getting one from King William the Third was one of the things that had strained his relationship with the monarch. But finally, in sixteen ninety six, he was made Warden of the Mints, and this marked the end of his time lecturing at Cambridge. So this may seem like sort of a random position to put a renowned scientist into, but here is how Newton finally won his much coveted government job. His niece, Catherine Barton, was Lord Halifax's mistress at the time, and it was Halifax who used his influence to secure the position for his paramour's uncle. To his credit, though Isaac Newton didn't just sit back and collect this government income. He took his job as the Master of the mint extremely seriously, and this happened to be an interesting time in England in terms of currency. Yeah. So, to set it up, in the late sixteen hundreds, English coins were still being minted in silver. The value of the material that was used to make the coins was actually worth more than the currency itself, and this led to a number of illicit activities. So initially the problem was that coins were sometimes being clipped or shaved around their edges so that they were still recognized as legal tender, but the person doing the clipping could then amass all of these clippings and shavings so that the silver could be melted down for other uses and sold. Eventually, the minting process was updated to make coins with milled edges that would deter clipping and shaving practices. But what this ended up doing was fostering a huge counterfeit and money market in England. Would be crooks would try to fill the gap in their incomes that they had been making through clipping by counterfeiting instead. Yeah, they would basically cast a mold from an actual coin, and then they would just start issuing their own basically with cheaper materials and counterfeiting coins at this point was considered treason, so it was classified as a high crime. And by Newton's reckoning, a full twenty of the coins in England when he took his job as Master of the Mint were in fact counterfeits, so that's one fifth of the circulating currency that was not real, and he made it his mission to find as many counterfeiters as he could. Newton was not the least bit wary of venturing into very unsavory areas and establishments. While he carried out this work, he became kind of an expert investigator, and he applied his rigorous scientific examination skills to his criminal investigations. He even went so far as to become credential in law so that he could perform cross examinations on suspects during their trials, and over the course of several years, Newton was able to successfully prosecute twenty counterfeiters. He had taken in many more, but those are the ones that were found guilty, and all of them were put to death for their crimes in The French Academy of Sciences named him one of eight foreign Associates. When seventeen o three he became President of the Royal Society. In seventeen o five he was knighted, So you would think at some point in this esteemed career he might be free of drama. That that would be wrong. The same year that he was knighted got freed. Leibniz, who was a German mathematician, asserted that he had developed the ideas of infinitesmal calculus years before Newton had published his own works on the subject. Yeah, I didn't ever find I'm sure it's out there somewhere, it just didn't turn up in my work on this particular project. Why he waited so long because this is quite a ways after Newton was publishing these ideas, So we don't know why Leibniz waited so long to say that it was his work. But these accusations persisted for years until finally in seventeen twelve. So remember it was seventeen o five when this whole business started, so this dragged on for seven years. Uh, this matter was finally investigated by the Royal Society and Newton was found to be the original mathematician to work on these concepts. Though we should point out that he did have a decidedly unfair advantage in the proceedings as he had as Royal Society President selected the investigation committee members. I was sort of startled throughout this at how cut through the mathematics and science world was, at least as it swirled around Isaac Newton. This was actually not the only intellectual skirmish that he had while he was the Royal Society President. In fact, he had a really negative reputation in that role. There were even people who called him a tyrant. He published the notes of astronomer Astronomer John Flamsteed without that man's permission, after Flamsteed didn't provide him with the notes he wanted for an update to the Principia as quickly as he wanted them. Yeah, it is kind of another case of like a footstompy kind of reaction. And we should point out that John Flamsteed had gathered an unreal amount of data. Newton's demands for specific notes we're probably a little bit unreasonable. That would be like somebody going, hey, run to the library and get me these three things in a library that's massive and that they, you know, are still sorting out. So it was kind of a a little bit of an unreasonable demand Flamsteed eventually sought out and won a court order demanding that Newton ceased the permission list publication of his work. This is one of the few times that in all of these skirmishes that Newton got into with other people that he actually kind of came out on the losing end. And his eighties, Newton started experiencing poor health, specifically digestive problems, and this took its hole on his overall well being. On March seventy seven, he got a really severe pain in his abdomen and he blacked out shortly thereafter. He remained unconscious until he died the next day at the age of eighty four. He held the position of Master of the Mint until he the day that he died. He was also still the President of the Royal Society, having been re elected every year in spite of sentiments that he was sometimes abusing his power in that position, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey in a very lavish ceremony. While he was lauded as a genius both before and after his death and even still today, the sad truth is that Isaac Newton was likely very lonely. He never married. He didn't have many close friends. He seemed to have some issues of insecurity, possibly tied to the absence of parents in his life as a child. Because he was mired in so many plagiarism battles, he never really became comfortable with the idea of collaborating with his colleagues, so he missed out on opportunities to forge forge relationships with his peers in the math and science community. But of course it's pretty undeniable that he changed the course of science and human history in fact with his work. In December, an original copy of his Principia, which had been presented to King James the Second, went up for auction with a value range of four hundred thousand to six hundred thousand dollars. When the bidding was over, the book sold for three of its estimate, at two point five million dollars. Yeah, that's one of those very rare and coveted items, both within sort of a book collector's community and in the scientific community. I did not look up or no, if it's even available who made that purchase. But uh so, that is the life and times a ster Isaac Newton. I think it's it's more interesting and a little bit more dramatic than people may suspect if they only know the happy version of the apple in the tree gravity moments, right, uh, and the scientific genius moment. Yeah. I mean he was undoubtedly a genius, but very complicated man. Fascinating and how he would become obsessed withvarious things at various points in his life. Um. I like the part where he was hunting down counterfeiters. How could you not? I mean, that's a fascinating tale. So now we have two bits of listener mail. They're related to the same thing. Um, And do you want me to read one and you read one and then we'll discuss That sounds great because it is an important topic. Um. It's related to our discussion in the History Mystery double feature podcast, particularly the one where we talked about hinter Kfik. And the first one that we received was from our listener Katie. She said, Hi, I hate to send a correction, and I'm sure it's been said already, but in your most recent episode, you discussed incest in a way that unintentionally blames victims of parental child incest. You referred to it as a quote affair between the father and daughter, and this implies that there was consent and even desire on the part of the daughter. Even in instances where the daughter would claim consent, there is an unfair power dynamic at play similar to the reas and the statutory rape is illegal. This dynamic makes it impossible for the victim to have full autonomy in the interaction. I feel like you guys are such advocates for women that you might want to be aware of how phrasing of these topics can unintentionally victim blame. I love your podcast and sent you another email within the last week being a total goober fangirl about it. Thank you so much for reading. Thank you so much for that email, Katie, and then I will hand it to Tracy for the other one. This one is from David, and David says, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I've long enjoyed the podcast and have recently gotten back to listening to it after a hiatus. I appreciate the reporting, the depth of research, and the adenda provided by listeners during the listener mail segment, and I also love your occasional interviews with historians. On rare occasions, hosts over the years have mangled the pronunciations of some foreign words. We all chalk that up to our different educational backgrounds. But in the hinter k f podcast, I was shocked to hear one of you make an insensitive comment regarding incest. Tracy said that the hinter k Fi murders reminded her of a more recent mass murder, and went on to say that the daughter in that case may, as with hinter Kfek, have been quote having an affair with the daughter. I take issue with that phrase. Most of us would agree that incestuous quote affairs can occur between consenting adults, like the siblings on Game of Thrones, but a father does not have an incestuous quote affair with his young daughter that is, in fact rape. I was especially surprised to hear this coming from a young female podcaster. I'd love it if you would make a quick correction in an upcoming listener male portion of the show, and at the very least, please be more sensitive to such issues in the future. They will certainly come up again at some point if history teaches us anything. Sincerely, David, it was me who said that I'd want to clarify first of all, or you have you like like you want to say a thing. Oh no, I think I may have said the one that Katie mentioned earlier when I was talking about the groupers at hinter Kafik, And then there was a second one that came up when you mentioned a likened scenario. Right, So we we both misspoke. Well we both misspoke, But I also do want to make it very clear that your your research on this. The woman you were talking about was thirty five years old, and I was speaking extemporaneously about a case that I learned about when I was fifteen, which was twenty five years ago. In my memory, the daughter in that case was also an adult. Um. I actually looked up after getting David's note, and I was expecting to find that she was in her mid twenties when that murder happened. She actually was not. She was younger than that, which I had completely remembered Wrongly. That's definitely not language I would use when talking about a father and a child. But like in my memory, this was a father and an adult, which is still definitely taboo. There is still definitely a train of thought that no person can ever consent to sexual activity with a parent because of the power dynamic. I don't. I don't think that's a you of burstell idea, but it is definitely one that exists. But yeah, I absolutely would not have framed it that way if I had remembered correctly that the daughter in that case was only seventeen. I remembered her as being a grown up. Uh, probably because she was older than I was when I read the book about that murder when I was fifteen, Right, So yeah, I mean, I apologize for having dismayed anyone or or victim. Believe that certainly would not be either of our intense. There was definitely some stuff that I found, and you may recall if you listen to that podcast that I mentioned at the end that some of the stuff I was looking at was online but was Bavarian legal records, and one of them was, but I couldn't verify that it was legitimate, which is why I did not bring it up on the podcast, but it completely seated in my brain. Um, there was one that claimed that in fact, Victoria and her father had been charged with incest and it went through an actual like trial situation and they were both found guilty. So I think in my head that automatically gave her a level of I don't want to say blame, That's not what I'm saying, but uh more of an equal footing because they both were found guilty in the same way, even though that may not have been the actual situation. I think my brain just went and moved on. I didn't want to Um. Yeah, I certainly would not, and I recognize that even if you were a thirty five year old woman, you still are not probably equal in the power dynamic to your father, and especially when there is this overlay of sexuality to the whole thing. It's a very complicated issue. So again well created by the fact that the period of time when we were talking about, as a general rule, all women were in a subordinate power position to to all men. I mean all is probably too strong a word, but overwhelmingly like women in general not have the same lafe level of agency that women do today. And so the way we talk about consent a hundred years ago has to be different in some ways because sort of the base level of of agency involved in being able to make consent was much different than it is now. So yeah, neither of us intended to to make light of um of incest, especially when it involves children or to the victim blame. Um, I genuinely thought I was talking about a grown up. Yeah, So thank you so much. Katie and David. You are the only two that we heard from on the subject. But you both presented it so smartly and intelligently and kindly. It was not uh screaming at all. So even if it were screaming, I mean, I feel like that's the thing that is worth being screaming about. Uh. And based on past experience, I am sure that in the window of time between us recording this today and the episode coming out, we will probably ten or fifteen more emails about it, because that's sort of how it how it goes. But yeah, yeah, I apologize for having been insensitive. Likewise, I do as well. Apologies all around. Um. Back to lighter notes, though, If you would like to write to us, you can do that. We're at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. You can also find us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History, on Twitter at mist in History, at pinterest dot com, slash missed in History at missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and on Instagram at mist in history. If you would like to learn a little bit more about what we talked about today. Go to our parents site, how stuff Works. Type in Isaac Newton's name into the search bar and you will get an article called how Isaac Newton Works. You will also get an article questioning whether or not the Apple situation was real. You can also visit us online at missed in history dot com, where you'll find all of our episodes all the way back to when the podcast began and they were only three minutes long to present day. You'll find show notes on all of the episodes Tracy and I have worked on, and you will occasionally get some other goodies here and there. So we encourage you to come and visit us at Miston history dot com and how stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com. M