More Disputes

Newton was contentious, and his most persistent opponent was the equally contentious
Robert Hooke. The Newton story is not complete without two more accounts
of Newton in rancorous dispute. The first of these was a battle over astronomical
data. John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, had a series of
observations of the Moon, which Newton believed he needed to verify and refine
his lunar perturbation theory. Flamsteed reluctantly supplied the requested observations,
but Newton found the data inaccurate, and Flamsteed took offense at
his critical remarks.
About ten years later, Newton was still not satisfied with his lunar theory and
still in need of Flamsteed’s Moon data. He was now president of the Royal Society,
and with his usual impatience, took advantage of his position and attempted
to force Flamsteed to publish a catalogue of the astronomical data. Flamsteed
resisted. Newton obtained the backing of Prince George, Queen Anne’s
husband, and Flamsteed grudgingly went ahead with the catalogue.
The scope of the project was not defined. Flamsteed wanted to include with
his own catalogue those of previous astronomers from Ptolemy to Hevelius, but
Newton wanted just the data needed for his own calculations. Flamsteed stalled
for several years, Prince George died, and as president of the Royal Society, Newton
assumed dictatorial control over the Astronomer Royal’s observations. Some
of the data were published as Historia coelestis (History of the Heavens) in 1712,
with Halley as the editor. Neither the publication nor its editor was acceptable
to Flamsteed.
Newton had won a battle but not the war. Flamsteed’s political fortunes rose,
and Newton’s declined, with the deaths of Queen Anne in 1714 and Montague
in 1715. Flamsteed acquired the remaining copies of Historia coelestis, separated
Halley’s contributions, and “made a sacrifice of them to Heavenly Truth” (meaning
that he burned them). He then returned to the project he had planned before
Newton’s interference, and had nearly finished it when he died in 1719. The task
was completed by two former assistants and published as Historia coelestis britannica
in 1725. As for Newton, he never did get all the data he wanted, and
was finally defeated by the sheer difficulty of precise lunar calculations.
Another man who crossed Newton’s path and found himself in an epic dispute
was Gottfried Leibniz. This time the controversy concerned one of the most precious
of a scientist’s intellectual possessions: priority. Newton and Leibniz both
claimed to be the inventors of calculus.
There would have been no dispute if Newton had published a treatise composed
in 1666 on his fluxion method. He did not publish that, or indeed any
other mathematical work, for another forty years. After 1676, however, Leibniz
was at least partially aware of Newton’s work in mathematics. In that year, Newton wrote two letters to Leibniz, outlining his recent research in algebra and on
fluxions. Leibniz developed the basic concepts of his calculus in 1675, and published
a sketchy account restricted to differentiation in 1684 without mentioning
Newton. For Newton, that publication and that omission were, as Westfall puts
it, Leibniz’s “original sin, which not even divine grace could justify.”
During the 1680s and 1690s, Leibniz developed his calculus further to include
integration, Newton composed (but did not publish) his De quadratura (quadrature
was an early term for integration), and John Wallis published a brief account
of fluxions in volume 2 of his Algebra. In 1699, a former Newton prote´ge´,
Nicholas Fatio de Duillier, published a technical treatise, Lineae brevissimi (Line
of Quickest Descent), in which he claimed that Newton was the first inventor,
and Leibniz the second inventor, of calculus. A year later, in a review of Fatio’s
Lineae, Leibniz countered that his 1684 book was evidence of priority.
The dispute was now ignited. It was fueled by another Newton disciple, John
Keill, who, in effect, accused Leibniz of plagiarism. Leibniz complained to the
secretary of the Royal Society, Hans Sloane, about Keill’s “impertinent accusations.”
This gave Newton the opportunity as president of the society to appoint
a committee to review the Keill and Leibniz claims. Not surprisingly, the committee
found in Newton’s favor, and the dispute escalated. Several attempts to
bring Newton and Leibniz together did not succeed. Leibniz died in 1716; that
cooled the debate, but did not extinguish it. Newtonians and Leibnizians confronted
each other for at least five more years.