Odd People
Isaac Newton
He pushed a needle into his own eye
To find out whether colour is made inside the eye, he slid a bodkin between eyeball and bone and wrote down what happened.
A notebook from around 1665 records the following. He slid a blunt needle — a bodkin — between his eyeball and the bone of the socket and pressed. Coloured circles appeared. He drew them in the margin.
The question was this: does colour come from outside, or does the eye make it? If pressing the eye produces colour without any light, then some part of colour is manufactured at our end.
He also stared at the Sun for extended periods, and had to shut himself in a dark room for days afterwards. He used his own body as apparatus.
This stayed hidden for a long time. When the papers came up at auction in 1936, Keynes bought and read them, and concluded that Newton was not the first of the age of reason but the last of the magicians.
In later life, as Master of the Mint, he hunted counterfeiters himself — going in disguise to taverns, gathering witnesses, prosecuting more than twenty men. Those convicted were hanged.
The question that remainsIf the man who reduced the world to equations spent half his hours trying to make gold — what was driving him?