Isaac Newton was not a handsome man.
The lines around his face deepened with age. His long, pointed nose and deep-set gaze revealed his serious nature. After putting on weight in middle age, he looked somewhat gentler, though his face also bore the marks of power and a life of comfort.
After being knighted, he presented the image of an aristocrat with a bright future: he wore a wig and black robes, and decorated his home with elegance. He had developed a deep fascination with crimson while still at Trinity College, Cambridge. Crimson was everywhere among his furniture and daily necessities, and this obsession may have arisen from the optical experiments he conducted around 1670.
By roughly the mid-1660s, Newton had already been able to use prisms to show that light was composed of multiple colors. In his 1666 paper "On Colors," he wrote that pure red light, after passing through a second prism, produced no colored light other than red, while pure blue light, after passing through a second prism, likewise produced no colored light other than blue.
The prevailing view at the time was that light changed or was modified after passing through a "dark" medium, but Newton's refraction experiments showed the opposite. Yet this simple experiment did not satisfy him. He needed a clearer, quantifiable way to prove his theory.
Beginning at the end of 1669, Newton made repeated trips to London to buy experimental equipment and materials. Because of the Great Plague of 1665 and the fire that followed, London was then being rebuilt. Many outsiders had entered the city, and public order was neither particularly good nor particularly bad. Even though the city government imposed severe punishments—thieves could be hanged—petty theft could not be stamped out. People still brought goods of dubious origin to secondhand