Isaac Newton lost a fortune in a stock bubble.
He is said to have lost about £20,000 in the South Sea Company in 1720, remarking that he could calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
The events
- The South Sea Bubble1720 · London. Between January and August 1720 South Sea Company shares soared from £128 to £1,000, then crashed, ruining thousands. Among the losers was Isaac Newton, said to have lost about £20,000. The episode helped make "bubble" the word for a speculative mania.
- Newton's Principia1687 · London. Isaac Newton published the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, setting out his three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. One mechanics for heaven and Earth became the foundation of classical physics.
More amazing facts
- 1718 Blackbeard held the people of a whole city hostage — and asked for a chest of medicine.
- 1718 · 1727 Blackbeard and Isaac Newton were contemporaries.
- 1720 Pirates had their own injury insurance.
- 1720 Two women pirates escaped the gallows because they were pregnant.
- 1721 Boston learned smallpox inoculation from an enslaved African man. Onesimus told his owner, the minister Cotton Mather, that this was how people at home protected themselves, and in the 1721 epidemic the inoculated died far less often.
- 1722 · 1795 The Chinese emperor Qianlong abdicated so as not to reign longer than his grandfather.