A pristine personal copy of Isaac Newton’s ‘Opticks’ that was recently found after disappearing for a century is up for auction.
Newton’s illuminating treatise examines the fundamental nature of easy and is considered one of the three major works on optics of the Scientific Revolution. The long-lost copy was discovered by a book collector David DiLaura while sorting through his collection during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book is set to be sold at the San Francisco Rare Book Fair from February 3-5 and is expected to fetch a staggering $460,000.
While organizing his collection, DiLaura, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, found a copy of Newton’s Opticks that he had purchased 20 years earlier. The bookplate indicated that the book was a second edition printed in 1717 and previously owned by a man named James Musgrave. Closer examination, however, revealed a second exhibit hidden by the first—revealing that the previous owner was Charles Huggins.
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Researching the two names, DiLaura learned that after Newton died intestate in 1727, his books and other possessions were purchased by an individual named John Huggins, who gifted them to his son Charles, a rector in Oxfordshire. The items were handed down to Charles’ successor as rector, James Musgrave, and passed down the generations before a large number of items were sold in 1920. The book was then considered lost until DiLaura’s discovery.
Newton’s Opticks was first published in 1704 and was the culmination of the physicist’s decades of investigation into the nature of light. Unlike his more famous Principia Mathematica, which outlined the three laws of motion and was written in Latin, Newton wrote Opticks in popular, vernacular English, making it accessible to a wider audience.
Among the many discoveries detailed in its pages, Newton explained how glass prisms could decompose white light and reconstitute it with the constituent colors of the optical spectrum; weighed in on the debate over whether light is a particle or a wave (he believed it was a particle, which he called a corpuscle); and described how our perception of color comes from how a material selectively absorbs, transmits, or reflects different colors in white light.
Newton’s fascination with light and how we perceive it made his experiments not only painstaking but also painful. As a young man, he stuck a long, blunt sewing needle (a bodkin) into his eye between the bone and the eyeball to puncture the retina underneath. By studying the bright spots in his vision that the terrifying survey produced, and comparing his notes with those taken from dissecting a rabbit’s eye, Newton confirmed that the eye acted more like a pinhole camera—inverting the images on the retinal wall that it- it would be the brain. later to build our sense of vision.
The copy of Opticks found by DiLaura is believed to be one of two personal editions that originally belonged to Newton; it is the original counterpart of his working copy, which is replete with annotations, edits, and marginalia, and is preserved in the Huntington Library collection. Personal copies and first editions of Newton’s books are incredibly rare and can be expected to sell for a high price. In 2016, a Latin first edition of Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” was sold at Christie’s in New York for $3.7 million to an undisclosed buyer, making it the most expensive science book ever sold at auction.