Isaac Newton lived here

On a visit earlier this month to London I walked the 500-meter length of Jermyn Street in the St. James’s district of Westminster. The narrow one-way street is famous for its bespoke shirtmakers and other high-end men’s clothing shops. A bronze statue of George Bryan “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840), the arbiter of men’s fashion in Regency England, stands on the street as a celebration of that tradition.

That day I chanced to look up from one of the shopfronts and spotted the plaque shown below. I had no idea that Isaac Newton had lived on the street.

When and why did Newton live on Jermyn Street? Newton moved to London in April 1696 to become warden of the Royal Mint, which was based outside the Tower of London at the time. According to Andrew McNab’s website Isaacnewton.org.uk , Newton’s first London abode was likely the warden’s residence inside the castle. But by November of that year he had moved to “a more pleasant house at 88 Jermyn Street,” as McNabb put it.

Number 88 might have indeed been pleasant. Jermyn street was developed around 1664 by Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans. Far enough west to have been spared from the Great Fire of London of 1666, the houses on Jermyn Street would have been modern in Newton’s day. After spending four years at number 88, Newton moved next door to number 87, where he lived until 1709.

Besides running the mint, Newton was a member of the Royal Society and served as its president from 1703 until his death in 1727. At the start of that span, the society met in Arundel House, the London residence of the Duke of Norfolk. By 1710 the society had moved to a new permanent home that Newton had secured in Crane Court.

Both Arundel House, which was demolished by one of the Dukes of Norfolk to make way for real-estate development, and the house at Crane Court, which was also demolished , lay about a mile east of Newton’s Jermyn Street house. The Royal Mint was two miles farther east.

Newton could well have walked to and from the Royal Society and the Royal Mint. According to his biographer, David Brewster (1781–1868), the great physicist remained strong and vigorous into his 80s. Still, one wonders why he chose to live so far from his professional offices.

My hunch is that Newton, like many well-to-do Londoners to this day, favored the more salubrious environs of the western side of the city over the bustling commercial center. Indeed, Newton’s last London residence —and the house where he died on 20 March 1727—was in Kensington, which was still in the countryside at the time.

Marking physics history

On the flight back to my adopted home of Washington, DC, I wondered which famous physicists were born or lived in the US capital. From my airplane seat I could recall two: Nobel laureates Norman Ramsey and David Gross. When I consulted Wikipedia on my return, I discovered three more Nobel laureates who were born in DC: Robert Richardson, Raymond Davis Jr, and Adam Riess.

Further investigation revealed that Gross and Richardson lived in Arlington, Virginia, not in DC itself. Ramsey’s father worked for the US Army Ordnance Corps in a position that entailed frequent moves. Young Norman did not live in Washington for long. Riess went to high school in New Jersey.

Davis, however, spent his childhood and early adulthood in Washington. Born in 1914, he attended the city’s public schools and took classes at the nearby campus of the University of Maryland. He also appeared to have enjoyed his time in DC. In the autobiography he wrote for the Nobel Prize Foundation, the discoverer of solar neutrinos recounted playing street games on summer evenings with his younger brother Warren and paddling a canoe on the Potomac River. “My favorite reading matter,” he wrote, “was Smithsonian reports on many phases of science, obtained at my local branch library. Washington offered many educational opportunities for curious young minds.”

The US equivalent of a blue plaque is the historical marker. Thanks to the historical marker database , I found three of them in DC that relate to physics. All are associated with and were erected by George Washington University. They commemorate Niels Bohr’s announcement of the atomic age on 26 January 1939, Edward Teller’s tenure as a physics professor from 1935 to 1945, and George Gamow’s tenure as a physics professor from 1934 to 1956.

It would be nice if someone erected a marker for Davis too.