How a book about fish nearly sank Isaac Newton’s Principia
Ian Sample wrote a piece for The Guardian on how a book about fish nearly bankrupted the Royal Society, nearly resulting in Isaac Newton’s hugely important Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which stated Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, never being published.
Though Ray and Willughby’s masterpiece delayed the publication of Newton’s Principia, it was saved from obscurity by Edmund Halley, then Clerk at the Royal Society, who raised the funds to publish the work, providing much of the money from his own pocket. The Principia was eventually published in 1687.
After publishing the work, the Royal Society told Halley it could no longer afford his salary and offered to pay him in unsold copies of the Historia Piscium instead.
