Free Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson Page B

watchmaking had advanced a good deal by the mid-1670s. The spiral balance spring, invented by Robert Hooke, stored enough energy and released it precisely enough to allow small, hand-held clocks and watches to keep time accurate to minutes instead of hours—a key step in the evolution of timekeeping. Apprentices usually spent seven years learning the intricacies of clockwork. Balance springs would be used to drive clockwork puppet shows by the early eighteenth century, and it is possible to imagine early attempts to make pornographic displays. Yet it is doubtful that a former nailer's assistant could have mastered the art swiftly enough to begin making his own mechanical automata so soon.
    More likely, Chaloner created his own variant of what were then being sold as toy watches. A watch was a mark of status, craved even (or especially) by those who could not afford the real thing. To meet that demand, London craftsmen began making imitations. Surviving examples—most recovered from the tidal margins of the Thames—all have the same basic design: two pieces of pewter, each cast into roughly the shape of half a pocket watch. One half would have a crude dial pressed into it, the other would be decorated with an echo of a gentleman's watch case. The two halves were soldered together and sold as a kind of affordable fashion accessory. Chaloner's metalworking knowledge would have been sufficient for this kind of work—and for the innovation of incorporating dildos into the pieces. He does not seem to have made much money at the scheme. But as his biographer hinted, this brief foray into the fringes of the sex trade was significant not so much for the loose change he managed to pick up as for the looser associates who thereby found him. Some of those new friends aided Chaloner in his next and more successful enterprise, which was built on another basic fact of seventeenth-century urban life: the relentless pressure of infectious disease.
    The plague had not returned after the epidemic that ended in 1667, but thanks to London's crowding, its choking air, and its primitive hygiene, deadly disease was always present. Smallpox remained a scourge for both highborn and low. Londoners died of typhus as well—picked up so easily in the prisons that it became known as jail fever. Winters brought tuberculosis and influenza, and in summer, mosquitoes distributed malaria while the swarming flies spread dysentery, infant diarrhea, and more. Children were unbelievably vulnerable. Thirty-five to forty of every hundred children in London died before the age of two. Prosperity was not much protection. The Quakers, a reasonably well-off group and one of the least affected by the plague of cheap gin available throughout the city, lost about two-thirds of their children before the age of five. Virtually all parents would bury at least one infant.
    William Chaloner knew a gold mine when he saw it. True medical expertise was expensive, scarce, and often ineffective, while the terror of disease supported a legion of folk doctors, fakers, patent medicine peddlers, confidence men and women. According to his biographer, in order to "satisfy an itching desire he had to be Extravagant," Chaloner found "a Companion little better than himself who had agreed together to set up for Piss-Pot Prophets, or Quack-Doctors."
    The key to a quack's success lay in his ability to convince the desperate, and here the young man from Birmingham demonstrated the gift that would advance all his later endeavors. His biographer moralized, but recognized his skill nonetheless: "Chaloner having the greatest Stock of Impudence, and the best knack at Tongue-pudding, (the most necessary Ingredients in such a Composition) 'twas resolv'd that he sho'd personate the Master Doctor, and his Comrade bear the Character of his Servant."
    Chaloner starred in the role, able to cajole, to wheedle, to command audiences to accept his authority as a man of uncommon skill and