A book by Isaac Newton lost for a century is auctioned: its price is in the millions

The book optics by Isaac Newton, material that has been missing for more than a hundred years, will be auctioned with a base of over four hundred thousand dollars.

opticsis an illuminating treatise on Newton’s analysis of the fundamental nature of light, and is considered one of the three major works on the optics of the Scientific revolution.

The book will be sold at the San Francisco Rare Book Fairwhich runs from February 3-5, and is expected to top out at a whopping $460,000.

The story of Isaac Newton’s book which will be auctioned at a record price

David DiLaura, a book collector, discovered Isaac Newton’s copy during the COVID pandemic, while sorting through his collection.

While organizing his collection, DiLaura, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, found a copy optics, from Newton, which he had purchased 20 years earlier.

The book plaque indicated that it was a second edition printed in 1717 and that it had been owned by James Musgrave. However, closer inspection revealed a second plaque, hidden by the first, which revealed that the previous owner was Charles Huggins.

Searching for the two names, DiLaura learned that, upon Newton’s death without a will in 1727, his books and other possessions were acquired by an individual named John Huggins.who gave them to his son Charles, rector of Oxfordshire.

The objects passed into the hands of Charles’s successor as rector, James Musgrave, e they were passed down from generation to generation before large numbers of them were sold in the 1920s.

The book was then considered lost until DiLaura’s discovery.

How is “Opticks”, the book by Isaac Newton

The book was first published in 1704 and was the culmination of decades of the physicist’s investigations into the nature of light.

​Unlike its more famous Mathematics principlewhich expounded the three laws of motion and was written in Latin, Newton wrote optics in popular English and vernacular, which made it accessible to a wider audience.

In its pages, Newton explains how glass prisms can break down white light and constitute it with the constituent colors of the optical spectrum; pronounces on the debate whether light is a particle or a wave, which Newton believes to be a particle, which he calls a corpuscle.

optics describes how our perception of color is due to the way a material absorbsselectively transmits or reflects different colors of white light.

Newton’s fascination with light and how we perceive it made his experiments not only painstaking but also painful.

As a young woman, she stuck a long sewing needle into her eye, between the bone and the eyeball, to target the retina.

Studying the bright spots produced in his vision by the horrible sting and comparing his notes with those taken on the dissection of a rabbit’s eye,

So Newton confirmed that the eye acted much like a pinhole camera, reversing images on the wall of the retina that the brain would later reverse to build our sense of sight.