Specific gravity: Isaac Newton’s beer mug found after 350 years

This is not a flagon that has seen many drunken nights. It seems unlikely that in its 350 years it has spent much time raised lustily in student digs, swung aloft to raucous singing or with its contents being downed in one.

On the other hand, while in those student digs it did herald the arrival of modern physics.

Its owner, historians now think, was almost certainly Sir Isaac Newton: renowned scientist, less renowned party animal.

And for the first time in 170 years, after having its provenance confirmed by a new historical study, the mug is to go on display at the Royal Society, the organisation Newton once led as its president.

The mug’s story begins, though, at Trinity College, Cambridge. There, in the 17th century, two like-minded nerds met: Newton and John Wickins.

Wickins’s son later wrote of the encounter: “My Fathers first Chamber-fellow being very disagreeable to him he retired one day to the walks where he found Mr Newton solitary & dejected; Upon entering into discourse they found their cause of Retirement the same.”

Both had been lumbered with less scholarly, more unruly room-mates. They resolved “to shake off their present disorderly Companions & Chum together”.

For 20 years, they lived alongside each other — and a wooden beer flagon, shaped like a barrel. When Newton left Cambridge, we know he passed the flagon on. Then, so the story went, it stayed with the Wickins family, who preserved it and “valorised it as a symbol of their friendship”, said Stephen Snobelen, a historian of science at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

But is this really the same mug that, from next week, will be on display in the Royal Society? The story of the mug’s validation, of the careful tracing of its chain of custody, begins not in Cambridge, but in Canada — when a student approached Snobelen with a story about another lecturer, Carmichael Wallace.

“He came up to me after class one day and said, ‘I have a prof who owns Isaac Newton’s beer mug’. And I said, ‘No. It’s a great story, but it’s highly unlikely’ — and in Halifax, of all places,” Snobelen said. His suspicion was reasonable.

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Newton has his share of relics. There are fragments of the famed apple tree. There are locks of his hair. There is the prism he used to split light. Many are fake.

DNA shows that “Newton’s locks” come from different heads. “Newton’s prism” could not have produced the angles seen in his calculations.

But the flagon? Snobelen got digging.

Over the three centuries that followed, it made occasional appearances. There was a mention — and illustration — in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1802. The writer, James Wickins, explained how he keeps it “as a valuable relique, it being given to my grandfather by Sir Isaac Newton, who was his contemporary and intimate friend”.

In 1852, it wenton show in Salisbury and a poem was written in its honour: “Sir Izaak Newton’s Flagon too/ Perfect and polished met the view/ As, when the Cam beside/ The “nut-brown ale” its owner quaffed.” It then passed to a different family.

In a paper in the journal Notes and Records, Snobelen traces each owner until the present day — and its first exhibition (so far without poetry) since the 19th century.

What, though, would Newton make of finding his shabby old beer flagon in a glass case 350 years later? “You could argue it’s a secular holy relic,” Snobelen said.

This is not something he would raise a glass to. “Newton was a puritan. I think he probably would have been not entirely happy; he was very much against idolatry.”