Awesome story! And all this before 28…

Though not a contender for “greatest counterfeiter”, there is also William Chaloner (1650–1699), who had a similar idea (“the safest place from which to pass his money was the Mint itself”), and did battle with Sir Isaac Newton. There's a great book about this called Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson; I wrote a blog post about it some years ago, with the subtitle “What happens when Newton’s laws are violated”: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/dont-mess-with-a... (aside: the free wordpress.com hosting injects lots of ads these days sadly)