Hacker News Reader

Related ongoing thread:

The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490644 - Sept 2023 (26 comments) - (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37499206)

Normally we downweight follow-ups but this is too good. Even the parentheticals are good ("the only thing ever recorded spoken by him [in Parliament] is a request to close the window)".

View on HN

I wonder where that comes from (is it apocryphal?) as prior to Hansard - which itself is not always verbatim and is the body that records the daily goings-on in the Houses of Parliament - there was very little documented on what was actually said in Parliament - let alone who said it.

It's a nice anecdote if nothing else.

Ah good point. As someone with a hair trigger for misattributed quotes I should have been more suspicious.

I dug deeper in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517597 — it's mentioned in many books, but Newton's very thorough biographer Richard Westfall authoritatively says “According to a story that rests solely on anecdotal authority, he spoke only once”. So in fact we can be fairly confident it's only an anecdote and nothing more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com