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1835, Great Britain. Unique Athenaeum Member's Ticket/Isaac Newton Silver Medal.

Mint year: after 1835
References: D & W –, MG –. Very Rare!
Condition: Edge hits, light scratchs and contact marks, otherwise a beautifully toned XF+
Denomination: Isaac Newton Medal - given only to members of the newly open Athenaeum society in Manchester to serve as a member´s ticket to the club for the "advancement and diffusion of knowledge" - individually engraved with the member´s name (Rev. Precentor Lowe) and a numeral (No. 54) - Unique Item!
Region: Cheltenham (Cloucestershire, UK)
Weight: 23.63gm
Diameter: 35mm
Material: Silver

Obverse: Head of Isaac Newton right.
Legend: ISAAC NEWTON

Reverse: Engraved member´s name (Rev. Precentor Lowe) and mebership number (No. 54) within wreath (which is placed upside-down to the legend around).
Legend: EXTER ATHENAEUM / OPENED OCT. 29. 1835.

EXETER, The Athenæum (Founded 1835), a silver member's ticket, bust of Isaac Newton right, rev. scrolled initials EB within wreath, legend around, 36mm (D & W –; MG –). Fine, brooch-mounted on reverse, very rare; in original or near-contemporary case £80-100

The Athenæum was founded for the promotion of the Arts, Sciences and Literature. These silver tickets were given to the original subscribers and entitled them to free admission to all lectures.

The Athenaeum in Princess Street Manchester, England, now part of Manchester Art Gallery, was originally a club built for the Manchester Athenaeum, a society for the "advancement and diffusion of knowledge" in 1837. The society, founded in 1835, met in the adjacent Royal Manchester Institution until funds had been raised for the building which had a newsroom on the ground floor, library, lecture hall and coffee room. The members later added a billiard room and gymnasium. It survived financial difficulties to become the centre for Manchester's literary life. Sir Charles Barry, who designed the Royal Manchester Institution in the Greek Revival style, designed the Athenaeum in the Italian palazzo style, the first such building in the city. Manchester Corporation acquired the building in 1938. In 2002, Manchester Art Gallery was extended by Hopkins Architects following an architectural design competition managed by RIBA Competitions to take in the Athenaeum. It is linked to the art gallery by a glass atrium. The Athenaeum is a grade II* listed building. Richard Cobden was instrumental in promoting education in the city and spoke at the opening and within four years it had over 1,000 members. Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli addressed its membership in the 1840s. The club declined after 1935.

Sir Isaac Newton PRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English physicist and mathematician (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and a key figure in the scientific revolution. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), first published in 1687, laid the foundations for classical mechanics. Newton made seminal contributions to optics, and he shares credit with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for the development of calculus.

Newton's Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which dominated scientists' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from his mathematical description of gravity, and then using the same principles to account for the trajectories of comets, the tides, the precession of the equinoxes, and other phenomena, Newton removed the last doubts about the validity of the heliocentric model of the Solar System. This work also demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies could be described by the same principles. His prediction that Earth should be shaped as an oblate spheroid was later vindicated by the measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine, and others, which helped convince most Continental European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over the earlier system of Descartes.

Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours of the visible spectrum. He formulated an empirical law of cooling, studied the speed of sound, and introduced the notion of a Newtonian fluid. In addition to his work on calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the study of power series, generalised the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, developed a method for approximating the roots of a function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves.

Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian, and, unusually for a member of the Cambridge faculty of the day, he refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, perhaps because he privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of biblical chronology and alchemy, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. In his later life, Newton became president of the Royal Society. Newton served the British government as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint.

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