The other anecdote concerning Sir Isaac Newton that seems most apt, and it was particularly well dramatized in Neil DeGrasse Tyson's updated Cosmos series, arose when the Royal Society delayed publishing his Principia due to the spectacular failure of their Encyclopedia of Fish the year before! I am not sure which amazes me more: that "natural philosophy" encompasses everything in the cosmos from optics to marine life. Or contemporaneous short-sightedness can imbue one subject with the most paramount economic and social import, whilst viewing the other as nothing more than a mere parlor trick. Only to have the perspective of history upend such dogma centuries later!

Short-sightedness or a matter of economics, considering printing was probably not as easy and cheap in those times as it is now?

Yay! I was going to mention Cosmos but you beat me to it. I certainly appreciated the deep and rich history associated with Newton in particular among others in the fields of math and science. Their lives were often hard and wrought with conflict vs. the powers of their times, which is hugely important.