1939: Giants from Eternity, a novel by Manly Wade Wellman, first published in Startling Stories, July 1939, available at the Internet Archive.
The world leader is Isaac Newton who held several important government offices in England: Member of Parliament 1689–1690 and 1701–1702, Warden of the Mint 1696–1699, Master of the Mint 1699–1727.
Warden of the Mint was a high-ranking position at the Royal Mint in England from 1216 to 1829. The warden was responsible for a variety of minting procedures and acted as the immediate representative of the current monarch inside the mint. The role of warden changed greatly through history with the original task being the receiving, assay and payment for bullion, while later evolving into more of an administerial role.
Master of the Mint is a title within the Royal Mint given to the most senior person responsible for its operation. It was an important office in the governments of Scotland and England, and later Great Britain and then the United Kingdom, between the 16th and 19th centuries. Until 1699, the appointment was usually for life. Its holder occasionally sat in the cabinet.
Newton is one of five scientific geniuses from the past (the others: Curie, Darwin, Edison, Pasteur) who are temporarily resurrected to save the world from an alien menace. The setting is an unspecified time in the near future. Here are two contrasting reviews of Giants from Eternity.
From a review by Frederik Pohl in If, September 1959, available at the Internet Archive:
Avalon has elected to bring back to life Manly Wade Wellman's twenty-year-old magazine novel, Giants from Eternity. This story was preposterous in 1939; age has not helped it. It begins with a mysterious meteorite (or something) that falls on a farm and begins to eat everything in sight, turning what it eats scarlet and threatening to engorge the world. A couple of poisonously juvenile scientists investigate it. They are baffled and helpless, but they manage to extract a sort of resurrection-juice from it, which they use to bring back the greatest minds of all time to help them out. These are the "Giants from Eternity" and they include Thomas Edison, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Charles Darwin and Madame Curie. One of the juveniles is entrapped by the red stuff and thus works to help it spread; the revived Giants take a few days to master everything that has happened in science since their deaths, then quickly invent everything necessary to wipe out the red menace and bring about a happy ending.
It happens that when Marie Curie died she was sixty-seven years old and paid very little attention to her personal appearance. As this fact did not suit the author, he chose to write it away. When Marie Curie is revived she is "a slender young woman, blonde and pale and lovely." Artistic license? All right. Artistic license should be extended only to art. Giants from Eternity is nothing like art. It is fast-moving; but it is also crude.
From a review by Paul Di Filippo in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2006, available at the Internet Archive:
But "Giants from Eternity" is something else altogether. It's a badass super-science tale that barrels along like a Tom Swift rocketship, mixing Lovecraftian riffs (specifically, from "The Colour Out of Space") with Julian Huxley bio-speculations and Campbellian lone genius derring-do.
A strange meteor falls to the earth in Kansas, discharging a deadly organic substance that begins consuming everything in its path. Soon, many square miles of territory are covered in this alien monoculture, a seething scarlet plain of death. Oliver Noll Norfleet, boy genius, his sardonic buddy Spencer DuPogue, and beautiful government agent Caris Bridge are the world's only hope against eventual total inundation by the plague.
The first thing Norfleet does is use the plague itself to create a revivifying tonic that can literally bring back the dead from any scrap of their substance. He promptly resurrects famous scientists—Pasteur, Newton, Darwin, Edison, and Madame Curie—to help in the battle. DuPogue dies in a lab accident and is brought back to life as well. The alien substance begins to exhibit intelligence. DuPogue goes over to the dark side. The famous scientists begin to decay. Bridge and Norfleet fall in love. And so on, to the rousing climax. (And I'm leaving a lot out here.)
Wellman rollicks along in blithe fashion, never parodic, always taking his wild premises seriously but not in any way dull. The writing is top-notch, with surprising hints of poetry: "... the silenced guns coughing croupily." Brilliant!
The way this story prefigures the film The Blob (1958), as well as Charles Sheffield's "Out of Copyright" and Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985) is uncanny, proving there's nothing new under the sun.
If you don't get your full complement of sensawunda from this tale, you've been tamed and declawed by too much literary canoodling.
