Bacon, Roger

Roger (1214-1294), an English friar. He was a Franciscan, a student at the University of Paris, and later, a student and resident for life at Oxford. He was a man of learning and originality. By attacking the ignorance, inactivity, and immorality of his brother monks he incurred no ordinary amount of hatred, resulting in his imprisonment for ten years. It has been claimed that Bacon was interested in an edition of the Scriptures, and that his "confinemen," not very serious, prevented him from becoming a reformer like Wyclif.

Roger Bacon stood for investigation and the kind of knowledge to be had from the laboratory and from nature, rather than from tradition and from the books of his day. Many of his views were too far in advance of his time to find believers. His greatest triumphs were in optics. He invented the magnifying glass, the beginning of telescopes and microscopes, and made some attempt to explain why the sun seems larger when rising and setting than at other times. In chemistry he appears to have been on the verge of inventing gunpowder as he had a method of producing lightning from sulphur, saltpeter, and charcoal. He preceded Columbus 200 years in considering a western route to Asia.

Strangely enough, Bacon preserved to the last a belief in the philosopher's stone, His views on all subjects are given in his Opus Majus, a sort of an encyclopedia of knowledge, covering errors of opinion, and the subjects of theology, grammar, mathematics, optics, and experimental science. His writings were, of course, in Latin. Some of his original manuscripts have been preserved in the British Museum.

In 1258 Brunetto Latini, the tutor of Dante, visited Roger Bacon and wrote as follows to a friend in Italy:

Among other things he showed me a black, ugly stone called a magnet, which has the surprising quality of drawing iron to it; and if a needle be rubbed upon it and afterward fastened to a straw, so that it will swim upon water, it will instantly turn to the pole star. . . .Therefore, be the night never so dark, neither moon nor stars visible, yet shall the sailor by help of this needle be able to steer his vessel aright. This discovery so useful to all who travel by sea, must remain concealed until other times, because no master mariner dare use it, lest he fall under imputation of being a magician, nor would sailors put to sea with one who carried an instrument so evidently constructed by the devil. A time may come when these prejudices, such hindrances to researches into the secrets of nature, will be overcome; and then mankind will reap benefits from the labor of such men as Friar Bacon, who now meet only with obloquy and reproach.

The following extract from a curious letter by Roger Bacon On the Hidden Workings of Nature and Art and the Emptyness of Magic seems like a prophecy:

I will now enumerate the marvelous results of art and nature which will make all kinds of magic appear trivial and unworthy. Instruments for navigation can be made which will do away with the necessity of rowers, so that great vessels, both in rivers and on the sea, shall be borne about with only a single man to guide them and with greater speed than if they were full of men. And carriages can be constructed to move without animals to draw them, and with incredible velocity. Machines for flying can be made in which a man sits and turns an ingenious device by which skillfully contrived wings are made to strike the air in the manner of a flying bird. Then arrangements can be devised, compact in themselves, for raising and lowering weights indefinitely great. . . . Bridges can be constructed ingeniously so as to span rivers without any supports.