Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon passed away in 1292.

Many books have been written about him including ‘Doctor Mirabilis’, ‘The Face in the Frost’, ‘Fifth Business’ and ‘The Black Rose’.

Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset. His exact year of birth has always been a topic for controversy and historians state it as 1213 or 1214, going by his statement in the book ‘Opus Tertium’, written in 1267.

The only information known about his family today is that they were considerably wealthy but during the reign of Henry III of England most of them were exiled and their property was annexed.

His earliest education was in geometry, arithmetic, music, astronomy and the classics. For further education he went to the Oxford University and developed an interest in natural philosophy and mathematics. It is believed that he did his M.A. either at Oxford or at Paris, in 1240.

Roger Bacon became a master at Oxford. He gave lectures in the faculty of arts and they were mainly about Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian treatises.

His next appointment was at the Paris University and he joined it somewhere between 1237 and 1245. Here he talked about Aristotelian Corpus (Compilation of Aristotle’s work) which included physics, meta-physics and the pseudo-Aristotelian De Vegetabilibus and the De Causis.

In 1247, he was inspired by the great scholar Robert Grosseteste and he began investing his time and money in acquiring secret books, training assistants, meeting savants and constructing instruments. He ardently researched optics, alchemy, astronomy and linguistics.

With some certainty it can be stated that he became a friar in the Franciscan Order in 1256 and in 1260, Master General Bonaventure issued a decree that prohibited friars from publishing books without the Order’s prior approval.

Bonaventure and Bacon remained much at odds due to their individual beliefs. Bonaventure believed that astrology was helpful in only predicting the things solely dependent on movement of heavenly bodies and that base metals couldn’t be converted into gold/silver; Bacon differed on both accounts.

Roger Bacon is accepted as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific methods in which results are cited only after experimentation and not solely on the basis of the findings of predecessors. He used parts of glass spheres as magnifying glasses to demonstrate that light reflects from objects rather than being released from them and for the first time introduced a mixture which could be used in making gunpowder.