Sounds Like a Silverback to Me

[Who knew? This poor guy was smarter than Leonardo (da Vinci, not DiCaprio), yet his work was banned for 450 years and he spent the last 15 years of his life in prison. And yet, here he is, featured on Silverback Digest! Don’t lose hope, my fellow apes. SB SM]

Today’s selection–from Mendeleyev’s Dream by Paul Strathern. Many of the ideas of the Franciscan monk Roger Bacon predate those of Leonardo da Vinci by 200 years:

Roger Bacon was born c. 1214; he became a Franciscan monk and studied at Oxford and Paris, where he also taught. Like Albertus, his knowledge was exceptional both in its range and its depth. He even attempted to write an encyclopedia which would contain all human knowledge, but he was forced to admit defeat. This was a rare occasion, for Bacon was a man of imperious self-confidence, and was constantly disparaging intellectual failings in others. His was not a monastic temperament: poverty and chastity he could manage intermittently, but obedience was quite beyond him. 

“Such was Bacon’s brilliance that he attracted the attention of Pope Clement IV, who became his patron. When Clement died, Bacon’s enemies took their revenge. Eventually the head of the Franciscan order had him imprisoned in Paris for fifteen years, and ordered all his works to be destroyed. Fortunately some were secreted away by like-minded monks, though his Opus Majus was not to be published until almost 450 years after his death in 1733. 

“Bacon’s ideas bear a remarkable resemblance to many of those which Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebooks — though they pre-date Leonardo by two hundred years, and in many instances go beyond him. Bacon predicted steamships, automobiles, submarines and even flying machines. He suggested that one day people would circumnavigate the globe. One of his letters even contains the first European reference to gunpowder. (As a result, it was thought for many years that he had invented it. Later historians maintained that gunpowder came from China. Recent scholarship suggests that it may well have been invented independently in Europe, in which case Bacon was as likely to have achieved this feat as any.) Such were the exceptional imaginings of an original mind. More mundane, but more significant, was his emphasis on experiment as the only true way forward in science. (Bacon’s personality ensured that he was able to spend much time undisturbed in his Oxford laboratory.) He also stressed the application of mathematics as the path to exact truth in scientific experiment. Both these ideas took hold only with Galileo almost four centuries later.”

author: Paul Strathern
title: Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements
publisher: Pegasus Books