Francis Bacon was neither a mathematician nor an experimental scientist, yet without him it is doubtful that engineering as we know it would exist today.
Bacon was born into a wealthy section of a changing world, as the son of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England and Anne Cooke, daughter of the Renaissance humanist Anthony Cooke.
A bright boy, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1573 aged just 12, where he was personally tutored for three years by John Whitgift, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. Education at Cambridge at this time still followed the old medieval curriculum, conducted almost exclusively in Latin, but his time there did introduce him to two people who would change his life – and, in time, that of the whole scientific community.
The first was Queen Elizabeth, who was rather impressed with the young man, and whose favour would ensure him access to the very top of society. The other had been dead for 1,895 years, but arguably affected him more. This was Aristotle, whose work stood at the centre of the medieval curriculum, and with whom he had a stormy relationship. He admired the ancient Greek philosopher’s use of reasoning, but rejected his philosophy as more the work of a schoolmaster than a researcher into truth.
Having enrolled as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn in London in 1576 while still only 15 years old, he was attached to the British ambassador to Paris’ entourage and travelled Europe, further widening his education. However, he returned to England on the sudden death of his father, who left him in debt.
After several years patiently working away at Gray’s Inn, he managed to get elected to parliament as MP, first for Bossiney in Cornwall. This gave him the launchpad to begin the real work of his life. He later claimed his three goals were to serve his country, to serve his church and, most importantly, to uncover truth. Being an MP ticked the first box. Promotions came rapidly – thanks at least in part to his uncle, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s chief adviser – and in 1597 he became the first ever ‘QC’. His enthusiastic support for the execution of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots ticked the second box – at least in his eyes. But it would be his rapid fall from grace that would actually kick start his third and most important goal.
Bacon’s public career ended in disgrace in 1621 when he was accused of taking bribes and barred from parliament. By now, you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with engineering. Bacon’s fall gave him the chance to return to considering his old frenemy Aristotle, and in 1620 he published his Novum Organum, which lays out what we today would call the scientific method. It refutes Aristotelian philosophy in favour of scientific investigation. Bacon maintained that the sciences should follow the mechanical arts in being “founded on nature”, but that science should be master of all.
In doing so he began to bridge the ancient divide between engineers and technologists, who were traditionally considered as artisans, and scientists, whose work was purely theoretical. He maintained that everything could be understood by examining and recording nature and undertaking experiments to draw out the truth by inductive reasoning. Experiments allowed the scientist to create a hypothesis and then test it against nature to produce a result from which a broader conclusion could be deduced. This idea, which we learn today in our first school science lesson, was a revolution at the time.
Bacon’s belief that the final goal of science is “the relief of man’s estate” could be said to be the credo of engineering, and it started its practitioners on the journey that would see them transformed from the ‘schemers’ of the 17th and 18th century to the engineering heroes of the Industrial Revolution. He also coined another of the great rallying cries of the modern age – Scientia potentia est, or ‘Knowledge is power’ – which led him to consider how all this newly gained knowledge could be organised. Classifying all information into the three large groups of poetry, history and philosophy, he then ordered these subjects based on how this knowledge was understood – in the imagination, in reasoning and in memory. This formed the inspiration for modern library classification systems.
Bacon was also very keen to put his ideas to the test, both in experimenting himself and in trying to create a ‘model’ society based on his ideas. In practical terms this involved his sponsoring of the Newfoundland plantation and a role in the founding of the colonies of Virginia and the Carolinas. This led Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the US, to number him among the “three greatest men that ever lived”, alongside Isaac Newton and John Locke.
And if we want to understand the future Bacon hoped for humanity, we can find it hidden away in a small, unfinished novel, which was published without fanfare after his death in 1626. In New Atlantis, Bacon describes the advances he hopes his ideas for the application of the scientific method will bring.
In the novel, a European ship stumbles upon a lost Pacific island, Bensalem, where they find a society centred on a state-sponsored scientific institution – Salomon’s House – which was used later as the model for the Royal Society. Here scientific experiments are conducted using the Baconian method to discover “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible”.
Bacon’s utopian Bensalem is an engineering wonder. Here there are skyscrapers (“high towers, the highest about half a mile in height”), air conditioning (“chambers of health wher wee qualifie the aire”) and telephones (“means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes”), as well as submarines and aeroplanes. Finally, their food is kept fresh from times of glut using refrigeration.
And it would be refrigeration that finally did it for Francis Bacon. On a freezing April day in 1626, Bacon stopped his coach at the bottom of Highgate Hill in London and bought a prepared chicken carcass. Venturing out into the cold, he then stuffed the bird with snow to see if this would slow the process of decay. It did, but the icy experiment also gave Bacon a bad case of pneumonia. He died two or three days later, a victim of his own scientific method.
