English polymath, philosopher and friar (c.1219/20–c.1292)
A 13th-century friar who pushed for testing ideas against the physical world instead of just reading Aristotle — and later got remembered as a wizard who built a talking brass head.
Roger Bacon, born around 1219 in England, became a Franciscan friar who thought Catholic faith and hands-on observation belonged together. He read the work of Ibn al-Haytham and noticed that running experiments sometimes proved Aristotle wrong, a method he learned partly from his teacher Robert Grosseteste. In 1267 he sent his Opus Majus to Pope Clement IV, a sprawling argument for empirical study that helped get optics added to university courses. He also wrote down Europe's first recorded formula for gunpowder, borrowed from Chinese sources. He worked on universal grammar and died around 129…
Sourced, dated quotes from Roger Bacon
Oh how delightful is the taste of wisdom to those who are thus steeped in it from its very fount and origin.
Everything in nature completes its action through its own force and species alone... as, for example, fire by its own force dries and consumes and does many things.
I shall draw... a figure (which all these matters are made clear as far as possible on a surface, but the full demonstration would require a body like the eye...
For sounds like thunder, and coruscations like lightning, may be made in the air, and they may be rendered even more horrible than those of nature herself.
Mix together saltpetre, luru vopo vir con utriet [powdered charcoal], and sulphur, and you will make thunder and lightning, if you know the method of mixing them.
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