Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon stands at the pivot between Renaissance natural magic and the scientific revolution. His central argument, developed in the Novum Organum (1620), is that the scholastic tradition had accumulated an enormous weight of words and syllogisms while achieving almost nothing in the way of practical improvement to human life. He proposed a new method: systematic empirical induction, organized around repeated experiment, that would extract from nature 'axioms' capable of generating a cascade of further inventions. The printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass — inventions he considered world-historical — had arrived by accident; Bacon's ambition was to make such discoveries regular and deliberate.

In New Atlantis (1627), Bacon dramatized this ambition as Salomon's House, a research institution staffed by specialists — collectors of experiments, compilers of data, 'benefactors' who translate findings into practical devices. It is the earliest detailed vision of organized research and development: not a lone inventor but a collaborative institution systematically exploiting the relationship between science and technology. For Bacon, the origin of technology in his own era was to be not chance but method — the sovereign application of human reason to the interrogation of nature. His framework established the ideological foundation for the Industrial Revolution and for every national research program that followed.