Born in London
Born at York House in the Strand, the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He grew up in the corridors of Elizabethan power and never quite left them.
1/3
Bacon served as Lord Chancellor of England and was disgraced for taking bribes. His philosophical legacy outlasted the scandal. His Novum Organum proposed replacing Aristotelian deduction with systematic observation and experiment. He catalogued the 'idols' that distort human thinking: the idols of the tribe (shared biases), the cave (personal biases), the marketplace (language), and the theatre (received systems). He died in 1626 after catching cold while stuffing a chicken with snow to study refrigeration. He was testing his own method.
