The Friar and the Cipher (9 page)

Thomas Aquinas gestures toward a mountain in which sulfur and mercury combine to form metals, in a seventeenth-century alchemy text
EDGAR FAHS SMITH COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LIBRARY

To begin his quest he went back to the place where he had first encountered the excitement of science, the place he would return to over and over in the course of his life, the place where he felt most at home, from which he drew strength and vision.

He went back to Oxford.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Miraculous Doctor:
Roger Bacon at Oxford

•   •   •

AT OXFORD,
in addition to teaching at the university, Bacon threw himself into research, returning to his original interests in languages, mathematics, optics, and experiment. He bought books or had them copied whenever he could, always seeking rare editions in the original languages. Among the authors he would later cite were Ptolemy, Pliny, Seneca, Hali, Solinus, Tullius, Artephius, the Venerable Bede, and St. Augustine—this, in addition to Aristotle, Plato, Avicenna, Averroës, and the scriptures.

For the next ten years, he traveled to discourse with scholars in other towns and kept up a line of communication with those he most respected, such as William of Auvergne, John of Basingstoke, and a mysterious scholar named Peter of Maricourt, also known as Peter Perigrinus. If Bacon had a role model other than Grosseteste, it was Peter. Bacon later wrote glowingly of this man, observing that he refused all honors in order to be free to experiment and advance his knowledge. Almost nothing is known of Peter, and all his work has been lost except for a single paper, one of the earliest studies on the effects of magnetism.

Bacon also counted Adam Marsh among his circle of academic confidants. Marsh was lecturing in theology at Oxford as late as 1250, and Bacon probably attended his lectures. “I have sought out the friendship of all wise men among the Latins,” he would later write. Grosseteste was still alive, and although he had many duties as bishop of Lincoln, he was still thoroughly involved in scholarship, learning Greek and producing a new translation of Aristotle's
Ethics
. Although there is no direct evidence that Bacon met or wrote to Grosseteste during this period, they were certainly aware of each other's work.

In addition to teaching, studying, and traveling, Bacon also conducted experiments with light, magnetism, and metals. It was a daunting schedule, and Bacon became renowned for working eighteen hours a day. “Men used to wonder . . . that I lived owing to my excessive labors,” he would write later to the pope. He spent an enormous sum on instruments and materials for his work. “During the twenty years in which I have labored specially in the study of wisdom, after abandoning the usual methods, I have spent more than £2000 [a fortune in those days] on secret books and various experiments, and languages, and instruments, and mathematical tables, etc.,” he wrote in the 1260s.

Bacon did not leave a lab book or notes, so it is impossible to re-create his actual experiments over the next twenty years. All we have are the stories that grew up around him. It was said that he astonished and frightened his students by directing light onto a crystal, thereby producing a rainbow, a feat generally attributed in the medieval mind to God alone. He was rumored to have produced explosions louder than thunder, which shook his study in the dead of night, and owned a magic looking glass that allowed him to see for fifty miles in any direction. One of his most picturesque supposed inventions was chronicled in a sixteenth-century potboiler entitled “The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon, containing the Wonderful Things that he did in his Life, also the Manner of his Death, with the Lives of the two Conjurers, Bungye and Vandermast.” Here he was credited with constructing a brazen or talking head (although a fourteenth-century tract attributes this achievement to Grosseteste).

Fryer Bacon reading one day of the many conquests of England, bethought himselfe how he might keepe it hereafter from the like conquests, and so make himselfe famous hereafter to all posterities. This (after great study) hee found could be no way so well done as one; which was to make a head of brasse, and if he could make this head to speake (and heare it when it speakes) then might hee be able to wall all England about with brasse. To this purpose hee got one Fryer Bungey to assist him, who was a great scholler and a magician (but not to bee compared to Fryer Bacon); these two with great study and paines so framed a head of brasse, that in the inward parts thereof there was all things like as in a naturall mans head.

It was during this period that Roger Bacon acquired the title
Doctor Mirabilus
, or the Miraculous Doctor.

Roger Bacon balancing the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, from a seventeenth-century alchemy text
EDGAR FAHS SMITH COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LIBRARY

On a less fanciful level, Bacon was by all accounts a superb teacher. His students adored him, even though he occasionally shook them up with the crystal experiment or the demonstrations of gunpowder. He was even known to play a joke now and then. There is a story of a time when some Cambridge students descended on Oxford, intent on besting their rivals in a public disputation. Bacon, forewarned of their approach, disguised himself as a laborer and met them just outside of town. When the students asked for directions, he answered them in Latin and challenged them to an on-the-spot debate. Astonished at the apparent level of education of a mere peasant, the Cambridge students turned tail and fled for home.

A LONG LETTER OF BACON'S
that gives some idea of where his scholarship was directed and how much he had already accomplished has survived from this period. Entitled “The Letter of Roger Bacon Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and of Nature and Concerning the Nullity of Magic,” it is thought to have been written about 1248. There is no address, but it is clearly a reply to a knowledgeable correspondent.

In this letter, Bacon scorned sorcery and proclaimed that knowledge of nature, combined with knowledge of the way to use nature to reach practical ends, is a much more potent force. This disavowal is significant because some later writers have suggested that Bacon himself was merely a superstitious crank who believed in the black arts. Quite the contrary: Bacon declared that most of what the world called magic was merely sleight of hand, “wonders which do not have the truth of existence.” He went through the various aspects of magic—invocation of spirits, magic characters, figures and charms—one by one and pointed out the flaws (or fraud) of each.

The real value of the letter, however, was in Bacon's assessment of what was possible through an acute understanding of the natural world, “marvels wrought through the agency of Art and of Nature . . . [in which] there is no magic whatsoever, because, as it has been said, all magical power is inferior to these works and incompetent to accomplish them.” He wrote of the possibility of enormous ships propelled at amazing speeds without a single oar, of cars that move without benefit of horses or oxen, of engines, and even of flying machines. He wrote of bridges that span vast rivers without supports. “It is possible also that devices can be made whereby, without bodily danger, a man may walk on the bottom of the sea or of a river,” he wrote, and “devices may be so contrived that the largest objects appear smallest, that the highest appear low and infamous, and that hidden things appear manifest.” He talked of building strategic weapons that would emit poison and infectious diseases; he even mentioned “that device by which rays of light are led into any place that we wish and are brought together by refractions and reflections in such fashion that anything is burned which is placed there.”

He reported on the alloying of gold and the ability to prolong life through regular exercise, moderate diet, and adequate sleep. His greatest hope was for a working astronomical model, in which “all heavenly bodies are described veraciously as regards longitude and latitude.”

A faithful and magnificent experimenter might aspire to construct an instrument of such materials and of such an arrangement that it would move naturally in the diurnal motion of the heavens, a thing which seems possible because many things are determined by the movement of the heavens, such as comets, and the tides of the sea, and other things wholly and in part. In the presence of this instrument all other apparatus of the Astrologers, whether the product of wisdom or mere vulgar equipment, would cease to count any more. The treasure of a king would scarcely merit comparison with it.

There is nothing in medieval science to compare to this one letter of Roger Bacon's. It is a masterpiece of insight and ingenuity; a thirteenth-century thought experiment at a time when science had not progressed much further than superficial observation. As a statement of purpose, it put him on the highest plane of scientific research and demonstrated the breadth of his understanding. Most of all, it vindicated the eccentricity of his approach.

The final two sections of this letter have been of enormous interest to Bacon scholars and the subject of great controversy for centuries. The latter consisted of a number of different recipes to produce what was known as the “Philosopher's Egg,” a mystical material for turning base metals into gold. The recipes are detailed but completely incomprehensible, sometimes descending almost to gibberish. Some have theorized that these pages were not written by Bacon at all but appended afterward by some unknown author, although there was absolutely no evidence to support this conclusion.

Eventually, the section immediately preceding the Philosopher's Egg recipes came to be seen as a clue. Here, Bacon wrote on the “Wisdom of Keeping Secrets.” “A man is crazy,” Bacon wrote, “who writes a secret unless he conceals it from the crowd and leaves it so that it can be understood only by effort of the studious and wise.” Then Bacon expounded on the “Seven Ways of Concealing Secrets.” Codes and ciphers had been used since the Greeks, of course, but according to Simon Singh in
The Code Book
, Bacon's letter was “the first known European [work] to describe the use of cryptography.”
*3

Bacon's seven methods include hiding a message “under characters and symbols” (a code); “in enigmatical and figurative expressions” (also a code); by “a method of writing, as by writing with consonants only like the Hebrews, Chaldeans, Syrians, and Arabians, and as the Greeks do” (shorthand ciphers); “by intermixing various kinds of letters” (cipher with nulls, meaningless characters inserted in a message to add a layer of complexity); “by means of special letters, devised by their own ingenuity and will, and different from those anywhere in use” (possibly artificial language); “actual letters are not used but other geometric figures that function as letters according to the arrangement of points and marks” (a code); and finally, “still a better way of obscuring which is comprehended in the
ars notaria
which is the art of noting and writing with whatever brevity we wish” (cipher in shorthand). Then Bacon added, “I have judged it necessary to touch upon these ways of concealment in order that I may help you as much as I can. Perhaps I shall make use of certain of them because of the magnitude of our secrets.”

Bacon was a student of cryptography as well as a practitioner. He gave historical examples of the seven methods, and earlier in the letter he had written about magic symbols: “Certain of these irrational inscriptions have been written by philosophers in their works about Nature and about Art for the purpose of hiding a secret from the unworthy.” In other words, much of what the common man considered a magic spell was simply a particular scholar's code, meant to protect a scientific secret.

There were those who believed that when Bacon wrote, “perhaps I shall make use of certain of them,” he meant that he would do so immediately following that sentence. In 1914, a retired British colonel and amateur cryptographer, H. W. L. Hime, suggested that the Philosopher's Egg recipes were actually a secret message, employing what was known as “the Argyle cipher” to disguise the true formula of a substance that Bacon felt should not fall into the wrong hands. The Argyle cipher, known in the thirteenth century, was produced by laying a template with specifically placed cutouts over a page of writing so that only certain words remained uncovered. The same template could be made for an entire document or switched page to page, thus making it almost impossible to decipher without the correct key. An example of the Argyle cipher method had been included by William Makepeace Thackeray in his novel
Henry Esmond
.

When Colonel Hime laid his makeshift template across the last pages of Bacon's letter, what was left was a clear and accurate formula for making gunpowder, the first of its kind to be published in Europe. Whether Bacon had invented the substance or accessed the formula from one of his many readings of exotic texts, no one knows.

After Colonel Hime published his findings, some scholars claimed that the colonel was seeing ciphers in his soup. Others asserted that while the Argyle cipher had indeed been utilized, Bacon had employed an anagram code—jumbling the letters—as well to further disguise the formula. In any event, if this was not a cipher, one has to believe that a man who wrote so clearly and convincingly about flying machines and submarines had suddenly, in the final pages, become confused and incoherent.