The dispute over Bacon's gunpowder recipe
Roger Bacon in the tracts of the 1260s mentions a combustible mixture: saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal producing 'a noise like thunder and flashes like lightning'. The passage itself is short and descriptive, with no proportions given in the text. Historians of the earlier twentieth century (H. W. L. Hime, 1904) read into the adjoining lines a concealed anagram and derived from it the 7:5:5 ratio; hence the reading 'Bacon had a precise gunpowder recipe'.
Subsequent criticism (Lynn Thorndike, John Maxson Stillman, Robert Steele, George Sarton, later Joseph Needham and J. R. Partington) rejected the decipherment: the anagram admits more than one reading, Hime's proposed proportions do not detonate, and the stylistically odd fragment was most likely inserted by copyists. Current opinion is that Bacon witnessed or heard of a Chinese firecracker ('a toy no bigger than one's thumb', as he himself says), rather than invented European gunpowder. The proportion-bearing recipe attributed to him is an early twentieth-century construction.
The entry follows the pattern of the stirrup-and-White card (see decision 047): the fact is modest, but the standard textbook is wrong. Hime is kept in the evidence list as the first source of the thesis; the card text honestly gives both his position and the refutation.
Why this date
disputed. Roger Bacon in 1266-1267 sent to the Pope his Opus maius and the works associated with it; one passage describes a mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal producing 'a noise like thunder and flashes like lightning'. Until the late twentieth century the dating was pinned to 1242 (De mirabili potestate artis et naturae, per the 1911 Britannica article Gunpowder); the overwhelming majority of later editions accepts 1266-1267 and refers the passage to Opus tertium. 1267 is taken for the axis.
Links under review
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First record of a saltpetre, sulphur and carbon mixture flaring up
influenced · Confidence: medium
A tradition-level link under decision 053. Quotes 1 and 2 (Needham, p. xxxi) state that gunpowder reached Bacon from China and do not name our node. Quote 3 (Needham, p. 99) states that the Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe is the first surviving record of the mixture flaring up, that is, the witness of this tradition.
The gunpowder that Bacon knew around 1260 as a firecracker came from China, where every stage from incendiary mixture to barrel had been passed before Europe knew the mixture itself. The Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe stands here for that Chinese tradition: according to Needham, it is the first surviving record of the mixture flaring up.
Dispute: The Chinese origin of gunpowder is generally accepted today; the specific route to Bacon (Franciscan brothers who travelled to the Mongols) is Needham's conjecture, and his 'doubtless' rests on no document.
Link sources
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. xxxi (1986), xxxi
were passed through in China, before Europeans knew of the mixture itself. Probably there were three comings.
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. xxxi (1986), xxxi
Roger Bacon by +1260 or so was able to study fire-crackers, doubtless brought west by some of his brother friars
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 99 (1986), 99
the first actual record of such ‘calamities’ is in the Chen Yuan Miao Tao Yao Lueh
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. xxxi (1986), xxxi
Three sources are an exception to rule 046 (one source per node): the card is about a dispute, so the refutation (Thorndike 1915) and the refuted thesis (Hime via 1911 EB) stand side by side. The first Thorndike quote carries an OCR error ('a9' for 'as'); by decision 036 (a corrupted page) the quote is given letter for letter from the source djvu on archive.org.
Node sources
- Lynn Thorndike, «Roger Bacon and Gunpowder», Science, Vol. XLII, No. 1092, 3 December 1915, pp. 799-800, JSTOR Early Journal Content Internet Archive Verified 28 Sep 2026
Roger Bacon openly alludes to gunpowder in 1267 in his "Opus Tertium" a9 already in common use in children's toy explosives.
- Lynn Thorndike, «Roger Bacon and Gunpowder», Science, Vol. XLII, No. 1092, 3 December 1915, «рецепта с пропорциями» Verified 28 Sep 2026
Much of it sounds like a brief popular compilation from Bacon's three works of 1267-8 concocted by some one else later
- Encyclopædia Britannica, 11- (1911), «Gunpowder», Wikisource. «рецепте с пропорциями» Verified 28 Sep 2026
Roger Bacon in his anagram gives the first real recipe for gunpowder, viz. (according to Hime, ch. xii.) saltpetre 41.2, charcoal 29.4, sulphur 29.4.
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.