A Man Who Invented the Future

The Widener family fortune was generated by electricity. Patriarch Peter Arrell Browne Widener may have started his career as a Philadelphia butcher who happened to receive a commission to supply mutton to all of the Union troops stationed within ten miles of Center City, but by diversifying his wealth into electric trolley lines, he had, by 1883, ensured that when he died thirty-two years later his estate would be worth around $32 million (counting philanthropy and assets, that figure reaches the billions). Like other robber barons of the Gilded Age, Widener took full advantage of the technological fruits of industrial capitalism, a founder of and an investor in not just his own Philadelphia Traction Company but also US Steel and the International Mercantile Marine Company, which manufactured large trade ships. For all of its wealth disparity, the nineteenth century was an era of miracles as well. Consider Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s alchemy of silver-platted copper and mercury vapor on which a living image could be preserved forever or Alexander Graham Bell’s voices through the wire. There were also Guglielmo Marconi’s mysterious radio waves in the ether and Thomas Edison’s luminescent filaments cradled in glass bulbs (not to mention his wax cylinders of recorded music and his moving picture machines).

The Wideners’ Lynnewood Hall—a palatial, neo-classical mansion in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania—was a testament to the faith in science and technology that had produced their wealth, featuring not just paintings by Rembrandt, Raphael, van Dyck, Vermeer, and Bellini but also a modern central vacuuming system and complete electrification in all of its 110 rooms. “For knowledge itself is power,” wrote Francis Bacon in his 1597 *Essays, *the first full-throated formulation of a positivist scientism that envisioned empirical knowledge leading an ever-upward movement of human progress. Peter’s grandson Harry Elkins Widener was, in addition to being a prodigious book collector, an avid reader of Bacon. While on a European collecting trip in 1912, Harry purchased a 1598 edition of the *Essays *from a London antiquarian for £260, later boarding a New York-bound ship in Cherbourg, France, with his treasure. Another technological marvel, the ship had a five-kilowatt-motor-generator for transmitting Morse code, ten-thousand lightbulb-illuminated lamps, a system of massive reciprocating steam engines, synchronized clocks, and even four elevators. The ship was the *Titanic, *soon to go down in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, taking Widener and what he called his “little Bacon” with her.

This April marks the quadricentenary of Bacon’s death, the man who, though his own scientific innovations were middling, was arguably the philosopher most responsible for championing the empirical technocracy that our world has largely become. “I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in,” Bacon wrote in his 1620 *Novum Organum, *“starting directly from the simple sensuous perception.” Bacon’s method was inductive, the careful tabulation of observation and experiment, the methodical calculation of possibility and the invention of models to describe nature, the models themselves ever-contingent and shifting based on the reception of new and better data.

Science (though that word wouldn’t be used in this way yet) had certainly existed before that English philosopher, but his genius lay in his ability to properly describe just how its methods worked. A master prose stylist (in a century not short of them), he explained in his 1605 *The Advancement of Learning *how, in contrast to the questions of theology and metaphysics, physics “inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes.” A dedicated Christian like most of his peers in seventeenth-century London, Bacon nonetheless saw fit to bracket the supernatural, transcendent, and numinous from positive knowledge about the material world, the better to approach more definitive answers about nature. Open, curious, and self-correcting, the virtues of the scientific method were what made possible the glories at the Wideners’ Lynnewood Hall, the miracles of electric lights and radio waves. But more than a scientist, Bacon was an advocate for a certain variety of epistemological supremacy, and it was partly the hubris of that perspective that would send Harry Widener’s copy of the *Essays *to the bottom of the sea some four centuries later.

Thomas Jefferson, who believed in a political system as rectilinear and rational, and as logical and analytical, as a Euclidian proof, grouped Bacon alongside John Locke and Isaac Newton in his own personal trinity. According to Jefferson, Bacon was among the “greatest men the world has ever produced,” and while G.K. Chesterton may have claimed that the United States was a country with the soul of a church, it has always had more of the cold calculation of a laboratory or the industrious precision of a foundry. The United States is Bacon’s country not just because it is capitalist (and the philosopher was certainly an advocate of the rapidly expanding market system) but because it is specifically a *technological *capitalism that reigns supreme in this land. After all, it was Bacon who in 1609 penned the fullest justification of England’s New World colonization up until that time in a report for the Virginia Company. The contention that knowledge is power, as advanced by Bacon, secularized the previously occult dictum to great effect. Disinterested curiosity was not Bacon’s only goal; he also envisioned the command of nature, its subjugation and bondage, in the advancement of human comfort, wealth, control, and power. And his vision would shape the dominant ideology of the next half-millennium. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” claimed Bacon in Novum Organum, charting the passage of that supposedly unsinkable ship of civilization toward the brighter and more prosperous future that enlightened men had long dreamed of. All that was required was a ritual sacrifice of the mystery that had suffused the world in the millennia the scientific revolution.

Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I, Bacon was as much a creature of his own era as he was the technocratic prophet of ours—in fact, those two designations are inseparable. His empiricism dismissed in a single swipe all of the strange hermeticism and cracked occultism that marked the Platonism of the Renaissance in favor of a cold, calculated, and careful ethos of observation that ultimately did prove more effective in parsing the particulars of the material world (if not at assessing their value). Far from being contrary to orthodoxy, Bacon’s project was estimably Protestant, the direct conclusion of the Reformation. “There are four classes of idols which beset man’s mind,” wrote Bacon in *Novum Organum, *one of the great passages explicating the skeptical methodology by which the author dismissed interpretations of natural phenomena that rely too much on personal experience, cultural background, misapprehension of language, or philosophical tradition. Furthermore, the choice of that loaded word “idol” is intentional in its connotations, because Baconian empiricism does to the convoluted epistemologies of the pre-modern world what iconoclasm did to the stained-glass windows and icons of a church: It pulls them down and smashes them apart. Luther and Calvin’s dismissal of the superstitions of medieval faith would ultimately result not in science (for empirical observation and experimentation go back to the ancient Greeks) but in the valorization of science as the only means of acquiring knowledge—a result that the early reformers would neither have anticipated nor desired.