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Roger Bacon: The Friar Who Wrote Down Gunpowder

admin · 2026-03-16T23:04:10.467Z

Roger Bacon doesn't come up much at the gun counter, but he probably should. A 13th-century English friar who documented black powder for the first time in Western history — while under institutional house arrest, writing in secret with papal cover — is a more interesting origin story than most people give the craft credit for. From the violence of that salt called saltpetre [together with sulphur and willow charcoal, combined into a powder] so horrible a sound is made by the bursting of a t...

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Roger Bacon: The Friar Who Wrote Down Gunpowder

Roger Bacon (c. 1219/20–c. 1292), known by the scholastic honorific Doctor Mirabilis — "Wonderful Teacher" — was a medieval English polymath, philosopher, and Franciscan friar who holds a specific, non-negotiable place in the history of firearms: he

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