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 thing so small, no more than a bit of parchment [containing it], that we find [the ear assaulted by a noise] exceeding the roar of strong thunder, and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning.

That's it. That's the recipe that fed into six hundred years of propellant development — everything from a Brown Bess to whatever you're running through your AR right now traces back to those three components. Next time you're at the reloading bench measuring out powder, that lineage isn't abstract.

Bacon didn't synthesize a new substance in a laboratory. He documented something he had seen or heard about from someone who had seen it. That's still the job — and he did it when nobody else in Europe had.

This is worth sitting with. He wasn't the inventor — the Chinese had this figured out centuries earlier. He was the guy who wrote it down clearly enough that it survived and spread. Accurate documentation of what actually works is underrated in this hobby — ask anyone who's tried to recreate a load from a half-remembered forum post.

The cryptogram theory — where a scholar claimed Bacon hid a precise powder ratio inside a coded passage — got picked apart by multiple historians over several decades. The proposed ratio came out too nitrogen-lean to reliably ignite. Another reminder that if the math doesn't hold up on paper, it's not going to work downrange either.

What's your earliest reference point for black powder — first time you ran it through a rifle, a shotgun, a cannon, or just the first time someone explained what the stuff actually was?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team