![]() ![]() Urban planner Edmund Bacon has been called "The Father of Modern Philadelphia." He is also the father of actor Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon is descended from a branch of Quaker Bacons who left England because of religious persecution (which makes his star-making role as a teen with an insatiable urge to dance all the more interesting, considering his ancestors were also opposed to dancing on religious grounds). The Puritans tended to be wealthy enough to pay for their own passage, meaning they were more likely to be craftsmen and tradesmen than farmers, wealth being a powerful aid to the survival of a name. In America, historically, Bacons have been most common in Vermont and other areas where Puritans from England settled in the 17th century, such as Massachusetts and the rest of New England. In any case, people were often named for their occupation, so at least some of the original bearers of the name were likely to have been pork butchers, although the food meaning of bacon did not appear until about 1350. However, early etymologists studying the English family name suggest it may have come from the Saxon baccen or buccen, which meant "beech tree," or from the Saxon bacan, for "bake." The beech tree explanation is that the best pigs were said to eat beech(en) mast-the nut of the beech tree. Almost a century after the Norman conquest of Britain, the first recorded spelling of the family name, that of William Bacun, appeared around 1150 in the county of Staffordshire. Another possibility, also from the Normans, was the French name Bascon or Bascoun. One possible root is the Germanic Bac(c)o or Bahho, possibly from a root meaning "to fight," which appeared in Old French as Bacus and then came to England with the Normans in 1066 and became Bacun or Bacon. He died on April 9, 1626, supposedly of bronchitis, while investigating the effects of ice in preserving meat (though it was chicken, not bacon, that he was testing).īut despite what seems like an obvious etymology, the surname Bacon doesn't necessarily have any connection to cured meat at all. Bacon came up with the idea that scientific knowledge should be based only on what we can see and measure. Before him, science was largely based on ideas people made up, saw as religious visions, or deduced by logic. The original Francis Bacon was a 17th-century Englishman who is known for modernizing empirical methods. Nowadays, the most well-known Bacon (after Kevin, obviously), is probably Sir Francis Bacon-the philosopher, scientist, and statesman (not to be confused with Francis Bacon the artist, or the cricketer, or Sir Francis's relative Francis Thomas Bacon, the 20th-century engineer and inventor of the hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell, a development which powered the space shuttle). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain Artist Lucy Bacon's Garden Landscape, 1894–1896. ![]()
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