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I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Safeguarding Sound Science, Evolution Edition.

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In April of 1626, the philosopher statesman Sir Francis Bacon, who for a time was popularly but falsely proposed to have been

the true author of Shakespeare, which you can hear all about in my series on the topic,

was riding in a carriage with a physician named Dr. Winterbourne through the North London

village of Highgate. Their conversation tended toward the

scientific, discussing practices for food preservation, as the snowbound countryside through which they

passed struck bacon with inspiration. Perhaps packing food in snow or ice could help to preserve it.

So taken with this notion was Bacon that he had the driver stop at a farm where he bought a chicken.

He and the doctor plucked the bird and prepared it for cooking, but then packed it in ice and snow to see how well it might be preserved.

This experiment is said to be among the earliest studies of the effects of refrigeration,

an area of study that would be further explored in the next century by such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin. Bacon himself,

however, died of pneumonia a few days later, leading some to suggest that he actually caught

his death of cold out there in the snow, preparing the chicken that day. There are several

reasons to doubt this story, though. First,

it seems to derive entirely from one source. Brief Lives by John Aubrey, written some 50

years or so after the fact, cited as a second-hand story told to him by Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher.

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