Why keep the boat that sinks?
A bath time story.
Imagine a tub of toy boats. You think every boat floats.
Four boats float. One sinks! Keep that one.
Francis Bacon said the sinking boat can teach you the most.
Now you look for why. A little hole!
Next time, you fix the hole first.
This is a pretend game. Real learning is much bigger than a bath tub.
For grown-ups
Francis Bacon, #90 in Michael H. Hart's The 100
Hart argues that Bacon (1561 to 1626) earns his place, between Mao Zedong and Henry Ford, as a persuasive early champion of science as a way to improve life. Hart concedes Bacon did not invent learning from observation and his detailed method was little used.
The record: in Novum Organum (1620) Bacon warned that people brush aside cases against a belief they like, and that piling up agreeable cases proves little: an idea must survive the cases that could rule it out. His ideas inspired the shared science of the early Royal Society, first meeting in 1660.
The case that does not fit your idea may teach you more than all the cases that do.
The bath game is our picture, not Bacon's, and science had many makers. A rank of #90 is Hart's judgement, not a measurement.
Sources
Where this comes from
- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, book I, aphorisms 46, 105 and 106 (Devey translation, Project Gutenberg).
- Markku Peltonen, Francis Bacon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- The Newton Project, Oxford, on the early Royal Society.
- Profile: Francis Bacon on Wikipedia and Wikidata Q37388.
Claims log: 35 claims checked, 34 verified. The one we could not verify is left out.
Ranking: Michael H. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History (Citadel Press, 1992). Life data: Wikidata (CC0). Page views: Wikimedia (CC0). Portrait: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Somer%20Francis%20Bacon.jpg), under the licence on its file page.
vizmaya desk · 29 October 2026 · More vizmaya data stories