It's pretty well known that if you chew fresh, dry Wint-O-Green candies in a dark room - or snap them in two using a pair of pliers - you'll get a spark of greenish/bluish light. I adored Wint-O-Green Life Savers as a child, mostly for the refreshing minty taste, but they also had loads of entertainment value. Sounds like a secret sweet tooth to me! This also establishes Bacon as the earliest to record the phenomenon, known as triboluminescence, a.k.a., "the Wint-O-Green Life Saver Effect." Now, one could argue that Bacon was merely being an observant scientist following his natural curiosity, but stop and think for a moment under what conditions he might have discovered such an effect - alone in a darkened room with a bag of hard candy and a knife to break up the pieces into smaller bits that were easier to consume. But Jen-Luc Piquant suspects he might have had a secret fondness for hard candies, based on a passing remark Bacon made in his treatise, Novum Organum (published in 1620): "It is almost certain that all sugar, whether refined or raw, provided only it be somewhat hard, sparkles when broken or scraped with a knife in the dark." One wouldn't expect the 17th century English philosopher Francis Bacon to have much of a sweet tooth he always struck me as a rather curmudgeonly sort, thoughts firmly fixed on Higher Matters, eschewing the paltry comforts of the flesh.
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