CONCEPT
Salomon's House
Francis Bacon's imagined research institution from The New Atlantis (1627)—a self-governing, state-supported college that pursues the "effecting of all things possible" and decides in private which of its discoveries to release to the world—whose description matches the org chart of a major AI laboratory with uncomfortable precision.
Salomon's House is the prophetic institution at the center of Francis Bacon's posthumously published utopia
The New Atlantis—and four centuries later it has been built. Bacon imagined a permanent, organized, state-supported research college on a hidden island called Bensalem, whose entire purpose is the systematic investigation of nature and the production of
useful knowledge: "the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible." The institution features a fine division of labor across specialized roles—gatherers of knowledge from abroad, compilers, experimenters, interpreters who raise findings into general principles—is richly resourced with vast laboratories and instruments, and pursues not one domain but general capability across every branch of what can be known and made. Most consequentially, it is self-governing in a specific way: its Fathers take an oath of secrecy and decide among themselves,