Not all inventors fit the image of the white-haired, bespectacled eccentric scribbling out notes while surrounded by beeping machines and steaming beakers. Some are gorgeous actors or gifted musicians who achieve fame and fortune in their chosen fields, yet still are motivated to fulfill a need or solve a problem afflicting the public. Here are six such celebrities who found the time between photo shoots, interviews, and the demands of their day jobs to follow their personal passions to the patent office.
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Marlon Brando
He may not have originated the “method acting” technique, but Marlon Brando was an innovator when it came to his enthusiasm for drumming. Late in life, the Oscar winner devoted his energy to developing a conga drum that could be tuned by way of a single lever at the bottom, as opposed to the usual five or six bolts along the top. Although he received four patents prior to his death in 2004, Brando likely needed to put in more work to make his creation a reality; one drum manufacturer interviewed for a 2011 NPR article indicated that the actor’s design was practical, but not cost-effective enough for production.
During her Hollywood heyday, Hedy Lamarr was known as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” a designation that ignored the impressive brain power behind those green eyes. Determined to aid the Allied cause during World War II, Lamarr teamed with composer George Antheil to devise a radio transmission technique that defied enemy disruption efforts by randomly jumping to different frequencies. Although it was initially dismissed by the U.S. Navy, the secret communication system is now recognized as a precursor to the wireless technology that fills our everyday lives. Lamarr also dabbled in more mundane creations, like an improved stoplight and dog collar, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
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Eddie Van Halen
While he is rightly celebrated for dazzling solos for his namesake band, Eddie Van Halen was also a craftsman who constantly sought out ways to improve the guitar-playing experience for himself and others. In 1987, the rocker patented his musical instrument support, a plate that props up a guitar against the player’s body and frees the hands to “explore the musical instrument as never before.” Van Halen also acquired patents for a tension adjustment mechanism for stringed instruments, the design and implementation of a noise-canceling humbucking pickup, and a guitar peghead.
The youngest of the Marx Brothers, Herbert “Zeppo” Marx was largely overshadowed as the straight man of the comedic quartet, but he later came into his own as an agent, businessman, and health-minded inventor. His first patent was for a vapor delivery pad for distributing moist heat, intended to replace the inefficient method of dipping towels in hot water to apply to achy body parts. The erstwhile entertainer later received multiple patents related to cardiac monitoring applications, one of which made headlines as the pulse-tracking “heart wristwatch.”
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Jamie Lee Curtis
While she’d already achieved stardom by way of roles in films such as Halloween (1978) and Trading Places (1983), Jamie Lee Curtis showed she was just as burdened as the next parent when she patented a new and improved diaper in the late 1980s. The solution was a simple one, as her infant garment came with a front pocket for wipes to eliminate the need to hunt down both items during stressful moments. Although she let the patent expire because of concerns over the product’s biodegradability, Curtis continued her pursuit of the perfect diaper with another patent in 2017, this time including a plastic bag to make disposal even more tidy.
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Bill Nye
Best known as the “Science Guy” from his popular 1990s PBS show, Bill Nye has engaged in a wide-ranging career that includes stints as a mechanical engineer, a stand-up comic and yes, an inventor. As befitting his brainy reputation, Nye designed a noise-and-vibration-reducing device called a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor for use on the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and he later received patents for his educational lens and digital abacus. More surprising are his patents for a throwing technique trainer, to help budding baseball players, and his toe shoe, to provide additional support for the grueling regimen of a ballerina.
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Tim Ott has written for sites including Biography.com, History.com, and MLB.com, and is known to delude himself into thinking he can craft a marketable screenplay.
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Some of the items found in our homes have unusual origins, and we’re not just talking about those hot dogs buried in the freezer. Whether acquired in a department store, grocery, or the local pharmacy, these common goods now enjoy widespread acceptance, but at one point were used for different purposes — or even viewed with suspicion. Read on to learn more about six household objects with a colorful past.
According to Amy Azzarito’s The Elements of a Home: Curious Histories Behind Everyday Household Objects, From Pillows to Forks, the first dining forks surfaced in the Byzantine Empire during the first millennium CE. However, their eastern migration via the marriage of Maria Argyropoulina to the son of the Doge of Venice in 1004 was met with horror by the Venetians, who considered these pronged utensils to be tools of the devil; when Argyropoulina died a few years after the marriage from the plague, it was viewed as God’s revenge for her spiteful vanity. It wasn’t until candied fruits became popular in the 15th century that the satanic connotations around the implement disappeared, and Italians again wielded forks to devour the messy treats.
Salt has long been treasured as a resource both for flavoring meals and keeping meat and fish fresh, rendering it a particularly vital commodity in the dark days before refrigerators. Roman soldiers were reportedly paid in rations of salt known as salarium — the origin of the word “salary” — while Saharan trade routes throughout the Middle Ages frequently featured the exchange of large bricks of the mineral. Recent research indicates that the Maya of South and Central America also used salt as money some 2,500 years ago, suggesting that humankind’s salty cravings are possibly as old and powerful as the desire to accumulate wealth.
Beds occupied an important place in medieval dwellings: Not only were they comfortable spots for people to read, pray, socialize, mate, and give birth, but they were often the most expensive pieces of furniture in a home. As a result, beds were often passed along by the same legal means used to transfer the deceased’s ownership of property or family jewels. Women were nearly twice as likely to bequeath beds than men, according to one examination of a set of wills from 1392 to 1542, though that’s probably because the rarer female testator was usually a widow and therefore more inclined to give away important household items.
“Concealed” Shoes May Have Been Used to Ward Off Evil Spirits
Ever want to give those uninvited evil spirits a good kick in the pants? Apparently, the best way to do so in 19th-century England was to stash a well-worn shoe in a hidden compartment near a home’s opening, be it a door, window, or fireplace. As there are no written records of this custom, the witches-be-gone theory really represents the best guess of many historians; others have speculated that it spread as a good-luck token among builders. Regardless of how and why the practice came about, enough hidden footwear has been discovered in old homes of Western Europe — as well as in the northeastern United States and Canada — for England’s Northampton Museum to oversee a Concealed Shoe Index.
Yes, you read that correctly; until the late 18th century, the best way to eliminate graphite markings was with moistened, rolled-up pieces of bread. However, a big breakthrough came in 1770, when English theologian Joseph Priestley realized that rubber was “a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil.” That same year, English engineer Edward Nairne began selling rubber erasers, which he claimed to have invented after mistakenly grabbing a piece of rubber instead of the intended breadcrumb. Nairne is largely credited for popularizing erasers, but there’s no need to feel bad for Priestly, who eventually received his due for discovering oxygen.
Early Forms of Kleenex and Kotex Were Used on World War I Battlefields
During the Great War, the Kimberly-Clark company of Wisconsin shipped huge supplies of their wood pulp-based “cellucotton” to be used as bandages and gas mask air filters. So what became of this thin, absorbent crepe paper once battlefield demand ceased with the armistice of 1918? The first step was to turn it into a women’s sanitary pad, which hit stores in 1920 under the brand name of Kotex. Four years later, Kimberly-Clark introduced another cellucotton product named Kleenex; originally marketed as a makeup and cold cream remover, it soon enjoyed a surge in popularity as a disposable alternative to the soggy handkerchief.
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The culinary world is full of happy mistakes. Whether thanks to unusual weather or broken machinery, some foods that are now commonplace were invented by complete chance. Snack on these six facts about tasty accidental treats.
As the co-proprietor of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, Ruth Graves Wakefield was known for baking delectable desserts for her guests. One night in 1930, Wakefield was baking a popular Colonial-era recipe for Butter Drop Do cookies and decided to improvise by adding chocolate. Realizing she had run out of baker’s chocolate, she chopped up a block of Nestlé chocolate gifted to her by a representative from the Nestlé company. Instead of the chocolate dispersing while baking and creating a solid chocolate cookie, it remained in the form of gooey globs. The result was a hit with her guests, and Wakefield dubbed her new invention the “Chocolate Crunch Cookie.”
The tasty treat grew in popularity after it was advertised on an episode of The Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air radio show, and Wakefield later included the cookie in her 1936 cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes. Wakefield went on to strike a deal with Nestlé, providing them with the rights to the recipe in exchange for a lifetime of free chocolate, and the recipe first appeared on the back of Nestlé packaging in 1939.
John H. Kellogg may be best known for his patented Corn Flakes — the dry, flaked cereal that transformed breakfast tables around the world — but Kellogg’s original intention had less to do with creating a delicious cereal and more with living a healthy lifestyle free of sin. Kellogg was a doctor, nutritionist, and health advocate who became superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a popular health resort in Michigan, in 1876. While there, Kellogg experimented with various foods to promote wellness for his guests.
Kellogg believed that simple, bland foods would improve digestion and also help steer people away from carnal sins, an ideal he called “biological living.” One day, Kellogg was working on a new kind of wheat meal that had been rolled out and forgotten overnight. Instead of loaves of bread when baked, it produced thin flakes that proved popular with guests. John’s brother, William Keith Kellogg, saw an opportunity to broadly market the product by adding sugar to make the flakes more flavorful, and went on to found the Kellogg Company. A former patient of John Kellogg’s, C.W. Post, was also inspired by this accidental invention, and created Grape Nuts.
In the late 1950s, Omar Knedlik was operating a Dairy Queen in Coffeyville, Kansas, and his machinery kept breaking down. After the restaurant’s soda fountain malfunctioned, Knedlik decided to store bottles of soda in the freezer to keep them cool, only to find that they were partially frozen when removed. Despite the unexpected texture, customers loved the slushy treat that Knedlik had inadvertently created and asked for more. He conceived of a machine that utilized an air-conditioning unit from a car to produce the same slushed effect.
The drink grew so much in popularity that Knedlik held a competition to name the product, and the winning entry was “ICEE.” In 1965, 7-Eleven convenience stores began installing Knedlik’s machine and rebranded the product as the Slurpee — their ad director thought it reflected the sound made when sucking the product through a straw.
It may be a tough name to say out loud, but the invention of Worcestershire sauce was an easy, albeit accidental process — one that just took a little time. The savory condiment was created in Worcester, England, in 1835, when a former governor of India known as Lord Sandys was looking for sauces that reminded him of his favorite flavors from the Asian subcontinent. He asked drugstore owners John Lea and William Perrins to come up with a product. The owners tested a fish-and-vegetable mixture that produced a strong odor, leading them to store the sauce in the cellar of their store — which they then forgot about.
Two years later, the owners rediscovered the sauce while cleaning the basement. In that time, it had fermented and obtained an appealing flavor, which eventually became popular as a condiment throughout the United Kingdom. Named after the town where it was invented, Worcestershire sauce was first exported to America in 1839.
The origins of nachos can be traced back to the border town of Piedra Negas, Texas, where the dish was invented in the early 1940s in a frantic effort to please customers. Ignacio Anaya, who went by the nickname Nacho, was the maître d’hôtel of the Victory Club when a group of women arrived at the eatery outside of business hours, after the cooks had gone home. Not wanting the customers to leave, Anaya ran to the kitchen and gathered up a few ingredients that he had lying around — fried tortilla chips, colby cheese, and jalapeños — which he combined and baked until the cheese melted. The diners loved the concoction and requested seconds, so the restaurant added it to the menu. Capitalizing on the local success of his new snack food, Anaya even went on to open his own restaurant.
It would be an entirely different person who popularized nachos on a national level, however. Frank Liberto took Anaya’s concept and changed the delivery process so that the cheese “sauce” didn’t need to be refrigerated. Liberto’s version of nachos was introduced at a Texas Rangers game in 1976, and today nachos are a staple at sporting arenas across the country.
Frank Epperson may not be a household name, but he’s responsible for coming up with a universally beloved summertime treat when he was just 11 years old: the Popsicle. In 1905, Epperson absentmindedly left his cup of soda with a stirring stick on the porch overnight, during which temperatures dropped below freezing. The weather was a rarity in the Oakland area, where Epperson lived, but those unusual temperatures paid off. The next day, Epperson discovered his drink had frozen over and transformed into a delicious treat, which he dubbed the “Epsicle.”
Epperson brought the idea to his schoolmates, who loved the frozen treat, and he later introduced it to his own children. They referred to the treat as “Pop’s ‘sicle,” a name that Epperson patented in 1923. That same year, Epperson extended his sales beyond his hometown by selling the Popsicle at Neptune Beach in the San Francisco area, and it soon grew in popularity. So the next time you find yourself cooling down with a Popsicle on a hot summer day, you can thank Frank.
Bennett Kleinman
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Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Optimism Media, and previously contributed to television programs such as "Late Show With David Letterman" and "Impractical Jokers." Bennett is also a devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
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Everybody in the world has a birthday, but not everybody celebrates it, or even recognizes it, in the same way. Local birthday traditions can be cute, messy, sweet, a little (affectionately) insulting, or all of the above. In some cultures, age even gets tallied differently — a child who would be considered 2 days old in most places could be considered 2 years old in certain locations.
In one tradition, 1-year-olds predict their own futures. In another, you might end up covered in flour. Dutch people have their own entire labyrinth of rituals. These seven birthday facts just might inspire you to celebrate in new ways.
In Many East Asian Traditions, Everyone Gets Older at the Same Time
In today’s East Asia, it’s common to celebrate individual birthdays, but that wasn’t always the case. Several countries, including Korea, China, Japan, and Vietnam, traditionally celebrate one common day when everybody gets one year older right around the new year. In these traditions, babies are born at age 1, making their traditional age a year older than their age would be in other countries like the United States. This also means babies born close to the end of the year could be considered 2 years old when, chronologically, they’ve only been around for a couple of days.
When Dutch People Turn 50, They “See Abraham” or “See Sarah”
It’s a big deal when someone turns 50 in most places, but the Netherlands has a very specific, goofy tradition. For men, turning 50 is called “seeing Abraham,” and for women it’s “seeing Sarah.” The names come from the long-lived Bible characters, but the celebration is almost wholly secular, and mostly consists of the birthday-haver’s friends decorating their home in gaudy, thematic ways. Some people go all-out and decorate their yards with giant inflatable dolls, while others might limit it to a tasteful baked good. There’s even an over-50 Dutch women’s magazine called Saar, or Sarah.
Dutch People Also Sit in a Big Circle and Congratulate Everybody
The Dutch take birthdays very seriously, and for the uninitiated, a birthday party can seem kind of tedious. Guests could be expected to congratulate everyone at the party based on their relationship to the person having the birthday. Because it’s all done in one big circle — Dutch birthday parties are also called “circle parties” — it’s hard to get away with not doing it. You could just say “congratulations, everyone,” but it wouldn’t be considered polite. If you bring a present, expect it to be opened in front of the entire circle, too.
A year old is a little young to figure out what you’re doing with your life, but a Japanese first birthday ritual called Erabitori, or Choose & Take, gives it a very cute try. (There are different versions of the game common in other East Asian countries.) According to tradition, the birthday kid is surrounded by several items related to occupations, such as pens, calculators, money, scissors, or eating utensils. The idea is that their choice indicates their direction in life; a child could pick up a pen to foretell a life as a writer, or money for a career in finance. Some parents use cards in lieu of the items themselves now — which makes sense if you’re worried about your kid being around scissors.
It’s a common tradition in Jamaica to douseyourfriends with bags of flour on their birthdays. Jamaican runner Usain Bolt couldn’t even escape it while celebrating his 29th birthday in China at the 2015 IAAF World Championships; he posted a photo of himself from Beijing after some other Jamaican athletes floured him. Sometimes the tradition calls for eggs, too — so you might as well just use leftover ingredients from baking a cake.
In Brazil, after blowing out the candles, it’s customary for the person who’s having a birthday to give their slice of cake to someone important to them. For kids that often means parents, but not always! An adorable video of this tradition, showing an 11-year-old kid taking his first slice of birthday cake and giving it to his very excited little sibling next to him, went semi-viral in 2022. The reaction is very sweet — the younger kid starts sobbing and hugging him, knowing exactly what it means.
In Australia and New Zealand, one of the most beloved childhood treats is called fairy bread. Much like colorful birthday cake in the United States, it’s not strictly limited to birthdays — but it’s strongly associated with them.
It’s simple on paper: You take cheap white bread, spread butter or margarine on it, and then add liberal amounts of nonpareil sprinkles (Australians call them hundreds and thousands). Then, very importantly, you cut the bread into triangles. Getting the right butter-to-sprinkle ratio is a big deal.
Sarah Anne Lloyd is a freelance writer whose work covers a bit of everything, including politics, design, the environment, and yoga. Her work has appeared in Curbed, the Seattle Times, the Stranger, the Verge, and others.
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Although she appeared in just 11 feature films, Grace Kelly endures as a larger-than-life figure due to her magnetic screen presence, her impeccable fashion sense, and a fairy-tale marriage that whisked her from Tinseltown to the royal palace of a glamorous European city-state at the height of her career. Here are seven facts about a leading lady who lived a life seemingly scripted by the Hollywood machine she left behind.
The Philadelphia-based Kelly clan was a group of high achievers: Grace’s father, Jack Sr., won three Olympic gold medals for rowing, earned a fortune from his construction business, and had significant political connections; her mother, Margaret, was a model and the first woman to teach physical education at the University of Pennsylvania. Two of Grace’s uncles also enjoyed success in the entertainment industry: Walter Kelly was a vaudeville star whose career stretched to the advent of talking pictures, and George Kelly, who served as a valuable mentor to his niece, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.
Despite her parents’ finances (and because they disapproved of her acting ambitions), a teenage Kelly insisted on paying her own tuition to attend New York City’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts in the late 1940s. Fortunately for her, the beauty and poise that soon became familiar to theater audiences was already apparent, and Kelly quickly found work with the John Robert Powers modeling agency. According to Donald Spoto’s High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly, the budding actress appeared in a series of print ads and commercials for shampoo, soap, toothpaste, beer, and cigarettes, with earnings of more than $400 per week making her one of the city’s highest-paid models at the time.
Sometime between 1950 and 1952 (sources differ on the year), Kelly auditioned for the part of a desperate Irish woman in a New York City-based drama called Taxi (1953). She was passed over for the role, but her screen test eventually found its way to celebrated director John Ford, who lobbied for the little-known actress to be included in his high-profile adventure film Mogambo (1953). Separately, Alfred Hitchcock also saw something intriguing in the same Taxi screen test, leading to Kelly’s first true starring role, in Dial M for Murder (1954).
As told in Spoto’s High Society, Kelly and Alec Guinness engaged in a running gag that lasted more than two decades after their time together on the prank-filled set of The Swan (1956). After Kelly relentlessly teased her co-star about an overzealous fan, Guinness retaliated by having a concierge slip a tomahawk into her hotel bed. A few years later, Guinness was surprised to return to his London home and discover the same tomahawk nestled between his bedsheets. He later enlisted English actor John Westbrook to redeliver the item while Kelly and Westbrook toured the U.S. for a poetry reading during the 1970s, but her highness got the last laugh when Guinness again found the tomahawk in his Beverly Hills hotel bed in 1979.
Her Romance With Prince Rainier Got Off to a Rocky Start
Per High Society, Kelly was in France to attend the 1955 Cannes Film Festival when she agreed to travel to Monaco to meet Prince Rainier III (part of a scheme put together by the magazine Paris-Match for a photo story). However, the prince was delayed by a commitment elsewhere, and by the time he rushed back to his palace an hour late, his fed-up guest was ready to leave. When Rainier asked if she wanted to tour the palace, Kelly coolly replied that she’d already done so while waiting. They subsequently relaxed while walking through the palace garden, their brief meeting giving rise to an epistolary friendship that turned romantic, and eventually led to their “wedding of the century” in April 1956.
Credit: Daniel SIMON/ Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
As Princess Grace of Monaco, She Devoted Herself to Charity
Along with giving birth to Prince Albert and Princesses Caroline and Stephanie, Kelly transitioned to life as Princess Grace by immersing herself in charitable initiatives in her adopted country. After taking over the presidency of the Monaco Red Cross in 1958, the erstwhile actress launched the World Association of Children’s Friends (AMADE) in 1963 and the Princess Grace Foundation the following year. Additionally, the princess opened the city-state’s first day care in 1966, and channeled her longtime love of flowers into the formation of the Monaco Garden Club two years later.
Credit: Images Press/ Archive Photos via Getty Images
Princess Grace Starred in a Little-Seen Comedy Just Before Her Death
A glance at a standard Kelly bio gives the impression that her screen career ended with her marriage, save for the occasional documentary appearance. However, the princess did deliver one final acting performance — albeit as a fictionalized version of herself — in the early ’80s mistaken-identity comedy Rearranged. Initially intended as a promotion for the Monaco Garden Club’s annual competition, the half-hour-long short was a hit, sparking plans to expand the piece into an hour-long American TV special. However, its star’s untimely death following a September 1982 car accident torpedoed those plans, and the original short remains within Monaco’s royal archives, largely unavailable to viewers.
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Tim Ott has written for sites including Biography.com, History.com, and MLB.com, and is known to delude himself into thinking he can craft a marketable screenplay.
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Look at an old menu or family dinner photo and you’ll probably notice some ghosts of dinners past: food that used to be everywhere but that’s not at all common today. Some choices are obvious retro relics (you don’t see too many gelatin molds anymore), while others have slipped into obscurity relatively quietly. Of course, none of these foods have dropped off the face of the planet, and they’re all still enjoyed by some people — just fewer of them.
From highly controversial holiday sweets to the meat and potatoes of yesteryear, these 10 dishes aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be.
Sweetbreads sound like dessert, but they’re actually a kind of offal, or organ meat — specifically the thymus and pancreas glands, usually from a lamb or calf. The meat is soaked in milk, buttermilk, or water before cooking. Sweetbreads reduce waste from a butchered animal, and many still enjoy the dish, but it’s not as common as it used to be. (Consumption of organ meats in general declined in the U.S. after World War II, although they’re making a bit of a comeback.)
Another highly controversial holiday dish is the much-maligned fruitcake, a cake with candied fruits and nuts that’s usually soaked in a spirit like brandy. Fruitcake has ancient roots, but fell into deep disfavor in the U.S. around the 1980s and eventually became a sort of joke, emblematic of the worst holiday gift. Without any fans to give or receive it, the fruitcake has faded into relative obscurity stateside, though it’s still common in some other countries.
Ambrosia, or Five-Cup Salad
Named for the preferred food of the Greek gods, the most divisive dish of the holiday season used to be ambrosia, sometimes called five-cup salad or, simply, fruit salad with marshmallows. It’s a mixture of mini marshmallows, canned (sometimes fresh) fruit, mayonnaise or Cool Whip or sour cream, and coconut. It tastes about how you’d expect it to, for better or for worse.
Nothing screams retro dinner party quite like a centerpiece savory gelatin salad, molded into an elaborate shape and often with showy colors. It wasn’t just sturdy vegetables that appeared in these concoctions — everything from lettuce to ham to ranch dressing could be made into jiggly edible art. Jell-O salads hit their peak in the 1950s and 1960s, although they stayed on the table in many households, especially in the South, for decades after.
Fondue
Fondue, a shared, heated cheese dip served in a special warming pot, was all the rage at parties in the 1970s. While you can sometimes find fondue in restaurants, it’s a pretty niche item now — and since single-function items like fondue pots take up valuable cabinet space in one’s home, it’s an extremely rare sight at parties.
Liver and onions are a classic, hearty combination, pairing beef or veal liver with soft-cooked or caramelized onions, often with a side of mashed potatoes. It’s now considered a little old-school, and many people in younger generations associate it more with a Simpsons joke than their dinner tables.
Salisbury Steak
Salisbury steak — named for its inventor, 19th-century doctor James Henry Salisbury, who advocated a meat-heavy diet — is not so much a steak as a cross between a burger patty and a meatloaf. It eventually became a mainstay of cafeterias and TV dinners, which didn’t do it any favors, flavor-wise. You can still find it at a classic diner here and there, but it’s not nearly as ubiquitous as it once was.
The history of this recipe and its name are a little murky, but this milky chicken dish with green bell peppers, pimento, and mushrooms was pretty popular in American kitchens for much of the 20th century. Its popularity started to wane in the 1980s, although some still consider it a comfort food (or just a good way to use up leftover chicken).
Crescent Rings
Canned crescent rolls are super easy to throw in the oven for a quick dinner or side — but what if you made them more complicated? For a crescent ring, you lay out the raw triangles of dough in a sunburst shape, add savory or sweet fillings, and tuck in the edges so the fillings peek through on top. The tidy wreath shape made it ideal for parties and potlucks.
Chicken Cordon Bleu
Chicken Cordon Bleu — that’s “blue ribbon” in French — is an over-the-top Swiss dish with thinly pounded chicken, ham, and cheese rolled together, breaded, and deep fried, then often topped with a cream sauce. That extreme level of richness is perhaps one of the reasons it’s not so popular anymore.
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Interesting Facts writers have been seen in Popular Mechanics, Mental Floss, A+E Networks, and more. They’re fascinated by history, science, food, culture, and the world around them.
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The world is wide and wonderful — and pretty weird. Take a break from your day and prepare to smile over this assortment of random facts, from the pseudo-medical roots of tomato ketchup to Antarctic matchmaking. What was Uranus called before Uranus? Why do giant pandas do handstands? These 15 facts may just give you a chuckle.
If we’re talking imperial measurements, a “butt” is a cask of liquid. And while this form of “butt” is obsolete for most people, it’s still used in wine and brewing contexts. In the wine world, a butt is around 108 imperial gallons (just under 500 liters, or around 126 U.S. gallons), so it turns out that a buttload is… a buttload.
Despite the fact that Uranus is four times the size of Earth, it took astronomers a while to realize it was a planet rather than a star, even after telescopes came along. English astronomer William Herschel made the first recorded discovery of Uranus as a planet in 1781, during the reign of King George III. He named the planet Georgium Sidus, or George’s Star, in honor of the king. The international astronomy community was less than thrilled about a planet being named after an unpopular British monarch rather than a deity, and in 1850 settled on naming the planet Uranus, after the Greek god of the sky.
A lot of dangerous things were sold as “patent medicine” in unregulated 1800s America, including mercury, lead, and arsenic. Meanwhile, tomatoes, which are in the same family as deadly nightshade, were considered unsafe by much of the population until they were sold as a cure-all. Dr. John Cook Bennett was one of the tomato’s biggest boosters, and claimed the fruit would protect migrants heading west “from the danger attendant upon those violent bilious attacks to which all unacclimated citizens are liable.” He provided several tomato recipes to be taken as medicine, including catsup, which, at the time, typically contained mushrooms and/or walnuts.
Eventually, Americans figured out that tomato ketchup worked much better as a tasty condiment than medicine — but to be fair to Dr. Bennett, he did suggest using it as a replacement for mercury, so he may have helped some folks out.
Antarctica is the most sparsely populated continent on the Earth, with only about 1,000 people over the winter (none of them permanent residents) in more than 5 million square miles. So when an American scientist opened the Tinder app at a research station in 2014, it was mostly out of curiosity. To his surprise, he matched with another researcher camping a 45-minute helicopter ride away. They didn’t meet until a few weeks after swiping right, just as his match was leaving town, but considering the population only grows to about 5,000 people in the summer, the chances that their paths crossed again seems high.
For a term that seems so cutesy, the literal use of “jiffy” is extremely scientific. Physicists use the term to describe how long it takes for light to travel a millionth of a millionth of a millimeter, which is less than a billion-billionth of a second. A jiffy is a little longer in electrical contexts; it’s the length of a single cycle of alternating current, or about one-fiftieth of a second. So next time you say you’ll be “back in a jiffy,” consider what you’re promising!
No, it’s not a human-taught trick: Wild giant pandas have been known to do handstands while relieving themselves, especially during mating season. Because, unfortunately, there aren’t too many giant pandas around — and they don’t have a ton of energy to spare — they want to broadcast their scent as widely and efficiently as possible to potential mates. This means finding trees with rough bark for greater absorption, choosing wide trees to increase the target area, and aiming as high as possible. The handstand gives male pandas a much-needed leg up (literally).
A toothbrush with a picturesque swirl of toothpaste, called a “nurdle” in the industry, is a mainstay of advertisements, and became especially popular as brands started releasing more colorful products in the 1970s. It’s a goofy factoid for most of us, but toothpaste manufacturers take nurdles very, very seriously.
In 2010, GlaxoSmithCline, the maker of Aquafresh, applied to trademark the nurdle design in any color. Colgate-Palmolive, which also used a nurdle to advertise its products, took it as a legal threat — the company’s lawyer called it “a blatant shot across Colgate’s bow” — and sued to protect their imagery and get the trademark petition canceled. GlaxoSmithCline countersued, alleging that Colgate’s nurdle caused “irreparable harm.”
The two companies eventually came to a confidential settlement, but still: Who knew the toothpaste industry was so wacky… and so litigious?
Humans Could Frame Koalas for a Crime (or Vice Versa)
Strangely enough, koala fingerprints strongly resemble those of humans — the pattern of ridges and whorls looks even more similar to our own than chimpanzee fingerprints. Though distant on the evolutionary tree from us primates, koalas likely developed fingerprints to help them grasp eucalyptus trees while climbing them and munching on their leaves. In the ’90s, a forensic scientist at the University of Adelaide in Australia warned that koala prints are so similar to human prints, it’s possible police in Australia could mistake one for another. “Although it is extremely unlikely that koala prints would be found at the scene of a crime, police should at least be aware of the possibility,” Maciej Henneberg noted.
Most humans can at least tap their toes to the beat of some music, but aside from a few primates, the majority of mammals can’t — or at least haven’t shown us that they can. Sea lions are an exception. In 2013, a pair of scientists taught a “particularly bright sea lion” named Ronan to bob her head to simple rhythmic sounds. It took her a few months to master those, but once she had those rhythms down, she could keep the beat to songs she hadn’t heard before, including “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys (a nod to a previous case of a parrot keeping a beat) and “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth, Wind & Fire, even when the songs were adjusted to various tempos.
Next time you’re in Wales, you might have the opportunity to visit Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch — or, as it’s often simplified on maps, Llanfair PG — a fishing village on the Isle of Anglesey in the northern part of the country. The name translates to “the church of Mary in the hollow of the white hazel near the fierce whirlpool and the Church of Tysilio by the red cave,” and it replaced the town’s shorter name, Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll, in the 1860s in hopes of drumming up tourism from a new railroad line. It worked, and visitors still pop through for souvenirs and passport stamps.
Bear in mind that in the Welsh alphabet, many pairs of letters function more like single ones, so while it’s still comically long in Welsh, to English speakers it’s even more dizzying. The place name is sometimes referred to as “the Englishman’s Cure for Lockjaw.” It still stops short of being the longest place name in the world, though; Bangkok’s full name is Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit.
People Used to Mail Their Children Via the Postal Service
When the United States Postal Service launched their parcel service in 1913, Americans immediately began testing its boundaries. People started mailing coffins, eggs, and even dogs, and a few decided to mail the ultimate precious cargo: human children.
The first known case of baby-shipping happened that same year, when an Ohio couple mailed their 10-pound infant to his grandmother a mile away, which cost them about 15 cents. Some kids traveled farther, like 6-year-old Edna Neff, who was mailed 720 miles from Pensacola, Florida, to her father’s home in Christiansburg, Virginia.
There was only a brief window for mailing kids, though; the postmaster general instituted a strict no-humans rule in 1914. At least two more children managed to slip through: Charlotte May Pierstorff was mailed via rail to her grandparents’ house with the appropriate postage stuck to her coat in 1914, but a postal worker relative escorted her (her story was later turned into a children’s book). The last recorded case was in 1915, when 3-year-old Maud Smith’s grandparents mailed her 40 miles across Kentucky to visit her sick mother. In 1920, the Postal Service declined two applications to mail children who had been listed as “harmless live animals,” a classification for creatures that don’t require food or water on their journey.
Carrots and other similarly colored vegetables like yams get their color from a pigment called beta carotene, which converts to vitamin A in the small intestine. When humans eat too much beta carotene, our small intestines can’t process it all, and the excess pigment hits our bloodstreams instead. If someone eats enough carrots to overload their body with beta carotene consistently over a long period of time, their skin can start to look a little orange, particularly on the palms of the hands, soles of the feet, and nose. This syndrome is called carotenemia, and it usually only affects babies and toddlers who chow down on a little too much puree. It’s weird, but it’s generally harmless.
It’s impossible to know what the first joke in history was, but we have a few ancient written examples. The oldest known written joke, circa 1900 BCE, came from ancient Sumeria, in what’s now southern Iraq.
This is the joke: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” It doesn’t really translate to today’s humor — like many jokes, maybe you just had to be there.
German chocolate cake, which alternates layers of buttermilk-and-chocolate cake with a pecan and coconut topping, sounds like it must come from Germany — but neither coconut nor pecans are part of traditional German cuisine. The recipe actually originated in Dallas, Texas, and the “German” part refers to a person named Samuel German, an employee of Baker’s Chocolate. The product Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate was his own formula of presweetened chocolate, and the recipe, which first appeared in the Dallas Morning News in 1957, used it as a main ingredient.
When the Norwegian King’s Guard visited Edinburgh, Scotland, for a drill display in 1961, Major Nils Egelien paid a visit to the Edinburgh Zoo, and became absolutely enamored with the king penguins that reside there. (Apparently, the march of the king penguins reminded him of the march of his own King’s Guard.) When he returned to Scotland in 1972, he insisted that his regiment adopt a penguin — although the penguin stayed at the zoo — as their mascot. The penguin, named Nils Olav after both his No. 1 fan and the king of Norway at the time (King Olav V), eventually climbed the Norwegian military ranks. He was made corporal in 1982, and was officially knighted in 2008. As of 2023, his official title in the Norwegian King’s Guard is Major General Sir Nils Olav III, Baron of the Bouvet Islands. Major general is the third-highest rank in the Norwegian Army — and he officially outranks the original (human) Nils.
Before you Google “how long do king penguins live”: They’re on the third penguin.
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Who can resist the smell of freshly baked cookies or a basket of warmed bread brought out before your entree? Not many, though it’s no surprise considering humans have made baked goods a dietary staple for thousands of years. The love doesn’t stop at just consumption, either — whether you enjoy mixing up a bowl of cake batter or watching a group of contestants sweat through the task, there’s something about baking that’s entirely alluring.
If life has you in a sour mood, baking a loaf of sourdough (or your favorite treat) may just be the answer. Some psychology research has shown that small-scale creative projects — such as baking — actually benefit human brains, and contribute to a sense of flourishing. Baking and cooking may help people feel more relaxed and satisfied with life, and focusing on kitchen tasks may have benefits similar to those offered by meditation.
Tiny crumbs are the last remnants of the world’s oldest bread, which researchers believe is at least 14,000 years old. Discovered in an ancient fireplace in Jordan, the small bits of bread likely belonged to the Natufians, hunter-gatherers who lived during the Epipaleolithic era. The bread crumb discovery, made public in 2018, has shifted scientific understanding about how early humans ate — the archaic food scraps are 4,000 years older than when researchers believe the first bread was baked. They indicate that humans learned to bake even before the advent of agriculture.
Yeast gives raised baked goods their lift by creating air bubbles — as the organisms feed off sugars, they produce carbon dioxide that inflates the dough. Humans have used some strains of yeast — like today’s popular Saccharomyces cerevisiae — for thousands of years, slowly domesticating it over time to create consistent results. In comparison, wild yeasts (like those that can be found on fruit skins or floating around in the air) behave unpredictably, which can change the scent and flavor of breads and fermented beverages.
Historians attribute the first mechanical dough mixer to Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, a formerly enslaved Greek man who became wealthy from baking bread in first-century Rome. Eurysaces’ mixer kneaded dough inside a stone basin outfitted with wooden paddles; the setup was attached to a horse or donkey that walked in circles to keep the paddles moving.
Heating an oven to bake a loaf of bread is much easier today than it was for 18th-century bakers. Cooks of the time relied on dome-shaped ovens, often called “beehive ovens,” to bake pies, breads, cakes, and other foods. The wood-fired ovens were made from brick and often covered with clay, and cooking in them took skill, especially because they took up to five hours to properly heat. That’s why many colonial cooks crafted breads and baked goods just once per week.
The instructions for many baked goods often suggest you preheat the oven to 350 degrees — but why? The reason is simple: 350 degrees is a middle-of-the-road temperature that’s sufficient for cooking foods without causing them to burn. Also, 350 degrees is the temperature at which the Maillard reaction occurs; that’s the browning reaction that gives food its toasty color and complex flavor profile. However, including a temperature in cooking instructions is something of a modern notation; before 1940, most ovens didn’t have a temperature gauge and required cooks to measure temperature by setting pans of flour or paper inside, or testing heat with their hands.
There’s a Major Difference Between Baking Powder and Baking Soda
If you’ve ever run out of baking powder and reached for baking soda, chances are the results weren’t quite right. While these two pantry necessities look nearly identical and do the work of helping cookies and cakes become light and fluffy, they work somewhat differently. Baking soda, the stronger of the two ingredients, is made from 100% sodium bicarbonate, which creates carbon dioxide when mixed with an acid like vinegar or lemon juice. Baking powder is a less potent blend of sodium bicarbonate and acidic cream of tartar that activates with moisture and heat, and removes the step of adding another astringent ingredient.
Most of the cooking astronauts do in space is limited to boiling water, used to rehydrate freeze-dried, shelf-stable meals. However, in 2019, astronauts Christina Koch and Luca Parmitano became Earth’s first zero-gravity bakers. They used a special “space oven” sent to the International Space Station just for the experiment, which tested how well raw foods cook in space. The cookies apparently took far longer to bake in space — about 120 to 130 minutes. However, the ISS crew didn’t get to taste their culinary creation; the baked cookies were returned to Earth for examination by NASA researchers. (Fortunately, the astronauts were provided with prebaked cookies to eat after the experiment, so they got a treat anyway.)
Nicole Garner Meeker
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Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.
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Few things are more central to human civilization than water. That’s why most ancient civilizations (Egypt, Indus, Sumer, etc.) flourished along rivers, and why many major cities today have followed suit. Around the world, 165 rivers are considered “major rivers” whose length and width tower over the competition.
But there’s more to rivers than just size. While some of the world’s most important rivers are long, winding natural wonders, others have outsized historical impact, represent an amazing moment of human engineering, or are simply beautiful to look at. These six facts concern some of the six most amazing rivers in the world, from the backwoods of Colombia to major metropolises around the globe.
Finding the source of the Nile, arguably the most famous and important river in human history, was one of the great adventures of the 19th century. Explorers including David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, and Richard Francis Burton searched the White Nile, the river’s longest tributary (the other major tributary being the Blue Nile), to no avail. Today, scientists still aren’t sure where the furthest headwaters of the White Nile are, although one leading contender is the Ruvyironza River in Burundi.
The Yangtze River Watershed Takes Up 20% of China’s Total Landmass
The Yangtze is central to Chinese culture and civilization, and is the longest river to be contained inside only one country. Rising on the Tibetan plateau, the river travels east as it eventually empties into the East China Sea. The river ranks among the longest in the world, but its drainage basin is truly gargantuan. At 700,000 square miles, it takes up 20% of China’s total landmass. Some 250 million people live on or near the river, and the Yangtze provides the country with 35% of its fresh water. There is no China without the Yangtze.
The Danube Flows Through 10 Countries, More Than Any Other River in the World
While the Yangtze flows in only one country, the Danube passes through more countries than any other river. Those countries are Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine. In those countries, the Danube also passes through four capital cities, including Vienna, Austria; Bratislava, Slovakia; Budapest, Hungary; and Belgrade, Serbia (an additional five capitals lie in the river basin). The Danube’s central location in Europe, along with its proximity to so many cities, easily makes it one of the most important rivers in the world.
Caño Cristales Has the Nickname “Rainbow River” Because of Its Multi-Hued Waters
Caño Cristales isn’t one of the world’s longest or deepest rivers, and it doesn’t really feature prominently in Colombia’s history, but it does have one dazzling attribute that’s hard to ignore — it’s as colorful as a rainbow. Caño Cristales gets the nickname “Rainbow River” because it’s colored yellow, green, blue, black, and most especially red, hues that can be seen from May until November. This panoply of colors is derived from the reproductive process of aquatic plants (Macarenia clavigera) living on the riverbed. Because the river’s depth fluctuates between the wet and dry seasons, it’s only dazzlingly brilliant a few months out of the year.
Although the Amazon is the second-longest river in the world and a vital artery of the Amazon rainforest, not a single bridge crosses its expanse. That’s surprising considering there are more than a hundred bridges crossing the similarly-sized Yangtze, and nine bridges crossing the Nile in Cairo.
The simple answer for the Amazon’s lack of bridges is the lack of need for them. The cities and towns bordering the Amazon have ferries and boats; the river basin’s extensive marshes also make building a bridge a costly affair. Floating bridges, or pontoons, are also impractical as the width of the river can vary between 2 miles and 30 miles between the dry and wet seasons.
Credit: Fraser Hall/ The Image Bank via Getty Images
The Chicago River Is the Only River That Flows Backward
As Chicago changed from a Great Lakes-adjacent village to a booming metropolis toward the end of the 19th century, city planners were faced with a conundrum. The Chicago River, which carried much of the city’s waste, emptied directly into Lake Michigan, which was also the source of the city’s drinking water. To fix the problem, engineer Ellis S. Chesbrough put forward an idea to reverse the river’s flow by building a ditch lower than both Lake Michigan and the river itself. When the project was finally completed in 1900, the Chicago River became the only river in the world that had reversed its flow.
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Putting away groceries, cooking dinner, washing up — there’s a lot that goes on in our kitchens, so it makes sense that many of the items inside them go more or less unnoticed, at least when it comes to asking the deeper questions. If you’ve never stopped to wonder who invented the whisk or how long humans have used cheese graters, you’re not alone. But the backstories on these 10 kitchen items may just give you something to think about while you’re waiting for the water to boil.
Humans have long consumed perishable foods that require refrigeration, even without modern cold storage — though it’s never been an easy feat. In more recent history, Americans in the 1800s relied on ice houses: underground chambers lined with stone that stayed cool thanks to ice collected from rivers and lakes. By the end of the 1800s, much smaller indoor ice boxes became popular, which kept foods cool by using an actual block of ice inside a wooden or tin cabinet. The modern refrigerator slowly emerged thanks to decades of innovations that introduced electric appliances and chemicals such as Freon. General Electric introduced its “Monitor Top” refrigerator in 1927, which became the first widely popular model thanks to a cookbook campaign that promoted tricks, tips, and reusing leftovers. Still, most American households wouldn’t own an electric fridge until after World War II.
Eating with your hands is often considered bad etiquette, but at one time in history, it was preferred. Prior to the 10th century, forks typically had just two to three tines and were used to skewer food for serving or hold it during cutting. That changed in the later 900s, when Byzantine royal Theophanu, who became Holy Roman empress, introduced the practice of eating with forks, though using the utensils was typically an upper-class practice. Fork usage slowly spread through Europe over the following centuries, though the implements were often lambasted as being too delicate or “feminine” in some cases, and the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church saw them as an excessive display of wealth that insulted higher powers. (In some cases, they were even seen as tools of the devil.) Fork usage eventually caught on more widely by the 1700s, and the utensils have claimed their space in cutlery drawers ever since.
Hobart Manufacturing Company, an Ohio-based kitchen equipment brand, got its start with stand mixers around 1908. Company engineer Herbert Johnson was inspired by watching bakers knead bread, and by 1914 the brand released a line of commercial dough mixers that became so popular that even the U.S. Navy made them standard issue on its ships. Within a few years, Hobart Manufacturing expanded into home kitchens with its H-5 model, which could slice, strain, and more with a handful of attachments. Model K — the predecessor to KitchenAid-branded models — hit kitchen countertops in 1937, though the punchy pastel paint colors (like “petal pink” and “island green”) would come two decades later in 1955.
Credit: Leemage/ Corbis Historical via Getty Images
Cheese Graters
Historians believe humans began experimenting with cheesemaking between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago. Grating and shredding, however, may have come much later; some of the oldest known cheese graters date back to the ninth century BCE in Greece. Archaeologists working in modern-day Tuscany have unearthed bronze graters from tombs belonging to the ancient Etruscans. Some researchers think the kitchen pieces were used by warriors who blended wine and cheese to make a ceremonial beverage.
Potholders protect our hands from blistering burns, though textile historians believe they’re a more recent kitchen addition. Most potholders in museums are no more than 250 years old, and those that survive are typically thinner, unpadded versions meant to cover teapot handles. According to Merriam-Webster, the word “potholder” didn’t even emerge until 1888. That doesn’t mean our ancestral cooks grabbed dishes barehanded; hooked metal pot grabbers and lid lifters were commonly used tools, along with less-decorative towels and rags. As for quilted and embellished options, researchers believe potholders picked up popularity in the mid-1700s to early 1800s, when they were sometimes decorated with anti-slavery messages and sold at fairs and bazaars hosted by abolitionists.
Microwaves are electromagnetic waves capable of being bounced off distant objects for radar detection, and microwave ovens actually descended from radar technology developed during WWII. (The first microwave oven was developed after an engineer working on a radar apparatus accidentally melted a chocolate bar in his pocket.) When shot at food, microwave radiation makes water molecules inside the food vibrate, which creates the heat that cooks your dinner.
According to food historian Andrew F. Smith, the earliest microwave oven was bought by a Cleveland restaurant in 1947; the $3,000 price tag made the new tool more or less unattainable for home use. Smaller, more affordable units were developed by the 1960s, but these were found to leak harmful levels of radiation. By the 1970s, designs had improved and microwave ovens were deemed safe. But it took the partnership of the convenience food industry — who created microwave-safe packaging designs — and a slew of instructive newspaper articles, pamphlets, and cookbooks to teach the home cook how to use this new tool. As of 2001, over 90% of U.S. homes had a microwave.
Up until the 19th century, most women made their own whisks out of bundles of birch sticks. This type of whisk is still used by some chefs for delicate sauces and whipping meringue, and can be a great alternative for whisking on easily damaged non-stick surfaces. Wire whisks, with the classic hot air balloon shape, came into use in the early 19th century, and the first rotary beaters were patented in the 1860s. Featuring one or two interlocking whisks powered by a hand crank, they cut down on the bicep-building work of whisking. These rotary beaters still have their place in the kitchen: They can whisk meringue in half the time of an upright, electrified mixer without leaving dregs of unbeaten egg at the bottom of the bowl.
Before the 20th century, outdoor meat cooking was done on massive grills, spits, or in barbecue pits lined with hot coals. Hot, heavy, and time-consuming, this was labor usually performed by groups of men, and in the South, enslaved men. But in 1897, the charcoal briquette was patented, cutting down on time and labor, and in the 1950s, the classic and compact Weber kettle grill was developed. Developed from a Lake Michigan buoy, its lightweight design and stylish shape opened grilling to all.
When retailers began marketing home grills, they targeted men because there was a tradition of men cooking barbecue, but also because men were usually the breadwinners. The thought was that women wouldn’t be interested in buying another cooking appliance when they could just use their stoves. By targeting men, advertisers were finding a new market for cooking, and men were being motivated to feel that cooking outdoors over a fire was a very masculine thing to do. To this day, professional grill masters and pit masters are typically male.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the ice industry was rapidly expanding. New England was the world’s leader in ice production; ice cutters used new horse-drawn blades to cut ice off of frozen lakes. The ice was insulated in ice houses, and could stay frozen until the following October. According to food historian Jeri Quinzio in her book Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making, by 1800 ice was being shipped to the West Indies, and in 1833, a Boston ice merchant began making regular shipments to Calcutta.
Ice became cheap and readily available by the mid-19th century, which spurred an abundance of iced drinks. The ice would have been brought into bars, soda fountains, or ice cream parlors in large blocks and skillfully chopped into different shapes by the resident bartender.
The first mechanical ice-maker was patented in 1851, and was designed “to convert water into ice artificially by absorbing its heat of liquefaction with expanding air.” Initially, the machine was meant to help treat yellow fever patients. Ice makers were first added to consumer refrigerators and freezers in 1953, and the fridge-door ice dispenser we’re familiar with today was introduced in 1965 by Frigidaire.
The earliest depiction of a straw is on a seal found in a Sumerian tomb dated to 3,000 BCE. It shows two men using what appear to be straws taking beer from a jar. Beer brewed in Ancient Mesopotamia and Sumeria was unfiltered, so it was full of grain and chaff that floated on the surface. The straw allowed drinkers to access the beer underneath. While most of these ancient straws were made from reeds, museums have examples of extraordinary early straws, including a pure gold straw and a gold and lapis lazuli “drinking tube,” both from the ancient city of Ur in what is now Iraq.
Straws didn’t become popular again until mid-19th-century America. Cocktail culture was thriving and rye straws (made from rye grain) were used to sip spirits from drinks that were packed with ice, fruit, and mint. The sherry cobbler, one of the most popular cocktails of the mid-19th century — made from sherry, sugar, and citrus — became famous in part because a straw was needed to drink it.
Paper straws were first developed at the turn of the 20th century as a “cheap, durable, and unobjectionable alternative to natural straws,” in the words of inventor Martin Stone, for use in soda fountains. They were originally made with waxed manila paper to replicate the color of rye straws. Today, paper straws masquerade in the bright colors of mid-20th-century plastic straws, and some businesses are returning to using straw straws as an environmentally conscious option.
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