Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Wolves and I'm Holly Frying. So a note
Speaker 1: before we begin this. Some of John Harvey Kellogg's thought
Speaker 1: was about the sexual health of adults. So if you
Speaker 1: are listening with young children, be aware there is going
Speaker 1: to be some talk about sex and some sexual terminology
Speaker 1: in this episode. Yeah, a little bit of anatomy that
Speaker 1: you may or may not have covered yet. Can I
Speaker 1: tell you a story, poor favour. I used to be
Speaker 1: a massage therapist, like a legitimate massage therapist. I had
Speaker 1: a license and all that, and I was getting ready
Speaker 1: to start my first full time job at a spa.
Speaker 1: And this was the spa was like the kind of
Speaker 1: place up in the mountains where you would go and
Speaker 1: you would get three health food meals a day and
Speaker 1: in addition to your massages, there were day hikes and
Speaker 1: nutritional counseling and uh and that sort of thing. Like
Speaker 1: it was very health spa. Yeah, the kind of place
Speaker 1: where there was such a focus on healthy eating that
Speaker 1: people would routinely ask the maintenance guy and they could smuggle.
Speaker 1: If you could smuggle some hamburgers for them. Um. So
Speaker 1: the night before my first day of work there, I
Speaker 1: was staying at this condo that had cable and I
Speaker 1: hadn't had a TV at all for about four years,
Speaker 1: so of course I turned it on and what was
Speaker 1: on was coincidentally The Road to Wellville, which is based
Speaker 1: on a book by TC Boyle. Yes, have you ever
Speaker 1: seen this or read this? Yes? And yes, but it's
Speaker 1: been quite some time on both of you. It's a
Speaker 1: fictionalized comedy about John Harvey Kellogg, and in the movie,
Speaker 1: everybody is at this spa to get better, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff going on. It just seems really cuckoo,
Speaker 1: from weird electrical therapies to a hyper strict focus on
Speaker 1: never ever ever masturbating. It's absolutely thick schnl. But the
Speaker 1: Battle Creek Sanitarium was a real place run by John
Speaker 1: Harvey Kellogg, who was a real guy, and it had
Speaker 1: its share of weirdness, which is what we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about today. It's almost one of those things where
Speaker 1: you're like, why did you fictionalize this funny weird as
Speaker 1: it is? That's sort of like Stone Mountain, Georgia. They
Speaker 1: really didn't need to make up all kinds of craziness
Speaker 1: about Stone Mountain for thirty y rock, because it's got
Speaker 1: its own craziness right there. Um. So also this is
Speaker 1: you thank some part to a listener request from Palace.
Speaker 1: We are going to talk about John Harvey Kellogg and
Speaker 1: the sanitarium at Battle Creek today. So John hard Vee
Speaker 1: Kellogg was born in Tyrone, Michigan, on February eighteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: and his parents were John Preston and and Kellogg. He
Speaker 1: was one of sixteen it's one six sixteen children, which
Speaker 1: included five from his father's first marriage. They were all
Speaker 1: devout Seventh day Adventists, and they moved to Battle Creek, Michigan,
Speaker 1: which was at that point the home of the Seventh
Speaker 1: Day Adventist Church. When John was young. His father owned
Speaker 1: a broom factory there and all of the children worked
Speaker 1: in it as soon as they were of legal age
Speaker 1: to do so. When John got older, he worked as
Speaker 1: a printer's devil, which is kind of a gopher slash
Speaker 1: apprentice type role at a Seventh Day Adventist publishing house.
Speaker 1: His interest in medicine and health reform probably started there
Speaker 1: because of the materials they were printing. Bell and White,
Speaker 1: who was co founder of the Seventh day Adventists, had
Speaker 1: begun to write extensively about health and wellness. A core
Speaker 1: Seventh Day Adventist belief is that people's bodies are the
Speaker 1: temples of the Holy Spirit, so they should be treated
Speaker 1: well and kept healthy through clean living and healthful behaviors,
Speaker 1: and people should avoid quote, unclean foods and tobacco and alcohol.
Speaker 1: When he was sixteen, he worked for a little while
Speaker 1: as a teacher. All There's some kind of respiratory trouble
Speaker 1: ended his teaching work and caused him to return to studying.
Speaker 1: John's father did not really see a lot of reason
Speaker 1: to educate his children. He believed that the Second Coming
Speaker 1: was imminent and that would have been a waste of time.
Speaker 1: So many of his siblings never finished high school. And
Speaker 1: in spite of that, John got his m d. From
Speaker 1: Bellevue Hospital Medical College in eighteen seventy five UH. For
Speaker 1: scattered years between eighteen eighty three and nineteen eleven, he
Speaker 1: also studied in Europe UH and continued his education in
Speaker 1: surgery and medicine there. His goal and all the study
Speaker 1: was really to be a good doctor and a good surgeon.
Speaker 1: And he was. He was a successful doctor and a
Speaker 1: very respected surgeon, and he continued to practice surgery until
Speaker 1: he was in his seventies. He also founded Battle Creek College,
Speaker 1: which later became part of Andrew's University, and he served
Speaker 1: as its first president. He was also an advocate of
Speaker 1: health outreach for the poor and needy. He believed that
Speaker 1: all Christian institutions should work with the poor in their
Speaker 1: local area, and he also believed that Seventh day Adventists
Speaker 1: were in particular called to work as medical missionaries. He
Speaker 1: was part of the Adventists creation of a medical mission
Speaker 1: in Chicago, the closest major city to Battle Creek at
Speaker 1: the time. Detroit was much smaller than and that was
Speaker 1: in eight three uh and that medical mission became a
Speaker 1: model for other missions in Chicago and elsewhere. The goal
Speaker 1: was to see to both the physical and spiritual health
Speaker 1: of the city's poorest residence. On February twenty second, eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, he married Ella et Eaton, and they lived
Speaker 1: in a fifty room home in Battle Creek. That sounds enormous,
Speaker 1: it does. Indeed, they really needed all that room because
Speaker 1: together they fostered about forty children and legally adopted seven
Speaker 1: of them. They had no biological children because allegedly, as
Speaker 1: it just seems to be a running theme with every
Speaker 1: topic that I picked, their marriage was chased and never consummated.
Speaker 1: You do have bad luck with that. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's bad luck, it's just it's just funny
Speaker 1: because you pick things not knowing that, and it always
Speaker 1: comes up in the research. Yeah, I just keep picking
Speaker 1: people to talk about, and then it turns out that
Speaker 1: that person, by coincidence, has a chased marriage. Yes, sav
Speaker 1: a chase marriage and practice celibacy for their whole life. Uh.
Speaker 1: And although some of his children were black, John was
Speaker 1: actually a proponent of the eugenics movement and founded the
Speaker 1: Race Betterment Foundation in nineteen eleven to pursue ideas of
Speaker 1: racial purity, which I think is a little startling because
Speaker 1: you think about all of his sort of seeming good
Speaker 1: works and outreach. Well, there were really a lot of
Speaker 1: people during those years who were active in the eugenics
Speaker 1: movement who uh that their activity sort of tarnishes all
Speaker 1: of the other good works that they did by having
Speaker 1: been part of this movement that is, at the time
Speaker 1: was not looked at with quite the level of horror
Speaker 1: as it is today like today, that whole idea really
Speaker 1: really upsetting. Um it was that was not really the
Speaker 1: that's the thought at the time period, and there's late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred, early nineteen hundred years and one of the
Speaker 1: race betterment foundations of jectives at the time was to
Speaker 1: start a eugenic registry so that they could ensure racial purity.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's that's another It sounds so alien and unsettling,
Speaker 1: but at the time it was a pretty common right.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of people who I think otherwise
Speaker 1: were ahead of their time and what they were thinking about,
Speaker 1: and then also participated in the eugenics movement, which becomes
Speaker 1: startling to people. Yeah. Um, so that that's sort of
Speaker 1: the basics of who this person was. A big part
Speaker 1: of his life was his philosophy on health, and you
Speaker 1: hear a lot about his very more extreme views. When
Speaker 1: you hear about John Harvey Kellogg, it becomes really easy
Speaker 1: to write him off as this kind of weirdo quack
Speaker 1: since a lot of his practices were way apart from
Speaker 1: mainstream thought at the time. They definitely don't hold up
Speaker 1: to scientific scrutiny now, and some of them were kind
Speaker 1: of scientifically questionable even at the time. Um. But in
Speaker 1: spite of that, he was really always on the lookout
Speaker 1: for medical evidence that his theories were actually effective, and
Speaker 1: he did seem to question his beliefs pretty regularly. He
Speaker 1: would he would advocate something, and then when it turned
Speaker 1: out that that was not a good idea and he
Speaker 1: had proof of that, he would turn away from it
Speaker 1: and advocate something else. So it was kind of a
Speaker 1: quest for the newest and best knowledge, and sometimes it
Speaker 1: didn't pan out, and sometimes it did. Right. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: also the context to consider in the world of medicine
Speaker 1: at the time, pasteurization and the germ theory of disease
Speaker 1: were really only starting to gain a mainstream acceptance. Diseases
Speaker 1: still spread rapidly because of a lack of basic hygiene,
Speaker 1: and a lot of quote medicines were patent medicines that
Speaker 1: had no real medical value. Cocaine and alat in um
Speaker 1: were being used medicinally. So Kellogg's focus on preventative care
Speaker 1: and healthy living was really groundbreaking in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: As we said before, he was a trained and respected doctor,
Speaker 1: and a lot of what he believed and wrote about
Speaker 1: mesha is pretty well with common sense health beliefs today,
Speaker 1: or at least mainstream natural health ideas. He advocated healthy eating, exercise, vegetarianism,
Speaker 1: and low calorie diets. Uh. Those last two you could
Speaker 1: sort of argue either way for but in the field
Speaker 1: of holistic health there pretty much staples at this point,
Speaker 1: and we have all kinds of documentations of these ideas.
Speaker 1: For almost seventy years, Kellogg edited a magazine called Good Health.
Speaker 1: It was originally a Seventh Day hadvent This publication called
Speaker 1: Health Reformer, and in this he would publish his philosophies.
Speaker 1: He also wrote many, many books on health and healthy living,
Speaker 1: and much of this material is actually in public domain now,
Speaker 1: so you can find a lot of his books online
Speaker 1: for free. He was really ahead of the curve on
Speaker 1: some of the health ideas that we take for granted today.
Speaker 1: He was an ardent believer that the American diet included
Speaker 1: more protein than people really needed, and that people should
Speaker 1: bathe more often than once it. He also really wanted
Speaker 1: people to wear less restrictive, more breathable clothing than they
Speaker 1: generally did in the nineteenth century. He was also an
Speaker 1: anti smoking advocate long before mainstream culture was ever thinking
Speaker 1: of smoking is hazardous, and he correctly concluded that smoking
Speaker 1: is bad for the heart. Uh from tobacco is m
Speaker 1: or how tobacco kills. He says tobacco in its various
Speaker 1: forms is one of the most mischievous of all drugs.
Speaker 1: There is perhaps no other drug which injures the body
Speaker 1: in so many ways and so universally as does tobacco.
Speaker 1: Some drugs offer a small degree of compensation for the
Speaker 1: evil effects which they produce, but tobacco has not a
Speaker 1: single redeeming feature and gives nothing in return for the
Speaker 1: one point five billion dollars which it costs the nation annually,
Speaker 1: besides the one thousand lives which it probably destroys. So
Speaker 1: that's a pretty startlingly modern for He also wrote about
Speaker 1: the dangers of sitting, which is something that's really increasingly
Speaker 1: present in medical literature in the past few years. From
Speaker 1: the simple life in a nutshell, one need not to
Speaker 1: generate physically because his occupation is sedentary. Always sit erect,
Speaker 1: with chest held high and the small the back supported,
Speaker 1: sit as little as possible. Standing and lying are more
Speaker 1: natural and healthful positions than sitting. One may exercise while
Speaker 1: sitting at work by deep breathing and by stiffening the
Speaker 1: muscles of verse one limb a few seconds than the other,
Speaker 1: all the muscles in the body may be exercised this way. Again,
Speaker 1: still going on today, Like that's well, and I stand
Speaker 1: up desk movements, the standing dusk thing is just yeah.
Speaker 1: I hear more and more people talking about their standing desks,
Speaker 1: and I think it's only been maybe in the last
Speaker 1: five years that that suddenly you're seeing more and more
Speaker 1: research about how how terrible, not just the fact that
Speaker 1: people are not exercising, but the sedentary time they're spending
Speaker 1: sitting yet during during the work day. Kellogg also had
Speaker 1: a huge focus on food, and he developed or refined
Speaker 1: a number of health foods, including peanut butter, soy milk,
Speaker 1: substitutes for coffee and tea, and breakfast cereals, although his
Speaker 1: brother really did a lot of the leg work on
Speaker 1: that one. He also believed in a concept called biologic living,
Speaker 1: which combined a near vegan diet along with other choices
Speaker 1: in a person's lifestyle. Also from The Simple Life in
Speaker 1: a Nutshell, he wrote about this as live out of doors,
Speaker 1: do your work under the trees instead of behind doors.
Speaker 1: And opaque walls. Big in the garden, Explore the woods
Speaker 1: and hills, follow the brooks, watch the squirrels and their gambles,
Speaker 1: and learn the songs of the birds. Pick up a
Speaker 1: sleeping portrait balcony and so taken outing all night long
Speaker 1: and every night, and don't move inside when the frost
Speaker 1: comes Outdoor sleeping is the best life preserver ever known.
Speaker 1: Simple Life in a Nutshell is a good way to
Speaker 1: get an overall sense of his health philosophies, and it
Speaker 1: goes on to outline all kinds of dietary and lifestyle recommendations.
Speaker 1: It covers food, exercise, personal hygiene, sleep, clothing, mental hygiene,
Speaker 1: and some additional suggestions. They start off pretty common sense,
Speaker 1: although maybe not science based, like eating only natural foods,
Speaker 1: avoiding meats, eating eggs only in moderation, avoiding cow's milk
Speaker 1: and animal fats, emphasizes getting the fat your body needs
Speaker 1: from olives and nuts instead. He also goes on to
Speaker 1: recommend that people avoid quote poison containing foods which are coffee, tea, chocolate,
Speaker 1: and cocoa, and he recommends that people get completely rid
Speaker 1: of all condiments and spicy foods. This is where in
Speaker 1: that particular synopsis of sort of what his health believed,
Speaker 1: where he starts to lose me at this point of it's, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm saying I made a cup of coffee and a
Speaker 1: travel cups so I could take it in the shower
Speaker 1: with me this morning. Yes, I'm definitely going to have
Speaker 1: a hard time embracing this cop right, even though I
Speaker 1: recognize that this is probably it would be extremely helpful,
Speaker 1: but it would also evolved for me at least a
Speaker 1: loss of some quality of life. His mental hygiene ideas
Speaker 1: included not worrying or becoming self centered, practicing self control,
Speaker 1: taking a vacation when you start dreaming about work, and
Speaker 1: avoiding patent medicines, as well as avoiding alcohol, tobacco, and drugs,
Speaker 1: which is all pretty common sense, uh kind of advice
Speaker 1: to to go buy. So you know, so far we've
Speaker 1: talked about a lot of stuff that's pretty reasonable. If
Speaker 1: maybe a little more restrictive and bland, then we would
Speaker 1: like um hey. He also for a while was pushing
Speaker 1: the idea that people should fletcherize their food, which is
Speaker 1: just to to it until it became sort of a
Speaker 1: goofy mask that would go down your throat on its own. UM.
Speaker 1: This idea came from Horace Fletcher, known as the Great masticator,
Speaker 1: and that's where the two each bite thirty two times
Speaker 1: rule comes from. So this is an example of where
Speaker 1: when evidence started to suggest that maybe that was not
Speaker 1: the best idea, John Harvey Kellogg changed his point of view. UM.
Speaker 1: He moved away of recommending that people fletcherized their food
Speaker 1: once he determined that that much chewing was basically pulverizing
Speaker 1: the food's fiber into uselessness. So you were denying yourself
Speaker 1: the benefits of fibrous foods. UH. From his New York
Speaker 1: Times obituary, there's a quote an authority on water therapy.
Speaker 1: He was the discoverer of the therapeutic value of the
Speaker 1: electric light and inventor of the electric light bath. He
Speaker 1: was also the discoverer of the sine soidal current. So
Speaker 1: this was the point in the world of John Harvey
Speaker 1: Killogg's health beliefs, that is, it starts to kind of
Speaker 1: nudge into the Okay, not sure what's going on there.
Speaker 1: This is clearly something that people would have known what
Speaker 1: it was about, because it was in his obituary when
Speaker 1: it was printed. But at this point they're far enough
Speaker 1: out of the mainstream thought that I had to go
Speaker 1: look up what they were. Um. The electric light bath
Speaker 1: was a device that you would sit in. It enclosed
Speaker 1: everything but your head, and inside of it were lots
Speaker 1: and lots of light bulbs and clusters that were that
Speaker 1: were directed at different parts of your body. He built
Speaker 1: one and used it by his own counts, so who
Speaker 1: knows that this number is inflated in fifty cases. He
Speaker 1: wrote in the book Light Therapeutics about his precursors using
Speaker 1: light to basically cure everything, but he wrote about mostly
Speaker 1: using it in short treatments to draw blood into the skin,
Speaker 1: saying that doing so would treat kidney disease, diabetes, rheumatic diseases, anemia,
Speaker 1: and other diseases. He also advocated the use of the
Speaker 1: light bath as a preventive measure and people who had
Speaker 1: sedentary lifestyles, calling it quote the best substitute for muscular activity.
Speaker 1: And the sinus sodal current was a high frequency, oscillating
Speaker 1: electrical current that would make muscles contract without causing pain,
Speaker 1: and he used this to make a device meant to
Speaker 1: exercise the muscles without having to actually move, which is
Speaker 1: the thing that people are still trying to do today. Right.
Speaker 1: Both of these things have analogs that are in actual
Speaker 1: medical use today, like light therapy for seasonal effective disorder
Speaker 1: UM and electrical stimulation that's used in some physical therapies,
Speaker 1: but neither of them today or in sort of the
Speaker 1: widespread cure all everyone should do this fashion of of
Speaker 1: what Kellogg was advocating. And additionally a lot of his
Speaker 1: health practices were focused on the bowel. There were lots
Speaker 1: and lots of enemas and colonic irrigations in his approach
Speaker 1: to health and wellness. That all the stuff with the
Speaker 1: enemas and the colon and all of that, it comes
Speaker 1: up over and over and is one of the things
Speaker 1: that starts to mark John Harvey Kellogg is kind of
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit off base in terms of what
Speaker 1: he advocated, and there are still people to advocate for those,
Speaker 1: but it's not like a widespread accepted medical approach to
Speaker 1: treating conditions the way that Kellogg was advocating for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was probably he was pretty much giving everyone who
Speaker 1: came to the sanitarium anema's all time as a course
Speaker 1: of general health and wellness. So sometimes when you will
Speaker 1: see in a like some kind of quack doctor in
Speaker 1: a movie he was saying, oh, you should you need
Speaker 1: an enema? That it is absolutely a call back to him.
Speaker 1: He was also into electrical electro therapy and vibrational therapy,
Speaker 1: and again both of these do have some uses today,
Speaker 1: but he was pretty much advocating them in broad widespread
Speaker 1: use on everyone often. And he had some very restrictive
Speaker 1: views on sex. Uh. It was in his mind barely
Speaker 1: acceptable even within marriage and then only very infrequently. It
Speaker 1: was certainly unacceptable outside of marriage. And he was very,
Speaker 1: very very focused on people not masturbating ever. Uh. He
Speaker 1: blamed masturbation for everything from poor posture to cancer. He
Speaker 1: was in favor of circumcision without anesthetic for boys, and
Speaker 1: the application of carbolic acid to the clitter is for
Speaker 1: girls as an anti master Asian tool. Yes, Yake, is
Speaker 1: exactly what I was thinking. I just I'm sure listeners
Speaker 1: like me are um feeling tense right at the moment.
Speaker 1: So John Harvey Kellogg put all of these beliefs into
Speaker 1: active practice at the Battle Creek Sanitarium also known as
Speaker 1: the Sand, where he became the chief physician in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, when he was only twenty four. He also
Speaker 1: opened a second sanitarium in Miami Springs, Florida, in one
Speaker 1: The SAND had been originally opened in eighteen sixty six
Speaker 1: as the Western Health Reform Institute, which was a health
Speaker 1: facility based on Seventh Day Adventist beliefs in practices. The
Speaker 1: idea was to treat illnesses naturally and to encourage people
Speaker 1: into preventative wellness practices. So its heart was in the
Speaker 1: right place for sure, really, especially considering the state of
Speaker 1: medicine at the time, and it wasn't really all that
Speaker 1: successful before John got there. There wasn't an official medical
Speaker 1: staff and it housed only about twenty patients when John
Speaker 1: came on board, so one of the first things that
Speaker 1: he did was to hire a staff of doctors and nurses.
Speaker 1: He set about trying to attract a clientele, and his
Speaker 1: target market was primarily made up of people who had
Speaker 1: things we might think of today as stress related illnesses,
Speaker 1: so Harry businessmen experiencing things like exhaustion and chronic indigestion.
Speaker 1: A lot of what went on at the SAND were
Speaker 1: common sense wellness practices like eating healthy, if extremely bland food, exercising,
Speaker 1: and abstaining from alcohol. And tobacco, uh, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the things that you'd also think of when you
Speaker 1: hear the word spa, like massages and nice relaxing baths.
Speaker 1: But it also had all kinds of the electrical and
Speaker 1: vibrational treatments that like we talked about earlier, lots and
Speaker 1: lots of electric light therapies and enemas and all the
Speaker 1: other sorts of things that are sort of regarded as
Speaker 1: quackery today. And it ended up becoming a retreat for
Speaker 1: the rich, and some really famous people actually visited the
Speaker 1: Sand to take the cure, including John D. Rockefeller, Amelia
Speaker 1: Earhart sojourn Or Truth, and Mary Todd Lincoln. A fire
Speaker 1: destroyed part of the Sanitarium in nineteen o two, including
Speaker 1: all of the main building, but it was eventually rebuilt.
Speaker 1: In nineteen o three. John's relationship with the church became
Speaker 1: strained after he published a book that didn't entirely mesh
Speaker 1: with the Adventist doctrine. He ultimately split from the church,
Speaker 1: and he set up the Sanitarium as an independent entity
Speaker 1: with its own board, making a nondenominational institution. The Sand
Speaker 1: reached its height of popularity in nineteen o six that year,
Speaker 1: it received seven thousand guests and employed eighteen hundred staff.
Speaker 1: It continued to operate until the Great Depression, when financial
Speaker 1: circumstances forced John to sell it after sixty seven years.
Speaker 1: And today's preponderance of breakfast cereals is thanks in part
Speaker 1: to The Sand, where the biologic diet was so boring
Speaker 1: and monotonous that John was constantly looking for alternatives that
Speaker 1: fit the philosophical criteria but also offered variety. While John
Speaker 1: was the staff position at the Sand, his brother will
Speaker 1: Keith Kellogg, also known as w K. Kellogg, managed the sanitarium,
Speaker 1: handling the books, the supplies, the general maintenance, all of
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. So while John was seeing to
Speaker 1: the medical end of things, w K was handling pretty
Speaker 1: much all of the day to day running of the place.
Speaker 1: The administration, yes, and their relationship wasn't always on the
Speaker 1: best of terms. John could be a taskmaster and w
Speaker 1: K worked really long hours for very little pay, allegedly
Speaker 1: seven days a week with no vacations for seven years,
Speaker 1: which is interesting because it seems to contradict his brother
Speaker 1: John's writings, which say to observe the Sabbath without working
Speaker 1: at all, and he advocates for taking a vacation when
Speaker 1: you start to dream about work, So assumably, yes, he
Speaker 1: assumably if w K had been working seven days a
Speaker 1: week for his taskmaster brother for seven years in a vacation,
Speaker 1: he's probably dreaming about work often, probably horrible nightmares and stress.
Speaker 1: So yeah, John's seemed to be like, you all should
Speaker 1: do this unless you were me, were my brother, one
Speaker 1: of the two of us working diligently to make sure
Speaker 1: the rest of you do the things. Yes, it's a
Speaker 1: little unclear exactly which of the Kellogg brothers really invented
Speaker 1: wheat flakes, which were a wheat based version of what
Speaker 1: we think of as corn flakes today. That happened in
Speaker 1: and this is the case in quite a number of inventions.
Speaker 1: John claimed the idea for how to make these wheat
Speaker 1: flakes came to him in a dream. We've had to
Speaker 1: come up in several podcasts, But according to other sources,
Speaker 1: John had given w K this easy to digest but
Speaker 1: very disgusting to eat wheat paste and told him to
Speaker 1: try to make something good out of it. W K
Speaker 1: left a batch of it out overnight where it started
Speaker 1: to dry out, and when he came in in the morning,
Speaker 1: he rolled what was left through rollers and then baked
Speaker 1: it and it was actually pretty good, and they named
Speaker 1: it Granos. Yes, this wasn't the first ever breakfast cereal.
Speaker 1: It's pre date. It's predated by Granula, which was created
Speaker 1: by James Caleb Jackson that was made from Graham flour
Speaker 1: and it was not really delicious, so it did not
Speaker 1: take off once it was introduced. John also made a
Speaker 1: cereal made of corn meal and oatmeal biscuits which were
Speaker 1: then ground, named Granula, and they actually got sued and
Speaker 1: they had to rename it Granola. Yes, it probably was
Speaker 1: not as smartest idea to make a thing that was
Speaker 1: like your competitors thing in the name of the same thing,
Speaker 1: because then you might get sued. It was also predated
Speaker 1: by shredded wheat, which was invented by Henry D. Perky
Speaker 1: of Colorado in eightee. He had promised to sell John
Speaker 1: a shredding machine which he was going to use to
Speaker 1: make his own shredded wheat, but he never delivered, which
Speaker 1: is one of the things that led to this experimentation
Speaker 1: of making cereals from other foods and Will and John
Speaker 1: started Sanitas Food Company in eight to sell their cereal.
Speaker 1: In their first year they sold more than one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand pounds of granose. Their factory, as it was called,
Speaker 1: was actually a barn on the grounds of the sand.
Speaker 1: They brought out corn flakes in and the profit margin
Speaker 1: was huge, and as people figured this out, suddenly there
Speaker 1: were a lot of competitors. One was C. W. Post,
Speaker 1: who founded what became the Post Cereal Company, who was
Speaker 1: a former sanitarium patient, and Post distributed a pamphlet called
Speaker 1: The Road to Wellville with his cereals. The novel in
Speaker 1: later movie got their name from that pamphlet. Post earliest
Speaker 1: products were Post Them, which was a coffee substitute made
Speaker 1: from cereal, which giuse me a little bit of a
Speaker 1: chin scratch to go, hm, I would try that, and
Speaker 1: grape nuts. Great nuts still survived today. John was really
Speaker 1: reluctant to promote the sale of these cereals. He was
Speaker 1: afraid that it was going to somehow reflect badly on
Speaker 1: the sand. So his brother did it all on his own,
Speaker 1: putting together a marketing campaign that included everything from door
Speaker 1: to door taste tests to big window displays, and in
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety, while John was abroad, Will actually went ahead
Speaker 1: and built a factory to replace the barn, which John
Speaker 1: may and pay fifty dollars for after he returned. Will
Speaker 1: also took advantage of one of John's trips abroad to
Speaker 1: add sugar to corn flakes, which of course deepened the
Speaker 1: divide between them. Yes, John, of course was not in
Speaker 1: favor of adding sugar to anything. Um, they did kind
Speaker 1: of men things a little bit. They established the Battle
Speaker 1: Creek Toasted corn Flake Company in nineteen oh six. Will
Speaker 1: owned a third of it and John owned the other
Speaker 1: two thirds. The employees were mostly paid in stock because
Speaker 1: John was not a general a generous person when it
Speaker 1: came to giving other people money. So, once again employing
Speaker 1: this sort of quick while he's not looking strategy, Will
Speaker 1: would quietly buy up the employees stock that they were
Speaker 1: being paid in while John was away. So he eventually,
Speaker 1: through doing this, gained a controlling share in the company
Speaker 1: and was able to basically kick his brother out of it.
Speaker 1: That's quite a sibling relationship. Yeah, they did not seem
Speaker 1: to have the most loving and supportive uh feeling between that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Kellogg serial story goes on from there. But long
Speaker 1: story short, the Kellogg Company became a juggernaut. It was
Speaker 1: doing good business by the twenties, so by the time
Speaker 1: the Great Depression took hold, people were thinking of cereals
Speaker 1: as daily staples, and while the idea of a health
Speaker 1: spa had become a completely frivolous expense. Uh the Kellogg
Speaker 1: Company thus became this huge institution of provisions, but John
Speaker 1: unfortunately mostly became considered something of a joke. Yeah, his wife,
Speaker 1: Ella died in nineteen twenty. John himself had wanted to
Speaker 1: live to be a hundred, but he died on December fourteenth,
Speaker 1: three in Battle Creek at the age of His cause
Speaker 1: of death was pneumonia. And in his mix of medicine
Speaker 1: and alternative practices, you might compare him to some of
Speaker 1: today's famous doctors like Depect Chopra, who is both a
Speaker 1: board certified doctor and a holistic health practitioner who has
Speaker 1: taught at prestigious medical schools, or even doctor mem at Oz,
Speaker 1: who was a heart surgeon who was often on some
Speaker 1: kind of health bandwagon. Like they're both people that are credential,
Speaker 1: but they also are willing to kind of look at
Speaker 1: new approaches to health and wellness. And he kind of
Speaker 1: was similar in that regard. Yeah, he just happened to
Speaker 1: have a farther flung idea of what would be a
Speaker 1: good thing to do to a body. Uh. Then some
Speaker 1: of the things that are going on today. Well, and
Speaker 1: he was working without the benefits of many of the
Speaker 1: things we've learned in the interim. His experiments and concepts
Speaker 1: kind of didn't have the level of information we have today. Well,
Speaker 1: and some of the things that he was really in
Speaker 1: favor of continue to be a focus in the world
Speaker 1: of natural health, Like there continues to be a focus
Speaker 1: on the bowel and your bowels being a clean place
Speaker 1: in the world of alternative medicine, and questioning our high
Speaker 1: levels of protein in our diet still being discussed and
Speaker 1: often being supported. Yeah. So, while he definitely had some
Speaker 1: ideas that we're maybe not the greatest in terms of health. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the troubling association troubling is not even a strong
Speaker 1: enough word, but his association with the eugenics movement, he
Speaker 1: still did manage to to do some productive and healthy
Speaker 1: work related to people's care for themselves. Um, and now
Speaker 1: we have corn flakes, which I kind of wanted corn
Speaker 1: flakes really badly after doing research. Even though I'm not
Speaker 1: really into corn flakes that much either, but we have
Speaker 1: them thanks to the Kellogg brothers. Yes, do you also
Speaker 1: have some listener mail for us? I do. This listener
Speaker 1: mail came to us with a present. It is from
Speaker 1: Ian and says, dear, stuff he missed in History Class podcast.
Speaker 1: These cookies are and Zach Biscuits. The recipe became popular
Speaker 1: during World War One because the cookies lasted long enough
Speaker 1: to be mailed off to the soldiers in the Australia
Speaker 1: New Zealand Army Corps and Zach on the other side
Speaker 1: of the world. No doubt the soldiers involved in the
Speaker 1: EMU War would have been familiar with them. I was
Speaker 1: going to make a batch myself, but my fiance pointed
Speaker 1: out that since you guys don't know me, they would
Speaker 1: probably fall into the same category as Halloween candy. I
Speaker 1: would like to take a moment and thank your fiance,
Speaker 1: because truthfully, yes, homemade goodies that come to our desk
Speaker 1: are probably not going to go into my mouth. Yea,
Speaker 1: they might. Other people might be less weird about that
Speaker 1: than I am, But but I'm weird about that. I'm
Speaker 1: on the fence. It depends on what mood I'm in
Speaker 1: When You Catch Me, So the letter goes on. After
Speaker 1: World War One, a lot of returning soldiers in Australia
Speaker 1: and New Zealand were given farms as a reward for
Speaker 1: their services, with some mixed results. For example, around Wanganui
Speaker 1: in New Zealand, a whole settlement was founded in bush
Speaker 1: land and the only way in was by a flying
Speaker 1: fox over the local river. The plan was to build
Speaker 1: a bridge later. However, the soldier farmers quickly found that
Speaker 1: the land they had been given was not very good
Speaker 1: for farming, so they cut their losses and gave up
Speaker 1: on it. By the time the bridge was built, the
Speaker 1: settlement was just about abandoned. It remains today, but with
Speaker 1: the roads to it cut off by landslides and overgrowth,
Speaker 1: making it a bridge to nowhere. I love the podcast,
Speaker 1: especially how it deals with the more down to earth
Speaker 1: subjects such as the invention of the sewing machine or
Speaker 1: listening some of the most haunted houses in the world.
Speaker 1: Compliments my In Our Time podcasts with Melvin brag quite nicely.
Speaker 1: I would like to thank you very much Ian for
Speaker 1: writing this lovely letter. I loved hearing about the Bridge
Speaker 1: to Nowhere. We also liked the cookies. I ate, uh,
Speaker 1: I ate three or four of the cookies, and then
Speaker 1: I sealed up the box and then I ate three
Speaker 1: or four more of the cookies. And then I decided
Speaker 1: that for my own protection, I should take them to
Speaker 1: our break area. And they were gone in minutes. It
Speaker 1: was like a buzz went through well. I went back up.
Speaker 1: I was like, maybe there's one more cookie, and it
Speaker 1: had not been long at all, and they were all gone.
Speaker 1: They were kind of reminiscent of ginger snaps, but with
Speaker 1: a little different flavor. The texture was kind of ginger
Speaker 1: snap like. So thank you so much for sending those
Speaker 1: ian and for writing us was great better. If you'd
Speaker 1: like to write to us, you can. We're at History
Speaker 1: Podcast at Discovery dot com. We are also on Facebook
Speaker 1: at facebook dot com slash history class Stuff, and on
Speaker 1: Twitter at misston History. You can find our tumbler at
Speaker 1: miss in history dot tumbler dot com, and we're also
Speaker 1: pinning things that are relevant to these episodes or just
Speaker 1: history in general at pinterest. If you would like to
Speaker 1: learn more about this subject, you can come to our website.
Speaker 1: Put the word accidental Inventions into the search bar and
Speaker 1: you will find ten accidental inventions you won't believe, what
Speaker 1: of which is corn flakes. You can learn about all
Speaker 1: of that and a whole lot more at our website,
Speaker 1: which is how stuff Works dot com. For more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
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