February 2, 2021 • 11 mins
A pair of tales guaranteed to get a rise out of you. And the stories they tell are downright curious!
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production
of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world
is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an
open book, all of these amazing tales are right there
on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to
(00:27):
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Almost everyone has a morning routine.
They wake up, take a shower, get dressed, and, perhaps
the most important step of all, they make some coffee.
Some may even forego the homemade stuff and instead opt
(00:48):
for a professionally prepared brew at their local coffeehouse. From
chain stores to mom and pop, there's something special about
settling into a comfy chair and sipping a piping hot latte.
Maybe it's the smell of the beans brewing, or the
din of the surrounding conversations that makes these spaces so alluring.
Not everyone finds them enjoyable, though, King Charles the Second
(01:11):
was faced with a dilemma in six five. The English
coffee houses were responsible for paying significant taxes, but they
also became hotbeds of political activity. Dissidents had been known
to meet inside them to conspire against the King. It
wasn't uncommon for such establishments to face closure or increased
taxes as a result. During the mid eighteenth century, Swedish
(01:33):
King Adolph Frederick banned coffee outright. He claimed it made
his subjects behave improperly. Unsurprisingly, that didn't stop the rich
from drinking it and the poor from bootlegging it. When
Gustav the Third ascended the throne years later, he too
made sure coffee stayed out of the mouths of Swedish people.
He believed it was so unhealthy that had actually killed
(01:54):
those who consumed it, and to prove it, he came
up with an experiment. He chose two men who had
been sentenced to death for murder. One was told to
drink three pots of coffee each day. The other was
given three pots of tea to drink each day. Not
exactly torture, but Gustav thought it would be. When he
saw that the coffee drinker was still alive and well
(02:14):
at the end of the experiment, he was furious, and
the prisoner didn't just survive his harrowing ordeal. He outlived
King Gustav, who was assassinated by masked men during a
masquerade ball. A short while later in Germany, though coffee
was not considered poison and coffee houses weren't known as
dens of conspiracy. They were places to gather and enjoy
(02:37):
each other's company. One particular house became the hottest spot
in Leipzig, but it wasn't because of the coffee. It
was called Cafe Zimmerman, owned and operated by man named
Gottfried Zimmerman in the early seventeen hundreds, the cafe was
a popular destination for middle class gentlemen interested in a
fine cup of coffee and frequently live music. Women were
(03:00):
not allowed to visit coffee houses at the time unless
they were attending live concerts by local musicians. In fact,
Cafe Zimmerman became a hotspot in what was essentially a
college town, drawing university students who were part of the
Collegium music Um. The collegium was founded in seventeen o
two by George Philip Telemann, German composer who wrote over
(03:21):
three thousand pieces of music over the course of his life.
But after several years with his organization, he passed his
duties onto another director, and each new director of the
Collegium music Um held the title for a short time
before handing it on to the next composer in line.
The group was comprised mainly of university students who performed
works by the current director and other famous composers of
(03:43):
their time. They would meet at Cafe Zimmerman several times
a week to play for the gathering crowds. The cafes
owner even bought some of the larger instruments to have
on hand, the kinds that musicians might only have used
at school due to their size or cost, like harpsichords
and double bays, and if you step back and think
about it, Cafe Zimmerman was home to some of the
(04:04):
first open mic nights, albeit without the mic. It gave
student musicians, people who might not have been ready to
play in grand theaters and opera houses, the chance to
perform for live audiences. The activity became so popular that
other collegiate music com were formed. They too began performing
at Cafe Zimmerman for the evening crowds. The original collegium, however,
(04:25):
the one started by Telemann, had a sure fire away
to draw the biggest audiences to the shop. It was
all thanks to its latest director, George Shot. One of
shots friends was a composer in need of some help.
He had written a series of cantatas with large orchestrations,
but no way of performing them. Conveniently, Shot had a
group of musicians at his disposal. He and his group
(04:47):
put on several concerts at Cafe Zimmerman where they performed
these new cantatas, and they were a hit. It was
no surprise though, after all, his friend had composed the
famous Brandenburg Concertos only a few years earlier, and in
seventy nine, when Shot left the group to take on
a new role elsewhere, that same friend stepped in as
the new director. Perhaps he liked how they performed his
(05:09):
pieces and his name, Johann Sebastian Bach. Prohibition was a
bad time, at least for yeast. That's what got the J.
(05:33):
Walter Thompson Company together in nineteen nine because they had
been brought in to turn things around, and they weren't
playing for small bills. Know their clients was the biggest
in the yeast business. Whatever size other yeast merchants were
in American cities and towns, they had barely risen past
five percent of the bakers and home cooks who were
ordering yeast in American catalogs and buying it off grocery
(05:56):
store shelves by J. Walter Thompson's accounting their client and
had more than nine of the yeast sales in America,
and they got that way on purpose. As their business
grew from the late eighteen hundreds to nineteen nineteen, their
yeast salesman had proliferated across the country and undercut the
sales from smaller operations. Now they controlled yeast, and in
(06:17):
the early nineteen hundreds that also meant distilled liquor and beer.
They were raking in money from all directions. But prohibition
was set to hit the next year nine and the
Yeast Kings knew it would reduce the very profitable liquor
side of their business. Anyone in their business who wanted
to fill in the gap in profit that would have
been left there would have to figure out what else
(06:39):
yeast could do besides fermenting alcohol. So that's what brought J.
Walter Thompson to the table. You see, they were advertisers.
When there was something to sell, they were the best
in the business, and now they would be pitching yeast.
Fortunately for the Yeast Kings, the ad men at J.
Walter Thompson had some ideas. It started with some novel
(07:00):
ways of thinking about food that had bubbled up since
nineteen eleven. That's when a Polish biochemist named Casimir Funk
coined a new term that we've all heard of, vitamin.
For a while, there was some debate about what exactly
it meant for there to be vitamins and food. They
didn't seem to be something you could taste, and there
wasn't any way to know if they were actually in there.
(07:21):
But now nutrition scientists were saying that you couldn't just
judge your food by how filling it was or how
good it tasted. And a series of stories about vitamins
was published in Good Housekeeping in nineteen fourteen, which convinced
readers across America that they needed to find these mysterious
things called vitamins, and they had to eat as many
of them as they could, and that's something that an
(07:43):
advertiser can work with now. The Yeast company sold their
products in compressed cakes wrapped in tinfoil, so J. Walter
Thompson launched a campaign to tell Americans that those little
blocks of yeast were the keys to health, wealth, and success,
and it wasn't like they had nothing to go on.
A chemist named Atherton Sidell had actually published some research
(08:05):
in nineteen sixteen showing that brewers yeast had enough nutrients
in it to help people recover from some vitamin deficiencies
behind conditions like scurvy. Soon enough, the Yeast for Health
campaign had begun. Advertisements flew out to readers across the country.
Yeast will cure your indigestion. Yeast will give you energy.
(08:26):
But it didn't stop there. Soon enough, eating yeast cakes
right from the foil was being declared a miraculous cure
for that scourge of teenagers everywhere acne. Yeast was even
proclaimed to be a cure for the common cold. After all,
it was full of those new vitamins people kept hearing about.
The Yeast company even paid for a professor at Jefferson
(08:46):
Medical College in Philadelphia to publish a study saying that
yeast was proven to cure all these problems, and a
special booklet called Yeast Therapy soon followed. And here's the thing,
the ads worked. Care sales did fall during Prohibition that
even in the years of the Great Depression, the sales
of yeast cakes tripled. The Yeast for Health campaign pushed
(09:09):
compressed cakes into the hands and mouths of kids and
adults at unprecedented levels. But when this new burst of
sales leveled off at the end of the nineteen twenties,
J Walter Thompson shifted into a higher gear. The next
round of advertisements featured pictures of stern European doctors with
the miracle testimonies of how yeast had healed even more
severe and mysterious conditions for their patients. By the final
(09:33):
ad campaigns, they were declaring that yeast was even better
for you than fruits and vegetables. It would cure and
this is a quote, bad tongue, bad breath, bad skin
because of all those vitamins. I'm sure the Yeast for
Health made them rich and a campaign did them proud.
The Federal Trade Commission less, so in nineteen thirty one
(09:55):
they issued a cease and desist the ads, they said
were misleading at best. Soon enough, the FTC was locked
in a fight with the yeast Kings, a battle that
lasted years as the government tried to scale back the
level of falsehoods that were being printed in papers across
the country. While the ad agencies then struggled mightily to
keep sales rising with more and more outlandish claims. The
(10:17):
Yeast for Health campaign came to an end in the
nineteen thirties, and soon enough yeast cakes were out as well.
But the yeast Kings landed on a new innovation, active
dried yeast, and ironically, the enemy of our old campaigns
became a major client because a Second World War in
Europe was just beginning and armies needed food, so in
the U s government was purchasing huge amounts of active
(10:39):
dry yeast to ship with their military supplies. Not to
mention the new revenue flow thanks to the end of prohibition,
it kept the Yeast Kings alive. Eventually, the Fleischmann family
sold the brand name to their innovative yeast products to
other food conglomerates, and the liquor side of the business
was spun off on its own in nineteen sixty two.
But the sales kept rising, so much so that you
(11:02):
can still buy yeast under the same brand name today.
Fleischmann's Active Dry Yeast is on your grocery store shelf
right now, just waiting for you to pick up and
get cooking. Even if it actually won't cure what ails you.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
(11:26):
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production
of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world
is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an
open book, all of these amazing tales are right there
on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to
(00:27):
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Almost everyone has a morning routine.
They wake up, take a shower, get dressed, and, perhaps
the most important step of all, they make some coffee.
Some may even forego the homemade stuff and instead opt
(00:48):
for a professionally prepared brew at their local coffeehouse. From
chain stores to mom and pop, there's something special about
settling into a comfy chair and sipping a piping hot latte.
Maybe it's the smell of the beans brewing, or the
din of the surrounding conversations that makes these spaces so alluring.
Not everyone finds them enjoyable, though, King Charles the Second
(01:11):
was faced with a dilemma in six five. The English
coffee houses were responsible for paying significant taxes, but they
also became hotbeds of political activity. Dissidents had been known
to meet inside them to conspire against the King. It
wasn't uncommon for such establishments to face closure or increased
taxes as a result. During the mid eighteenth century, Swedish
(01:33):
King Adolph Frederick banned coffee outright. He claimed it made
his subjects behave improperly. Unsurprisingly, that didn't stop the rich
from drinking it and the poor from bootlegging it. When
Gustav the Third ascended the throne years later, he too
made sure coffee stayed out of the mouths of Swedish people.
He believed it was so unhealthy that had actually killed
(01:54):
those who consumed it, and to prove it, he came
up with an experiment. He chose two men who had
been sentenced to death for murder. One was told to
drink three pots of coffee each day. The other was
given three pots of tea to drink each day. Not
exactly torture, but Gustav thought it would be. When he
saw that the coffee drinker was still alive and well
(02:14):
at the end of the experiment, he was furious, and
the prisoner didn't just survive his harrowing ordeal. He outlived
King Gustav, who was assassinated by masked men during a
masquerade ball. A short while later in Germany, though coffee
was not considered poison and coffee houses weren't known as
dens of conspiracy. They were places to gather and enjoy
(02:37):
each other's company. One particular house became the hottest spot
in Leipzig, but it wasn't because of the coffee. It
was called Cafe Zimmerman, owned and operated by man named
Gottfried Zimmerman in the early seventeen hundreds, the cafe was
a popular destination for middle class gentlemen interested in a
fine cup of coffee and frequently live music. Women were
(03:00):
not allowed to visit coffee houses at the time unless
they were attending live concerts by local musicians. In fact,
Cafe Zimmerman became a hotspot in what was essentially a
college town, drawing university students who were part of the
Collegium music Um. The collegium was founded in seventeen o
two by George Philip Telemann, German composer who wrote over
(03:21):
three thousand pieces of music over the course of his life.
But after several years with his organization, he passed his
duties onto another director, and each new director of the
Collegium music Um held the title for a short time
before handing it on to the next composer in line.
The group was comprised mainly of university students who performed
works by the current director and other famous composers of
(03:43):
their time. They would meet at Cafe Zimmerman several times
a week to play for the gathering crowds. The cafes
owner even bought some of the larger instruments to have
on hand, the kinds that musicians might only have used
at school due to their size or cost, like harpsichords
and double bays, and if you step back and think
about it, Cafe Zimmerman was home to some of the
(04:04):
first open mic nights, albeit without the mic. It gave
student musicians, people who might not have been ready to
play in grand theaters and opera houses, the chance to
perform for live audiences. The activity became so popular that
other collegiate music com were formed. They too began performing
at Cafe Zimmerman for the evening crowds. The original collegium, however,
(04:25):
the one started by Telemann, had a sure fire away
to draw the biggest audiences to the shop. It was
all thanks to its latest director, George Shot. One of
shots friends was a composer in need of some help.
He had written a series of cantatas with large orchestrations,
but no way of performing them. Conveniently, Shot had a
group of musicians at his disposal. He and his group
(04:47):
put on several concerts at Cafe Zimmerman where they performed
these new cantatas, and they were a hit. It was
no surprise though, after all, his friend had composed the
famous Brandenburg Concertos only a few years earlier, and in
seventy nine, when Shot left the group to take on
a new role elsewhere, that same friend stepped in as
the new director. Perhaps he liked how they performed his
(05:09):
pieces and his name, Johann Sebastian Bach. Prohibition was a
bad time, at least for yeast. That's what got the J.
(05:33):
Walter Thompson Company together in nineteen nine because they had
been brought in to turn things around, and they weren't
playing for small bills. Know their clients was the biggest
in the yeast business. Whatever size other yeast merchants were
in American cities and towns, they had barely risen past
five percent of the bakers and home cooks who were
ordering yeast in American catalogs and buying it off grocery
(05:56):
store shelves by J. Walter Thompson's accounting their client and
had more than nine of the yeast sales in America,
and they got that way on purpose. As their business
grew from the late eighteen hundreds to nineteen nineteen, their
yeast salesman had proliferated across the country and undercut the
sales from smaller operations. Now they controlled yeast, and in
(06:17):
the early nineteen hundreds that also meant distilled liquor and beer.
They were raking in money from all directions. But prohibition
was set to hit the next year nine and the
Yeast Kings knew it would reduce the very profitable liquor
side of their business. Anyone in their business who wanted
to fill in the gap in profit that would have
been left there would have to figure out what else
(06:39):
yeast could do besides fermenting alcohol. So that's what brought J.
Walter Thompson to the table. You see, they were advertisers.
When there was something to sell, they were the best
in the business, and now they would be pitching yeast.
Fortunately for the Yeast Kings, the ad men at J.
Walter Thompson had some ideas. It started with some novel
(07:00):
ways of thinking about food that had bubbled up since
nineteen eleven. That's when a Polish biochemist named Casimir Funk
coined a new term that we've all heard of, vitamin.
For a while, there was some debate about what exactly
it meant for there to be vitamins and food. They
didn't seem to be something you could taste, and there
wasn't any way to know if they were actually in there.
(07:21):
But now nutrition scientists were saying that you couldn't just
judge your food by how filling it was or how
good it tasted. And a series of stories about vitamins
was published in Good Housekeeping in nineteen fourteen, which convinced
readers across America that they needed to find these mysterious
things called vitamins, and they had to eat as many
of them as they could, and that's something that an
(07:43):
advertiser can work with now. The Yeast company sold their
products in compressed cakes wrapped in tinfoil, so J. Walter
Thompson launched a campaign to tell Americans that those little
blocks of yeast were the keys to health, wealth, and success,
and it wasn't like they had nothing to go on.
A chemist named Atherton Sidell had actually published some research
(08:05):
in nineteen sixteen showing that brewers yeast had enough nutrients
in it to help people recover from some vitamin deficiencies
behind conditions like scurvy. Soon enough, the Yeast for Health
campaign had begun. Advertisements flew out to readers across the country.
Yeast will cure your indigestion. Yeast will give you energy.
(08:26):
But it didn't stop there. Soon enough, eating yeast cakes
right from the foil was being declared a miraculous cure
for that scourge of teenagers everywhere acne. Yeast was even
proclaimed to be a cure for the common cold. After all,
it was full of those new vitamins people kept hearing about.
The Yeast company even paid for a professor at Jefferson
(08:46):
Medical College in Philadelphia to publish a study saying that
yeast was proven to cure all these problems, and a
special booklet called Yeast Therapy soon followed. And here's the thing,
the ads worked. Care sales did fall during Prohibition that
even in the years of the Great Depression, the sales
of yeast cakes tripled. The Yeast for Health campaign pushed
(09:09):
compressed cakes into the hands and mouths of kids and
adults at unprecedented levels. But when this new burst of
sales leveled off at the end of the nineteen twenties,
J Walter Thompson shifted into a higher gear. The next
round of advertisements featured pictures of stern European doctors with
the miracle testimonies of how yeast had healed even more
severe and mysterious conditions for their patients. By the final
(09:33):
ad campaigns, they were declaring that yeast was even better
for you than fruits and vegetables. It would cure and
this is a quote, bad tongue, bad breath, bad skin
because of all those vitamins. I'm sure the Yeast for
Health made them rich and a campaign did them proud.
The Federal Trade Commission less, so in nineteen thirty one
(09:55):
they issued a cease and desist the ads, they said
were misleading at best. Soon enough, the FTC was locked
in a fight with the yeast Kings, a battle that
lasted years as the government tried to scale back the
level of falsehoods that were being printed in papers across
the country. While the ad agencies then struggled mightily to
keep sales rising with more and more outlandish claims. The
(10:17):
Yeast for Health campaign came to an end in the
nineteen thirties, and soon enough yeast cakes were out as well.
But the yeast Kings landed on a new innovation, active
dried yeast, and ironically, the enemy of our old campaigns
became a major client because a Second World War in
Europe was just beginning and armies needed food, so in
the U s government was purchasing huge amounts of active
(10:39):
dry yeast to ship with their military supplies. Not to
mention the new revenue flow thanks to the end of prohibition,
it kept the Yeast Kings alive. Eventually, the Fleischmann family
sold the brand name to their innovative yeast products to
other food conglomerates, and the liquor side of the business
was spun off on its own in nineteen sixty two.
But the sales kept rising, so much so that you
(11:02):
can still buy yeast under the same brand name today.
Fleischmann's Active Dry Yeast is on your grocery store shelf
right now, just waiting for you to pick up and
get cooking. Even if it actually won't cure what ails you.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
(11:26):
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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