John Harvey Kellogg

While his last name is famous for breakfast cereal, John Harvey Kellogg was a 19th-century doctor with some unique (and groundbreaking) beliefs about health and wellness.His Battle Creek Sanitarium was home to anything but treatment as usual.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wolves and I'm Holly Frying. So a note
before we begin this. Some of John Harvey Kellogg's thought

(00:22):
was about the sexual health of adults. So if you
are listening with young children, be aware there is going
to be some talk about sex and some sexual terminology
in this episode. Yeah, a little bit of anatomy that
you may or may not have covered yet. Can I
tell you a story, poor favour. I used to be
a massage therapist, like a legitimate massage therapist. I had

(00:42):
a license and all that, and I was getting ready
to start my first full time job at a spa.
And this was the spa was like the kind of
place up in the mountains where you would go and
you would get three health food meals a day and
in addition to your massages, there were day hikes and
nutritional counseling and uh and that sort of thing. Like
it was very health spa. Yeah, the kind of place

(01:05):
where there was such a focus on healthy eating that
people would routinely ask the maintenance guy and they could smuggle.
If you could smuggle some hamburgers for them. Um. So
the night before my first day of work there, I
was staying at this condo that had cable and I
hadn't had a TV at all for about four years,

(01:26):
so of course I turned it on and what was
on was coincidentally The Road to Wellville, which is based
on a book by TC Boyle. Yes, have you ever
seen this or read this? Yes? And yes, but it's
been quite some time on both of you. It's a
fictionalized comedy about John Harvey Kellogg, and in the movie,
everybody is at this spa to get better, and there's

(01:47):
a lot of stuff going on. It just seems really cuckoo,
from weird electrical therapies to a hyper strict focus on
never ever ever masturbating. It's absolutely thick schnl. But the
Battle Creek Sanitarium was a real place run by John
Harvey Kellogg, who was a real guy, and it had

(02:08):
its share of weirdness, which is what we're going to
talk about today. It's almost one of those things where
you're like, why did you fictionalize this funny weird as
it is? That's sort of like Stone Mountain, Georgia. They
really didn't need to make up all kinds of craziness
about Stone Mountain for thirty y rock, because it's got
its own craziness right there. Um. So also this is
you thank some part to a listener request from Palace.

(02:30):
We are going to talk about John Harvey Kellogg and
the sanitarium at Battle Creek today. So John hard Vee
Kellogg was born in Tyrone, Michigan, on February eighteen fifty two,
and his parents were John Preston and and Kellogg. He
was one of sixteen it's one six sixteen children, which
included five from his father's first marriage. They were all

(02:52):
devout Seventh day Adventists, and they moved to Battle Creek, Michigan,
which was at that point the home of the Seventh
Day Adventist Church. When John was young. His father owned
a broom factory there and all of the children worked
in it as soon as they were of legal age
to do so. When John got older, he worked as
a printer's devil, which is kind of a gopher slash

(03:15):
apprentice type role at a Seventh Day Adventist publishing house.
His interest in medicine and health reform probably started there
because of the materials they were printing. Bell and White,
who was co founder of the Seventh day Adventists, had
begun to write extensively about health and wellness. A core
Seventh Day Adventist belief is that people's bodies are the

(03:35):
temples of the Holy Spirit, so they should be treated
well and kept healthy through clean living and healthful behaviors,
and people should avoid quote, unclean foods and tobacco and alcohol.
When he was sixteen, he worked for a little while
as a teacher. All There's some kind of respiratory trouble
ended his teaching work and caused him to return to studying.

(03:56):
John's father did not really see a lot of reason
to educate his children. He believed that the Second Coming
was imminent and that would have been a waste of time.
So many of his siblings never finished high school. And
in spite of that, John got his m d. From
Bellevue Hospital Medical College in eighteen seventy five UH. For
scattered years between eighteen eighty three and nineteen eleven, he

(04:18):
also studied in Europe UH and continued his education in
surgery and medicine there. His goal and all the study
was really to be a good doctor and a good surgeon.
And he was. He was a successful doctor and a
very respected surgeon, and he continued to practice surgery until
he was in his seventies. He also founded Battle Creek College,
which later became part of Andrew's University, and he served

(04:40):
as its first president. He was also an advocate of
health outreach for the poor and needy. He believed that
all Christian institutions should work with the poor in their
local area, and he also believed that Seventh day Adventists
were in particular called to work as medical missionaries. He
was part of the Adventists creation of a medical mission
in Chicago, the closest major city to Battle Creek at

(05:03):
the time. Detroit was much smaller than and that was
in eight three uh and that medical mission became a
model for other missions in Chicago and elsewhere. The goal
was to see to both the physical and spiritual health
of the city's poorest residence. On February twenty second, eighteen
seventy nine, he married Ella et Eaton, and they lived
in a fifty room home in Battle Creek. That sounds enormous,

(05:26):
it does. Indeed, they really needed all that room because
together they fostered about forty children and legally adopted seven
of them. They had no biological children because allegedly, as
it just seems to be a running theme with every
topic that I picked, their marriage was chased and never consummated.
You do have bad luck with that. And I don't
know if it's bad luck, it's just it's just funny

(05:49):
because you pick things not knowing that, and it always
comes up in the research. Yeah, I just keep picking
people to talk about, and then it turns out that
that person, by coincidence, has a chased marriage. Yes, sav
a chase marriage and practice celibacy for their whole life. Uh.
And although some of his children were black, John was
actually a proponent of the eugenics movement and founded the

(06:10):
Race Betterment Foundation in nineteen eleven to pursue ideas of
racial purity, which I think is a little startling because
you think about all of his sort of seeming good
works and outreach. Well, there were really a lot of
people during those years who were active in the eugenics
movement who uh that their activity sort of tarnishes all

(06:30):
of the other good works that they did by having
been part of this movement that is, at the time
was not looked at with quite the level of horror
as it is today like today, that whole idea really
really upsetting. Um it was that was not really the

(06:51):
that's the thought at the time period, and there's late
eighteen hundred, early nineteen hundred years and one of the
race betterment foundations of jectives at the time was to
start a eugenic registry so that they could ensure racial purity.
So yeah, that's that's another It sounds so alien and unsettling,

(07:12):
but at the time it was a pretty common right.
There were a lot of people who I think otherwise
were ahead of their time and what they were thinking about,
and then also participated in the eugenics movement, which becomes
startling to people. Yeah. Um, so that that's sort of
the basics of who this person was. A big part

(07:35):
of his life was his philosophy on health, and you
hear a lot about his very more extreme views. When
you hear about John Harvey Kellogg, it becomes really easy
to write him off as this kind of weirdo quack
since a lot of his practices were way apart from
mainstream thought at the time. They definitely don't hold up
to scientific scrutiny now, and some of them were kind

(07:57):
of scientifically questionable even at the time. Um. But in
spite of that, he was really always on the lookout
for medical evidence that his theories were actually effective, and
he did seem to question his beliefs pretty regularly. He
would he would advocate something, and then when it turned
out that that was not a good idea and he

(08:18):
had proof of that, he would turn away from it
and advocate something else. So it was kind of a
quest for the newest and best knowledge, and sometimes it
didn't pan out, and sometimes it did. Right. Uh. There's
also the context to consider in the world of medicine
at the time, pasteurization and the germ theory of disease
were really only starting to gain a mainstream acceptance. Diseases

(08:38):
still spread rapidly because of a lack of basic hygiene,
and a lot of quote medicines were patent medicines that
had no real medical value. Cocaine and alat in um
were being used medicinally. So Kellogg's focus on preventative care
and healthy living was really groundbreaking in a lot of ways.
As we said before, he was a trained and respected doctor,

(08:59):
and a lot of what he believed and wrote about
mesha is pretty well with common sense health beliefs today,
or at least mainstream natural health ideas. He advocated healthy eating, exercise, vegetarianism,
and low calorie diets. Uh. Those last two you could
sort of argue either way for but in the field
of holistic health there pretty much staples at this point,

(09:23):
and we have all kinds of documentations of these ideas.
For almost seventy years, Kellogg edited a magazine called Good Health.
It was originally a Seventh Day hadvent This publication called
Health Reformer, and in this he would publish his philosophies.
He also wrote many, many books on health and healthy living,
and much of this material is actually in public domain now,

(09:44):
so you can find a lot of his books online
for free. He was really ahead of the curve on
some of the health ideas that we take for granted today.
He was an ardent believer that the American diet included
more protein than people really needed, and that people should
bathe more often than once it. He also really wanted
people to wear less restrictive, more breathable clothing than they

(10:04):
generally did in the nineteenth century. He was also an
anti smoking advocate long before mainstream culture was ever thinking
of smoking is hazardous, and he correctly concluded that smoking
is bad for the heart. Uh from tobacco is m
or how tobacco kills. He says tobacco in its various
forms is one of the most mischievous of all drugs.

(10:26):
There is perhaps no other drug which injures the body
in so many ways and so universally as does tobacco.
Some drugs offer a small degree of compensation for the
evil effects which they produce, but tobacco has not a
single redeeming feature and gives nothing in return for the
one point five billion dollars which it costs the nation annually,
besides the one thousand lives which it probably destroys. So

(10:50):
that's a pretty startlingly modern for He also wrote about
the dangers of sitting, which is something that's really increasingly
present in medical literature in the past few years. From
the simple life in a nutshell, one need not to
generate physically because his occupation is sedentary. Always sit erect,

(11:11):
with chest held high and the small the back supported,
sit as little as possible. Standing and lying are more
natural and healthful positions than sitting. One may exercise while
sitting at work by deep breathing and by stiffening the
muscles of verse one limb a few seconds than the other,
all the muscles in the body may be exercised this way. Again,

(11:32):
still going on today, Like that's well, and I stand
up desk movements, the standing dusk thing is just yeah.
I hear more and more people talking about their standing desks,
and I think it's only been maybe in the last
five years that that suddenly you're seeing more and more
research about how how terrible, not just the fact that
people are not exercising, but the sedentary time they're spending

(11:55):
sitting yet during during the work day. Kellogg also had
a huge focus on food, and he developed or refined
a number of health foods, including peanut butter, soy milk,
substitutes for coffee and tea, and breakfast cereals, although his
brother really did a lot of the leg work on
that one. He also believed in a concept called biologic living,
which combined a near vegan diet along with other choices

(12:18):
in a person's lifestyle. Also from The Simple Life in
a Nutshell, he wrote about this as live out of doors,
do your work under the trees instead of behind doors.
And opaque walls. Big in the garden, Explore the woods
and hills, follow the brooks, watch the squirrels and their gambles,
and learn the songs of the birds. Pick up a
sleeping portrait balcony and so taken outing all night long

(12:41):
and every night, and don't move inside when the frost
comes Outdoor sleeping is the best life preserver ever known.
Simple Life in a Nutshell is a good way to
get an overall sense of his health philosophies, and it
goes on to outline all kinds of dietary and lifestyle recommendations.
It covers food, exercise, personal hygiene, sleep, clothing, mental hygiene,

(13:03):
and some additional suggestions. They start off pretty common sense,
although maybe not science based, like eating only natural foods,
avoiding meats, eating eggs only in moderation, avoiding cow's milk
and animal fats, emphasizes getting the fat your body needs
from olives and nuts instead. He also goes on to
recommend that people avoid quote poison containing foods which are coffee, tea, chocolate,

(13:27):
and cocoa, and he recommends that people get completely rid
of all condiments and spicy foods. This is where in
that particular synopsis of sort of what his health believed,
where he starts to lose me at this point of it's, uh, yeah,
I'm saying I made a cup of coffee and a
travel cups so I could take it in the shower

(13:47):
with me this morning. Yes, I'm definitely going to have
a hard time embracing this cop right, even though I
recognize that this is probably it would be extremely helpful,
but it would also evolved for me at least a
loss of some quality of life. His mental hygiene ideas
included not worrying or becoming self centered, practicing self control,

(14:12):
taking a vacation when you start dreaming about work, and
avoiding patent medicines, as well as avoiding alcohol, tobacco, and drugs,
which is all pretty common sense, uh kind of advice
to to go buy. So you know, so far we've
talked about a lot of stuff that's pretty reasonable. If
maybe a little more restrictive and bland, then we would
like um hey. He also for a while was pushing

(14:35):
the idea that people should fletcherize their food, which is
just to to it until it became sort of a
goofy mask that would go down your throat on its own. UM.
This idea came from Horace Fletcher, known as the Great masticator,
and that's where the two each bite thirty two times
rule comes from. So this is an example of where
when evidence started to suggest that maybe that was not
the best idea, John Harvey Kellogg changed his point of view. UM.

(14:59):
He moved away of recommending that people fletcherized their food
once he determined that that much chewing was basically pulverizing
the food's fiber into uselessness. So you were denying yourself
the benefits of fibrous foods. UH. From his New York
Times obituary, there's a quote an authority on water therapy.

(15:21):
He was the discoverer of the therapeutic value of the
electric light and inventor of the electric light bath. He
was also the discoverer of the sine soidal current. So
this was the point in the world of John Harvey
Killogg's health beliefs, that is, it starts to kind of
nudge into the Okay, not sure what's going on there.
This is clearly something that people would have known what

(15:41):
it was about, because it was in his obituary when
it was printed. But at this point they're far enough
out of the mainstream thought that I had to go
look up what they were. Um. The electric light bath
was a device that you would sit in. It enclosed
everything but your head, and inside of it were lots
and lots of light bulbs and clusters that were that
were directed at different parts of your body. He built

(16:03):
one and used it by his own counts, so who
knows that this number is inflated in fifty cases. He
wrote in the book Light Therapeutics about his precursors using
light to basically cure everything, but he wrote about mostly
using it in short treatments to draw blood into the skin,
saying that doing so would treat kidney disease, diabetes, rheumatic diseases, anemia,

(16:27):
and other diseases. He also advocated the use of the
light bath as a preventive measure and people who had
sedentary lifestyles, calling it quote the best substitute for muscular activity.
And the sinus sodal current was a high frequency, oscillating
electrical current that would make muscles contract without causing pain,

(16:47):
and he used this to make a device meant to
exercise the muscles without having to actually move, which is
the thing that people are still trying to do today. Right.
Both of these things have analogs that are in actual
medical use today, like light therapy for seasonal effective disorder
UM and electrical stimulation that's used in some physical therapies,
but neither of them today or in sort of the

(17:09):
widespread cure all everyone should do this fashion of of
what Kellogg was advocating. And additionally a lot of his
health practices were focused on the bowel. There were lots
and lots of enemas and colonic irrigations in his approach
to health and wellness. That all the stuff with the
enemas and the colon and all of that, it comes

(17:31):
up over and over and is one of the things
that starts to mark John Harvey Kellogg is kind of
maybe a little bit off base in terms of what
he advocated, and there are still people to advocate for those,
but it's not like a widespread accepted medical approach to
treating conditions the way that Kellogg was advocating for. Yeah,

(17:53):
he was probably he was pretty much giving everyone who
came to the sanitarium anema's all time as a course
of general health and wellness. So sometimes when you will
see in a like some kind of quack doctor in
a movie he was saying, oh, you should you need
an enema? That it is absolutely a call back to him.

(18:14):
He was also into electrical electro therapy and vibrational therapy,
and again both of these do have some uses today,
but he was pretty much advocating them in broad widespread
use on everyone often. And he had some very restrictive
views on sex. Uh. It was in his mind barely
acceptable even within marriage and then only very infrequently. It

(18:39):
was certainly unacceptable outside of marriage. And he was very,
very very focused on people not masturbating ever. Uh. He
blamed masturbation for everything from poor posture to cancer. He
was in favor of circumcision without anesthetic for boys, and
the application of carbolic acid to the clitter is for
girls as an anti master Asian tool. Yes, Yake, is

(19:03):
exactly what I was thinking. I just I'm sure listeners
like me are um feeling tense right at the moment.
So John Harvey Kellogg put all of these beliefs into
active practice at the Battle Creek Sanitarium also known as
the Sand, where he became the chief physician in eighteen
seventy six, when he was only twenty four. He also

(19:25):
opened a second sanitarium in Miami Springs, Florida, in one
The SAND had been originally opened in eighteen sixty six
as the Western Health Reform Institute, which was a health
facility based on Seventh Day Adventist beliefs in practices. The
idea was to treat illnesses naturally and to encourage people
into preventative wellness practices. So its heart was in the

(19:46):
right place for sure, really, especially considering the state of
medicine at the time, and it wasn't really all that
successful before John got there. There wasn't an official medical
staff and it housed only about twenty patients when John
came on board, so one of the first things that
he did was to hire a staff of doctors and nurses.
He set about trying to attract a clientele, and his

(20:06):
target market was primarily made up of people who had
things we might think of today as stress related illnesses,
so Harry businessmen experiencing things like exhaustion and chronic indigestion.
A lot of what went on at the SAND were
common sense wellness practices like eating healthy, if extremely bland food, exercising,
and abstaining from alcohol. And tobacco, uh, and a lot

(20:29):
of the things that you'd also think of when you
hear the word spa, like massages and nice relaxing baths.
But it also had all kinds of the electrical and
vibrational treatments that like we talked about earlier, lots and
lots of electric light therapies and enemas and all the
other sorts of things that are sort of regarded as
quackery today. And it ended up becoming a retreat for

(20:51):
the rich, and some really famous people actually visited the
Sand to take the cure, including John D. Rockefeller, Amelia
Earhart sojourn Or Truth, and Mary Todd Lincoln. A fire
destroyed part of the Sanitarium in nineteen o two, including
all of the main building, but it was eventually rebuilt.
In nineteen o three. John's relationship with the church became

(21:13):
strained after he published a book that didn't entirely mesh
with the Adventist doctrine. He ultimately split from the church,
and he set up the Sanitarium as an independent entity
with its own board, making a nondenominational institution. The Sand
reached its height of popularity in nineteen o six that year,
it received seven thousand guests and employed eighteen hundred staff.

(21:35):
It continued to operate until the Great Depression, when financial
circumstances forced John to sell it after sixty seven years.
And today's preponderance of breakfast cereals is thanks in part
to The Sand, where the biologic diet was so boring
and monotonous that John was constantly looking for alternatives that
fit the philosophical criteria but also offered variety. While John

(21:58):
was the staff position at the Sand, his brother will
Keith Kellogg, also known as w K. Kellogg, managed the sanitarium,
handling the books, the supplies, the general maintenance, all of
that kind of stuff. So while John was seeing to
the medical end of things, w K was handling pretty
much all of the day to day running of the place.
The administration, yes, and their relationship wasn't always on the

(22:21):
best of terms. John could be a taskmaster and w
K worked really long hours for very little pay, allegedly
seven days a week with no vacations for seven years,
which is interesting because it seems to contradict his brother
John's writings, which say to observe the Sabbath without working
at all, and he advocates for taking a vacation when
you start to dream about work, So assumably, yes, he

(22:44):
assumably if w K had been working seven days a
week for his taskmaster brother for seven years in a vacation,
he's probably dreaming about work often, probably horrible nightmares and stress.
So yeah, John's seemed to be like, you all should
do this unless you were me, were my brother, one
of the two of us working diligently to make sure
the rest of you do the things. Yes, it's a

(23:06):
little unclear exactly which of the Kellogg brothers really invented
wheat flakes, which were a wheat based version of what
we think of as corn flakes today. That happened in
and this is the case in quite a number of inventions.
John claimed the idea for how to make these wheat
flakes came to him in a dream. We've had to
come up in several podcasts, But according to other sources,

(23:30):
John had given w K this easy to digest but
very disgusting to eat wheat paste and told him to
try to make something good out of it. W K
left a batch of it out overnight where it started
to dry out, and when he came in in the morning,
he rolled what was left through rollers and then baked
it and it was actually pretty good, and they named

(23:51):
it Granos. Yes, this wasn't the first ever breakfast cereal.
It's pre date. It's predated by Granula, which was created
by James Caleb Jackson that was made from Graham flour
and it was not really delicious, so it did not
take off once it was introduced. John also made a
cereal made of corn meal and oatmeal biscuits which were

(24:13):
then ground, named Granula, and they actually got sued and
they had to rename it Granola. Yes, it probably was
not as smartest idea to make a thing that was
like your competitors thing in the name of the same thing,
because then you might get sued. It was also predated
by shredded wheat, which was invented by Henry D. Perky
of Colorado in eightee. He had promised to sell John

(24:36):
a shredding machine which he was going to use to
make his own shredded wheat, but he never delivered, which
is one of the things that led to this experimentation
of making cereals from other foods and Will and John
started Sanitas Food Company in eight to sell their cereal.
In their first year they sold more than one hundred
thousand pounds of granose. Their factory, as it was called,

(24:58):
was actually a barn on the grounds of the sand.
They brought out corn flakes in and the profit margin
was huge, and as people figured this out, suddenly there
were a lot of competitors. One was C. W. Post,
who founded what became the Post Cereal Company, who was
a former sanitarium patient, and Post distributed a pamphlet called

(25:19):
The Road to Wellville with his cereals. The novel in
later movie got their name from that pamphlet. Post earliest
products were Post Them, which was a coffee substitute made
from cereal, which giuse me a little bit of a
chin scratch to go, hm, I would try that, and
grape nuts. Great nuts still survived today. John was really
reluctant to promote the sale of these cereals. He was

(25:41):
afraid that it was going to somehow reflect badly on
the sand. So his brother did it all on his own,
putting together a marketing campaign that included everything from door
to door taste tests to big window displays, and in
eighteen ninety, while John was abroad, Will actually went ahead
and built a factory to replace the barn, which John
may and pay fifty dollars for after he returned. Will

(26:03):
also took advantage of one of John's trips abroad to
add sugar to corn flakes, which of course deepened the
divide between them. Yes, John, of course was not in
favor of adding sugar to anything. Um, they did kind
of men things a little bit. They established the Battle
Creek Toasted corn Flake Company in nineteen oh six. Will
owned a third of it and John owned the other

(26:24):
two thirds. The employees were mostly paid in stock because
John was not a general a generous person when it
came to giving other people money. So, once again employing
this sort of quick while he's not looking strategy, Will
would quietly buy up the employees stock that they were
being paid in while John was away. So he eventually,

(26:44):
through doing this, gained a controlling share in the company
and was able to basically kick his brother out of it.
That's quite a sibling relationship. Yeah, they did not seem
to have the most loving and supportive uh feeling between that. Yeah.
The Kellogg serial story goes on from there. But long
story short, the Kellogg Company became a juggernaut. It was

(27:07):
doing good business by the twenties, so by the time
the Great Depression took hold, people were thinking of cereals
as daily staples, and while the idea of a health
spa had become a completely frivolous expense. Uh the Kellogg
Company thus became this huge institution of provisions, but John
unfortunately mostly became considered something of a joke. Yeah, his wife,

(27:31):
Ella died in nineteen twenty. John himself had wanted to
live to be a hundred, but he died on December fourteenth,
three in Battle Creek at the age of His cause
of death was pneumonia. And in his mix of medicine
and alternative practices, you might compare him to some of
today's famous doctors like Depect Chopra, who is both a

(27:51):
board certified doctor and a holistic health practitioner who has
taught at prestigious medical schools, or even doctor mem at Oz,
who was a heart surgeon who was often on some
kind of health bandwagon. Like they're both people that are credential,
but they also are willing to kind of look at
new approaches to health and wellness. And he kind of
was similar in that regard. Yeah, he just happened to

(28:11):
have a farther flung idea of what would be a
good thing to do to a body. Uh. Then some
of the things that are going on today. Well, and
he was working without the benefits of many of the
things we've learned in the interim. His experiments and concepts
kind of didn't have the level of information we have today. Well,

(28:31):
and some of the things that he was really in
favor of continue to be a focus in the world
of natural health, Like there continues to be a focus
on the bowel and your bowels being a clean place
in the world of alternative medicine, and questioning our high
levels of protein in our diet still being discussed and
often being supported. Yeah. So, while he definitely had some

(28:54):
ideas that we're maybe not the greatest in terms of health. Uh.
And the troubling association troubling is not even a strong
enough word, but his association with the eugenics movement, he
still did manage to to do some productive and healthy
work related to people's care for themselves. Um, and now

(29:15):
we have corn flakes, which I kind of wanted corn
flakes really badly after doing research. Even though I'm not
really into corn flakes that much either, but we have
them thanks to the Kellogg brothers. Yes, do you also
have some listener mail for us? I do. This listener
mail came to us with a present. It is from

(29:36):
Ian and says, dear, stuff he missed in History Class podcast.
These cookies are and Zach Biscuits. The recipe became popular
during World War One because the cookies lasted long enough
to be mailed off to the soldiers in the Australia
New Zealand Army Corps and Zach on the other side
of the world. No doubt the soldiers involved in the
EMU War would have been familiar with them. I was

(29:58):
going to make a batch myself, but my fiance pointed
out that since you guys don't know me, they would
probably fall into the same category as Halloween candy. I
would like to take a moment and thank your fiance,
because truthfully, yes, homemade goodies that come to our desk
are probably not going to go into my mouth. Yea,

(30:19):
they might. Other people might be less weird about that
than I am, But but I'm weird about that. I'm
on the fence. It depends on what mood I'm in
When You Catch Me, So the letter goes on. After
World War One, a lot of returning soldiers in Australia
and New Zealand were given farms as a reward for
their services, with some mixed results. For example, around Wanganui

(30:40):
in New Zealand, a whole settlement was founded in bush
land and the only way in was by a flying
fox over the local river. The plan was to build
a bridge later. However, the soldier farmers quickly found that
the land they had been given was not very good
for farming, so they cut their losses and gave up
on it. By the time the bridge was built, the
settlement was just about abandoned. It remains today, but with

(31:01):
the roads to it cut off by landslides and overgrowth,
making it a bridge to nowhere. I love the podcast,
especially how it deals with the more down to earth
subjects such as the invention of the sewing machine or
listening some of the most haunted houses in the world.
Compliments my In Our Time podcasts with Melvin brag quite nicely.
I would like to thank you very much Ian for
writing this lovely letter. I loved hearing about the Bridge

(31:23):
to Nowhere. We also liked the cookies. I ate, uh,
I ate three or four of the cookies, and then
I sealed up the box and then I ate three
or four more of the cookies. And then I decided
that for my own protection, I should take them to
our break area. And they were gone in minutes. It
was like a buzz went through well. I went back up.
I was like, maybe there's one more cookie, and it

(31:44):
had not been long at all, and they were all gone.
They were kind of reminiscent of ginger snaps, but with
a little different flavor. The texture was kind of ginger
snap like. So thank you so much for sending those
ian and for writing us was great better. If you'd
like to write to us, you can. We're at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. We are also on Facebook

(32:06):
at facebook dot com slash history class Stuff, and on
Twitter at misston History. You can find our tumbler at
miss in history dot tumbler dot com, and we're also
pinning things that are relevant to these episodes or just
history in general at pinterest. If you would like to
learn more about this subject, you can come to our website.
Put the word accidental Inventions into the search bar and

(32:27):
you will find ten accidental inventions you won't believe, what
of which is corn flakes. You can learn about all
of that and a whole lot more at our website,
which is how stuff Works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
works dot com. Audible dot com is the leading provider

(32:58):
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