Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (73 page)

Though the Chinese had all the ingredients for gunpowder, they never employed the explosive for military purposes. That violent application fell, ironically, to a thirteenth-century German monk of the Franciscan order, Berthold Schwarz, who produced history’s first firearms.

The Chinese were more interested in using explosives for celebrations—and in attempting to fly. One inventor, Wan-hu, built a plane consisting of two kites, propelled by forty-two rocket-like fireworks, and seated himself in its center in a chair. Unfortunately, when the rockets were simultaneously ignited, the paper kites, the wooden chair, and the flesh of the inventor
were reduced to the common ingredient ash.

For eight centuries firework displays were limited to shades of yellow and reddish amber
.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, European fireworks technicians could create elaborate flares that exploded into historic scenes and figures of famous people, a costly and lavish entertainment that was popular at the French royal palace at Versailles. For eight centuries, though, the colors of firework explosions were limited mainly to yellows and reddish amber. It was not until 1830 that chemists produced metallic zinc powders that yield a greenish-blue flare. Within the next decade, combinations of chemicals were discovered that gave star-like explosions in, first, pure white, then bright red, and later a pale whitish blue. The last and most challenging basic color to be added to the fireworks palette, in 1845, was a brilliant pure blue. By midcentury, all the colors we enjoy today had arrived.

Dolls: 40,000 Years Ago, Africa and Asia

Long before Mattel’s Barbie became the toy industry’s first “full-figure” doll in 1958, buxom female figurines, as fertility symbols, were the standard dolls of antiquity. And they were the predecessors of modern dolls. These figures with ample bosoms and distended, childbearing bellies were sculpted in clay some forty thousand years ago by
Homo sapiens sapiens
, the first modern humans.

As early man developed mythologies and created a pantheon of gods, male and female, dolls in wax, stone, iron, and bronze were sculpted in the likenesses of deities. In India, for instance, around 2900
B.C
., miniatures
of Brahma rode a goose; Shiva, a bull; and his wife, Durga, a tiger. At the same time, in Egypt, collections of dolls were boxed and buried with a high-ranking person; these ushabti dolls were imagined to be servants who would cater to the needs of the deceased in the afterlife.

The transition from dolls as idols to dolls as toys began when figurines came to represent ordinary human beings such as Egyptian servants. For while it would have been sacrilegious for a child in antiquity to play with a clay idol, it became acceptable when that figurine represented a mere mortal. These early toy dolls, which arose independently in the Near and Middle East and the Orient, never took the form of infants, as do modern dolls; rather, they were miniatures of adults.

Other features distinguished these original toy dolls. Whereas today’s infant doll is usually of indeterminate sex (the gender suggested by incidentals such as hair length or color of dress), the gender of an ancient doll was never ambiguous. In general, female dolls were voluptuous and buxom, while males were endowed with genitalia. It was thought natural that a human representation of an adult should be accurate in detail.

Both the Greeks and the Romans by 500
B.C
. had toy dolls with movable limbs and human hair. Joints at the hips, shoulders, elbows, and knees were fastened with simple pins. Most Greek dolls of the period were female—to be played with by young girls. And although Roman craftsmen fashioned wax and clay dolls for boys, the figures were always of soldiers. Thus, at least 2,500 years ago, a fundamental behavioral distinction between the sexes was laid down. Several Greek gravestones exist with inscriptions in which Greek girls who had died in youth bequeathed their collections of dolls to friends.

The transition from adult dolls to infant dolls is not clearly documented.

Existing evidence suggests that the infant doll evolved in ancient Greece once craftsmen began to fashion “babies” that fitted into the arms of adult “mother” dolls. This practice existed in third century
B.C
. Greece, and in time, the popularity of the infant outgrew that of the adult doll. Modern psychological studies account for the transition. A female child, given the choice of playing with an adult or infant doll, invariably selects the infant, viewing it as her “own baby” and seeing herself as “mother”, thereby reen-acting the early relationship with her own mother.

By the dawn of the Christian era, Greek and Roman children were playing with movable wooden dolls and painted clay dolls, were dressing dolls in miniature clothes and rearranging furniture in a dollhouse.

Barbie Doll
. The Barbie doll was inspired by, and named after, Barbie Handler, daughter of Ruth Handler, a toy manufacturer born in 1917 in Denver, Colorado. With her husband, Elliot, a designer of dollhouses, Ruth Handler founded the Mattel toy company in 1945.

American dolls then were all of the cherub-faced-infant variety. Mrs. Handler, observing that her daughter preferred to play with the more
shapely teenage paper dolls, cutting out their wide variety of fashion clothes, decided to fill a void in toyland, and designed a full-figured adult doll with a wardrobe of modish outfits.

Popular dolls of the 1890s. Bisque China head and muslin body (left); jointed, dressed dolls (middle, top); wooden doll (bottom); basic jointed doll, undressed
.

The Barbie doll, bowing in 1958, helped turn Mattel into one of the world’s largest toy manufacturers. And the doll’s phenomenal overnight success spawned a male counterpart in 1961: Ken, named after the Handlers’ son. The dolls became such a part of the contemporary American scene that in 1976, the year of the United States bicentenary, Barbie dolls were sealed into time capsules and buried, to be opened a hundred years thence as social memorabilia for the tricentenary.

China Doll
. Traditionally, dolls’ heads were sculpted of wood, terra cotta, alabaster, or wax. In Europe in the 1820s, German Dresden dolls with porcelain heads and French bisque dolls with ceramic heads became the rage. The painted ceramic head had originated in China centuries earlier, and many manufacturers—as well as mothers and their young daughters—had observed and complained that the dolls’ exquisite ceramic faces occasionally were marred by brownish-black speckles. The source of these imperfections remained a confounding mystery until the early 1980s.

The solution unfolded when a sixteen-year-old British girl who made reproduction antique China dolls noticed that if she touched the dolls’ heads when painting them, black speckles appeared after the ceramic was
fired. She took her problem to a doctor, who enlisted a team of scientific detectives. That the problem disappeared if the girl wore gloves suggested sweat from her hands as the source of the trouble.

X-ray fluorescence showed that the black speckles consisted not only of the normal body salts found in sweat but also of sulfides. The girl’s diet was scrupulously studied and found to contain small but regular quantities of garlic—in sauces, soups, and meat dishes. Garlic is high in sulfides. When she abstained from garlic, the problem ceased.

The British researchers further investigated the sweat from the girl’s hands. It contained sulfur metabolites of garlic, which in most people are broken down and excreted in urine. These metabolites were reacting with iron in the clay to produce the speckles. Medical studies revealed that the girl had a subtle, harmless metabolic deficiency, which would never have shown up had she done less unusual work. The researchers concluded that the cloudy speckles occasionally found on ceramic faces of antique dolls probably had a similar origin: A small percentage of humans do not sufficiently metabolize sulfides, and certain ceramic-doll makers literally left fingerprints of their deficiency.

Chapter 16

In the Pantry

Potato Chip: 1853, Saratoga Springs, New York

As a world food, potatoes are second in human consumption only to rice. And as thin, salted, crisp chips, they are America’s favorite snack food. Potato chips originated in New England as one man’s variation on the French-fried potato, and their production was the result not of a sudden stroke of culinary invention but of a fit of pique.

In the summer of 1853, American Indian George Crum was employed as a chef at an elegant resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. On Moon Lake Lodge’s restaurant menu were
French-fried potatoes
, prepared by Crum in the standard, thick-cut French style that was popularized in France in the 1700s and enjoyed by Thomas Jefferson as ambassador to that country. Ever since Jefferson brought the recipe to America and served French fries to guests at Monticello, the dish was popular and serious dinner fare.

At Moon Lake Lodge, one dinner guest found chef Crum’s French fries too thick for his liking and rejected the order. Crum cut and fried a thinner batch, but these, too, met with disapproval. Exasperated, Crum decided to rile the guest by producing French fries too thin and crisp to skewer with a fork.

The plan backfired. The guest was ecstatic over the browned, paper-thin potatoes, and other diners requested Crum’s potato chips, which began to appear on the menu as Saratoga Chips, a house specialty. Soon they were packaged and sold, first locally, then throughout the New England area. Crum eventually opened his own restaurant, featuring chips. At that time,
potatoes were tediously peeled and sliced by hand. It was the invention of the mechanical potato peeler in the 1920s that paved the way for potato chips to soar from a small specialty item to a top-selling snack food.

For several decades after their creation, potato chips were largely a Northern dinner dish. In the 1920s, Herman Lay, a traveling salesman in the South, helped popularize the food from Atlanta to Tennessee. Lay peddled potato chips to Southern grocers out of the trunk of his car, building a business and a name that would become synonymous with the thin, salty snack. Lay’s potato chips became the first successfully marketed national brand, and in 1961 Herman Lay, to increase his line of goods, merged his company with Frito, the Dallas-based producer of such snack foods as Fritos Corn Chips.

Americans today consume more potato chips (and Fritos and French fries) than any other people in the world; a reversal from colonial times, when New Englanders consigned potatoes largely to pigs as fodder and believed that eating the tubers shortened a person’s life—not because potatoes were fried in fat and doused with salt, today’s heart and hypertension culprits, but because the spud, in its unadulterated form, supposedly contained an aphrodisiac which led to behavior that was thought to be life shortening. Potatoes of course contain no aphrodisiac, though potato chips are frequently consumed with passion and are touted by some to be as satisfying as sex.

Pretzel:
A.D
. 610, Northern Italy

The crisscross-shaped pretzel was the creation of a medieval Italian monk, who awarded pretzels to children as an incentive for memorizing prayers. He derived the shape of his confection from the folded arms of children in prayer. That origin, as popular folklore has it, is supported by the original Latin and Italian words for “pretzel”: the Latin
pretiole
means “little gift,” and the Italian
bracciatelli
means “small arms.” Thus, pretzels were gifts in the shape of praying arms.

From numerous references in art and literature, as well as extant recipes, we know that the pretzel was widely appreciated in the Middle Ages, and that it was not always baked firm and crisp but was frequently chewy. A recipe for moist, soft pretzels traveled in the thirteenth century from Italy to Germany, where the baked good was first called, in Old High German,
bretzitella
, then
brezel
—the immediate predecessor of our word.