Bird Brain

about the wind and the way it moves. That was the thought mathematician Elias Loomis had in eighteen forty two, after hearing reports about naked chickens. Yeah you heard me right, naked chickens. Farmers in Ohio had noticed their poultry walking around without their feathers following a tornado that tore through their town, and it happened enough that folks didn't really think anything about it. Loomis saw the featherless foul as an opportunity to measure a tornado's wind speeds, a feat

previously thought impossible. Keep in mind this was the forties, well before animal rights organizations monitored how scientists use living creatures in their studies. Elias Loomis had a hypothesis and almost no oversight. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Loomis killed a chicken and launched its body out of a small cannon, clocking in at a top

speed of over three forty miles per hour. The bird flew high and far, leaving in its wake a cloud of feathers and enough meat to make a few chicken nuggets. Tornadoes must spin at a slower rate, he thought, and continued his research unfod Sinately, his test proved unsuccessful. The technology being what it was at the time, he was unable to gather enough data on just how quickly tornadoes turned,

nor their effects on the local livestock. It wasn't until over a century later when Bernard, an atmospheric scientist at Suny Albany, took a closer look. Bernard had spent his early career at General Electric researching the atmosphere. He discovered the effects of what happened when silver iodide was injected into clouds. They formed ice crystals, and Bernard thought he

might be able to use this to control precipitation. In fact, his work is still used today by cloud seeding companies that can produce rain on demand in drought stricken areas. After he left ge Bernard went on to work for Arthur D. Little, the company that helped create the word processor and the Nasdaq stock exchange, which eventually led him to the University of Albany. It was there where he learned about Elias Loomis's research on wind speed and naked chickens.

Bernard wasn't sure Loomis had been on the right track, but technology had advanced to the point where new research wouldn't need to harm animals in the process, so he took a crack at it himself. He dropped some chickens into a wind tunnel, the kind they used to test aircraft, and then turned it on and it worked well, sort of. The chickens lost plenty of feathers, but inconsistently, and not enough to classify them as naked. They were honestly just

sort of patchy and ran around clucking angrily. It didn't take long for Bernard to realize that chickens made terrible gauges of wind speed, but that didn't stop him from earning an ig Nobel Prize. In no not a Nobel Prize, an ig Nobel Prize ignoble get it. It's a satirical award given to ten bizarre or benign achievements in scientific research. Bernard one for his paper Chicken Plucking as measure of tornado windspeeds. Bernard's work also found its way into popular culture.

His research of ice crystal formations and clouds became the basis for the substance ice nine in Kurt Vonnegut's nineteen sixty three novel Cat's Cradle. It turns out Vonnegut had worked as a publicist for General Electric in the late forties, so he knew all about Bernard's work. Even though he didn't have a college degree himself. Ge hired Kurt to help advertise the company's scientific breakthroughs. To be honest, any other applicant as unqualified as Kurt Vonnegut would have been

turned away at the door. But he had two things working in his favor. First, he lied. He told Ge that he held a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago, which he most certainly did not. His other advantage was that he had a little help from the inside. It turns out that his brother already worked for Ge where he worked as an atmosphere scientist. His

brother Bernard Vonnegut. Before Atkins, before South Beach, before jazz Er, Size and Soul Cycle and Tibot, there was Battle Creek Sanitarium, founded in eighteen sixty six in Battle Creek, Michigan. The sanitarium wasn't a mental health facility like we're used to seeing today. Back then, the word sanitarium was a variation on the word sanatorium, which came to define a health

resort for injured soldiers. It had been owned and operated by the Seventh day Adventists, the denomination of Protestants who believed in healthy living straight from the Good Book. No meat, no shellfish, and definitely no alcohol or tobacco were allowed. It was strict, but some people believed it was also beneficial. Strangely enough, not a whole lot of people went for

that sort of thing. Battle Creek started small, with no more than a hundred patients in the beginning, but when Dr John Harvey arrived at the turn of the century, he wanted to change all of that. Under Dr John's leadership, he quickly grew the sanitarium's meager attendants from one hundred to over seven thousand patients, with a staff of over eight hundred assisting at any given time. He turned Battle Creek into a well oiled machine dedicated to making lives

better for a nominal fee. Of course, John was himself a Seventh day Adventist, and as part of his theology, believed strongly in the churches, pushed towards vegetarianism and away from sin. In order to achieve the latter, he developed what was referred to as a bland diet, consisting mostly of yogurt's, nuts, peanut butter, and starches. A bland diet was the key to abstinence in his mind, brought on

by the lack of stimulation of the taste buds. Patients at Battle Creek were also encouraged to take part in various activities to aid in their recoveries, in light therapy, afternoon marches around the premises to assist with digestion, and even regular enemus. John believed the root of all evil in the body was bacterial toxins, and his combination of a bland diet with rigorous exercise was meant to help

clear all of that nastiness right out. While he ran Battle Creek, John filed patents for several inventions that would help those who stayed there, including a radiant heat bath, massage tools, and exercise equipment. He made numerous strides and medical devices under what he called physiotherapy, but there was something missing, something from the other side of the equation. He'd done all he could for the patients physically, but now he needed to revolutionize their diets. The idea had

come to him in a dream one night. It was for a new kind of bread, one that would be easier to chew at breakfast when people had just woken up. The following day, John walked down to the kitchen and mixed a dough made of wheat, oats, and corn. What came out wasn't very appetizing, and he left it there for a few days while attending to sanitarium business. When he came back, the mixture had hardened and John almost

threw it out, But then he had another idea. Rather than waste all of that food, he rolled it out and baked it, and what he ended up with were crispy little flakes. John had stumbled onto something big here. So big it would go on to spawn an entire new category of food, the breakfast cereal. It just so happened that John Harvey Kellogg had invented corn flakes. But

the story doesn't end there. Just when Kellogg's corn flakes had hit the sanitarium's breakfast tables, a down on his luck businessman sought out Dr Kelly to help cure his chronic health problems. This businessman, inspired by the doctor's delicious new breakfast cereal, returned home with ambitions of his own. While his first product, a serial beverage called post Them, didn't do so well, his sophomore endeavor was a huge hit.

It was called grape Nuts, named for the fruity aroma given off during the manufacturing process, and its creator C. W. Post had inadvertently kicked off what would be known for decades as the serial wars. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn 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. H