Lucky Charm

foods that work for our specific lifestyles and metabolisms. Calorie counts, vitamins and fats, all the chemistry that goes into food. We understand so much of it, and yet that makes it an incredibly daunting task to optimize. And that's without

even mentioning missin information and quack medicine. This may seem like a purely modern problem, and it is, don't get me wrong, But like many parts of society, we have been struggling with diet almost as long as we've known about different types of food groups, and when medical knowledge was in its infancy, guess work was all we had. In New York in the middle of the nineteenth century, a man named James Caleb Jackson was suffering from a

series of untreatable health issues. He was likely someone that we would refer to today as immunocompromised. An abolitionist newspaperman, His frequent sicknesses forced him to sell his share in the newspaper, essentially taking retirement at the age of thirty six. Things were not looking good for Jackson. He visited doctors throughout his entire life, and none of them had been able to help him. But he did survive spoiler alerts, and part of the reason why is that he finally

found a medicinal regimen that worked for him. It was called hydrotherapy, essentially a series of baths in mineral waters. After visiting a spa in the eighteen forties, he felt completely restored. The treatment didn't just give him a new lease on life, it gave him something to devote his life too, and so he became a diehard advocate for hydrotherapy, helping to found an institution called glen Haven Water Cure in eighteen forty seven. This place ironically burned down, but

it didn't slow down his new career. In eighteen fifty he obtained a medical degree and eight years after that, he moved to Dansville, New York, where he founded Our Home on the Hillside, a facility that he would run for the rest of his life. His patients were like himself a decade earlier, desperate people who had exhausted everything that traditional medicine could do for them and were seeking out alternate cures, and James Caleb Jackson was a reassuring

presence to these sort of people. He was promising a miracle cure, but he was also no showy snake oil salesman. He was someone for whom his cure was a lifesaver. Now under his supervision, Our Home on the Hillside became an incredible success, serving as many as twenty thousand patients. Progressive thinkers from around the country even came to give lectures there, including Frederick Douglass. When he wasn't looking after patients, Jackson spent his time developing his ideas and strategies for

healthy living. And that's how, in eighteen sixty three, he came to introduce a special breakfast that would provide a healthy and nutritious start to the day. You see, the man had been a farmer before he started his newspaper, and so, along with his wife Lucretia, he developed a bland but nutritious combination of wheat and grains. It was served in the form of cubes that had to be soaked in milk overnight to become edible. They called it granula.

Sold that the affordable price of twenty cents a pound. It was a hit with both his patients and New York at large. At its peak, our home on the Hillside was producing and selling sixty thousand pounds a year just to keep up with demand. Over a decade after the invention of granula, a man from Michigan came to stay at Jackson's facility. A man who had a wellness facility of his own back in Battle Creek and was

interested in studying Jackson's methods. His name was John, and by eighteen seventy seven, John was selling a cold cereal of his own, which he referred to as granola, legally distinguishing it from Jackson's invention in order to protect himself

in court. Now some retellings of this story say that James Jackson sued John for stealing his idea, but the actual sourcing for that claim is vague at best, and If we know anything about Jackson, it's that he didn't seem like the sort of man who aspired to great influence over the new field of breakfast cereals, and yet in a way, that's what he created. Granula was the first cereal, and it grew into an industry worth billions,

all thanks to John's influence. John Kellogg, So the next time you take a bite of cereal in the morning, remember that behind all the cartoon marketing, the sugar and the wheat products, there is a story of a nineteenth century hydrotherapist and his journey to create a healthy breakfast. September twenty fifth of nineteen fifty began like any other Sunday in Toronto, Canada. The stores were closed, the streets were quiet, and families trickled home from church to relax

and get ready for the week ahead. But in the middle of the afternoon, the sunny sky began to darken. Massive storm clouds rolled in over the rooftops, and when residents squinted out their windows, they saw a pale blue disc peeking out from behind the clouds. At first, it looked like a full moon hanging in the afternoon sun, but in the brief moment when the clouds parted, the truth became obvious. That was not the moon, it was the Sun, hanging like a big blue circle amid purple clouds.

At that very moment, one of Canada's most famed astronomers, Helen Sawyer Hog, was passing through a park. The sky had grown so dark that she saw a gaggle of ducks sleeping in the middle of a pond, with their heads tucked under their wings, as if they thought that it was the dead of night. Helen knew that something highly unusual must be happening in the sky, but she had no idea what, and so she rushed to her lab.

She hurried past rows of houses and apartment buildings with the lights on in every window, and then suddenly the whole streets went dark. Seconds later, a piercing alarm rang out in the distance. A police car raced down the street with its sirens blaring and lights flashing under the swirling purple sky. All across Toronto, the quiet streets devolved into pandemonium. The phone lines at the police stations were ringing off the hook with panicked residents wondering what was

going on. Had the sun exploded. Was there a nuclear attack, an alien invasion, the apocalypse? But when Helen got to her lab, she and her colleagues quickly put together the truth. All of this terrifying chaos had a surprisingly mundane cause. It seems that the dark clouds were the result of a wildfire that was raging in the forests of British Columbia and Alberta, almost two thousand miles away from her.

The smoke particles were unusually large and dense, and they scattered certain wavelengths of light from the sun, making it appear blue instead of its usual yellow. On top of that, as the sky had darkened that afternoon, everyone in Toronto had turned on their lights at the same time, and the sudden surge in electricity had overloaded the power lines,

causing a blackout. The electrical failure, in turn, had accidentally triggered the alarms at banks all over the city, and the police had rushed out to respond to these false alarms, filling the darkened streets with a horrid cacophony of sirens. In short, the world wasn't ending, even though it sure did feel like it was. In the days that followed the wildfire, smoke moved eastward, turning the sky blue over northeastern United States, the British Isles, and even as far

east as Denmark. It took another month for the autumn rain in the snow to finally put the fire out, and once it had stopped smoldering, the sky finally went back to normal. I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced by

Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the people who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities. You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of Curiosity's hardcover book, available in book stores and online, as well as ebook and audiobook. And if you're looking for an ad free option, consider joining our Patreon. It's all the same stories, but without the interruption for a small

monthly fee. Learn more and sign up over at patreon dot com, slash Grimandmild, and until next time, stay curious.