You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what will?
What's that mango?
Do you know that NASA Mission Control actually has its own official candy?
And is I'm guessing the ice cream, like the astronaut ice cream doesn't count? Is that right?
You know? I think no one wants that stop, so that's right, You're right, sadly. But apparently the big board where you see all the scientists sitting at, like you know, the one where they're watching to see if anyone's going to call in with a problem, that's called the console and the quote console candy of choice is the atomic fireball nice you know, is also the official candy of
Part Time Genius. Now, NASA has embraced the candy for a little longer than our show, And I just assumed it made sense because it's science y and nerdy and it kind of feels like, you know, the flames of
a blast off, But that actually isn't why. There was apparently an an admin assistant named Karen who used to make copies, and when she'd drop off papers to the folks working in the Console and Mission Control, she'd drop off an atomic fireball with the copies as kind of this little treat, and the scientists found it really helpful for that midnight to seven am shift when it kind of added a little extra pep to their otherwise sleepy stuffs.
And that's how the atomic fireball became this permanent fixture of NASA and Mission control. They actually began ordering boxes of the candy to the office starting in nineteen eighty nine. That is just one of nine spicy facts for all of you about atomic fireballs. I can't wait to dig in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome a part time genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always, I've got my good friend mangesh I ticket out here with me and on the other side of the soundproof glass lining up a whole bunch of different types of milk. He's got almond milk, oat and milk two percent whole. Also got a little soy milk over there. He was waiting to cool our mouths off in case we eat too many fireballs for this episode. That is our very thoughtful pal, Dylan Fagan.
He is just so considered. I am sorry that he doesn't have any chocolate milk or any crazy straws. For us, but I do like that he's taking the initiative, all right.
Mega, So we've obviously been talking about atomic fireballs a lot recently. So when we started the show, we had a little debate about whether the official candy of Part Time Genius was going to be Smarties or Nerds. I was team Smarties, you were team Nerds, and it got pretty heated, unfortunately, and we had to just sort of put that conversation aside for a little bit, and then
just this year we decided to revisit the conversation. We've both grown a lot as people, I think, and it really helped us come together, and we both decided atomic fireballs were the perfect choice. But I'm curious, do you remember the first time you had an atomic fireball?
Yeah? Kind of, like you know, there are all sorts of candies that were so novel and of a specific era for me right now and later as I really associated with like one of my cousin's weddings from when I was in third grade, I remember when kids started
selling airheads at school and then orhoids. But I think it was at this summer camp when I was like five or six and we were playing kickball and this one kid just had this bag of candy from like a corner store, and I put an atomic fireball in my mouth and I just could not believe this was candy, Like it was so hot and unbelievable, also sweet, and it just blew my mind. And then I don't think
I saw them again for like years. They weren't really a Halloween candy where I was, Like in my neighborhood we had lemonheads at the store and other variations, like there was an Alexander the grape candy that the same time used to make, but not really atomic fireballs. But that moment really stands out to me. What about you, Like, I know you've had this somewhat recent renaissance with the candy. When did that start?
Well, so the recent renaissance started, I'm trying to remember because it had been years since i'd had I had really gotten my fix of atomic fire balls, which I'd also loved since I was a kid. I don't actually remember how it happened, but when it happened, it was all over, Like I was definitely going back to it.
And as we've talked about before, when I get hooked on a candy, I go big and so, as you know, we have this place that we know as the center of excellence in our home where we store a lot of my favorite candies that I end up ordering in bulk. And there are no joke, hundreds of atomic fireballs sitting in a bucket in there for me to stop buy and grab some. But it won't be long before we have to refill. They go faster than you think. But we should talk about fireballs. Get to the whole history,
the whole everything here. So where do you want to start.
How about with the makers of atomic fireballs, uh Farepan, who gave the candy the somewhat frightening slogan burns so good. It's one of my favorite candy companies. They also called a candy quote a spicy hot ball of sweet, burning cinnamony deliciousness. But what is amazing about these little red balls of wonder is that none of that drives people away. In fact, atomic Fireballs have been one of the most popular candies in the country since their debut in the
nineteen fifties. Now, what's interesting to note is that the candies really were of a time when the atom baumb was on everyone's mind, and this slipped into kid culture as well. So according to a book called Atomic Tunes quote, children's toys in the nineteen forties through the nineteen sixties were rife with atomic age themes, and this is something I totally had forgotten. But there were board games like
Uranium Rush and Air Raid. Kids sucked on atomic fireball candies while reading atomic comics like Atomic Man, Captain Adam and Nukla. There were atomic disintegrating pistols, we hid Geiger counters, and zero scale model train sets that transported nuclear weapons and waste. There was a fallout Shelter paper doll cutout book. In nineteen fifty one, the Bowman Gum Company created a series of forty eight Red Menace trading cards, some of which were titled Fleeing the Reds, Atomic Doom and war
Maker which was mause a donks card. And all of this contact had sort of escaped me, Like for us, the candy has just always been around. But at the time I guess atomic fireballs were in some way kind of the most pleasant and fun version of atomic culture you could be interacting with. And now today they are so popular that there was a recent scare about the
shortage of these atomic fireballs. But seeing as the company behind them, for a pen, makes over fifteen million fireballs a week, I think we're all gonna be okay.
I do want to just go ahead and apologize in case I had anything to do with that shortage sence
I'm clearly hoarding them here. But all right, Well, because we're talking hot stuff, I do think we need to take a minute to talk about Wilbur Scoville, and I think we've talked about Scoville before, is of course the inventor of the Scoville scale, which you probably know measures just how hot something is, and so you know, like when you're at a Thai restaurant and you have to wonder whether the five peppers next to the curry means
you're probably going to die after eating it. The Scoville scale is like a scientific objective answer to that question. So in terms of the scale, a bell pepper is
a zero. A banana pepper, you know, like you might have on an Italian sub or something like that, that notches up to five hundred, which sounds like a lot until you realize the scale goes all the way up to two million, six hundred and ninety three thousand with pepper X that's the Guinness Book World record holder for the hottest pepper on Earth.
I'm sure that's a pepper that might actually kill you. But where does the atomic fireball rate on the Scovill Well.
That's what's so cool here. So other spicy candy like red hots, another Ferrera pan tree and something I also enjoy, those don't even rate on the scale. Meanwhile, the atomic fireball weighs in at thirty five hundred Scovil units, which puts it above seracha and below the Serrano pepper and a good bit below at bird's eye chili. So for you, mango, that means it's hotter than nachos with jalapinos, but not as hot as drunken noodles. So does that register there?
Yes? I get it now. Yeah.
I can give seventeen more examples. But one more thing about Wilbur Scoville. Before he invented the Scoville scale for rating spiciness of food, he wrote a book on compounding for pharmacies that went through many additions, and actually, amazingly, it was that book that it was first reported in print that milk is an antidote to spice so when we chug those glasses of milk that Dylan's got laid out here for us after setting our mouths on fire for this episode, he is actually the one to thank.
So interesting stuff in there related to Scoville. But I'm curious, what do you have next.
It's kind of perfect that you were talking about, because my next fact is about why the atomic fireball is so spicy. So I usually see fireballs in the same category with red hots and hot tamales, and it turns out atomic fireballs aren't just hotter versions of those candies, because unlike those other red hot treats, atomic fireballs don't really run on cinnamon. They actually have something else to thank for their flaming hotness, and that's cap saysan, which
is why they actually rank on that Scoville scale. So cap sasan is the chemical and peppers that makes it spicy, and it's also used in medicines to treat pain and swelling and cause numbing. It's in all of those peppers on the Scoville scale as well. Generally speaking, the more cap saysan you have, the higher the Scoville rating. Now,
the other candies I mentioned, red hots, hot tamales. They get their hotness from something called cinnamaldehyde, which I know it sounds like something I'm making up, but really it's the chemical and cinnamon that makes things more cinnamony. It's known for that tingly feeling on your tongue and it works on the same recept that other similar spicy but not chili hot flavors do. So, like think about things like horsefraddish or withsabi. Definitely spicy, but it's a different type of heat.
And so what about capsation, Like what part of your tongue is that actually triggering?
So, according to the Brooklyn brainery, capsaicin gets picked up on by something called TRPV one, and this is a spiciness receptor, but it doesn't exactly detect the chemicals so much as take the temperature, and when it senses that things are getting super hot, it sounds this sort of alarm in your brain. So when you're eating pizza that's too hot, it's this receptor that's telling you quick, put
the slice down and glugs some soda. But it works on capsasin too, and when you eat something with capsaicin in it, the receptor tells your brain that it's something like one hundred and ten degrees in your mouth. It's like a five alarm fire.
You know, I actually got curious about how they get all that heat into this sugary sweet thing, because you know, it's an interesting science there. And that gets us to my next fact. So you know, the proverb a journey of one thousand miles begins with a single step, right, you love proverbs, proverbs, And actually it has no relation to this episode. I just wanted to. I just like to test you every once in a while. So that was a pause for our proverb test of the day. Well,
now this is relevant here. So the same thing is kind of true for the atomic fireball. That journey begins with a single grain of sugar, literally, like they make the candy using the hot panned process as it's non Now, this hot doesn't refer to spice, but rather to the fact that the pan the candy is cooked in stays hot throughout a two week process. So this is a
long process. An atomic fireball starts with a single grain of sugar and nearly equal amounts of flavor and syrup that coat that single grain, and then once the coating is complete, there's a little more sugar added, and again nearly equal amounts of flavor and syrup and so on and so on. And the process is actually pretty intense, where the candy maker builds up layers in these concentric
spheres around that initial grain of sugar. It's also how other suckers like lemon heads and things like that are made, and it's what makes this consistent flavor as you work your way through the candy over time. So now that you know the process, guess how many layers are in a single atomic fireball?
I feel like a kindly owl once tatas that takes three licks to get to the center of a tipsy pop. But this is obviously atomic, so maybe like thirty layers.
You're almost a third of the way there. It's one hundred, one hundred layers like sugar and spiciness over that original single piece of sugar. There's a lot of science that goes into the making of this deliciousness.
That is incredible. I feel like I can have to count the layers as I eat one the next time. But why don't we talk about the invention of the atomic fireball, which was first created back in nineteen fifty four. Something must have been in the air for spicy candy at the time because another cinnamon retreat, the Hot Tamale, first debuted four years earlier in nineteen fifty. And what's wild is that the creators of these two spicy candies, they almost have lives that mimic one another. So let's
actually start with the Hot Tamale. Bob Bourne had just come back from fighting in the US Navy in World War Two. He actually had been accepted into medical school, but the family business needed a little bit of attention. His father, Sam Boorne, was this former rabbinical student from Ukraine who had started just born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which most people know for making peeps, But another candy they are famous for is the Mike and Ike. Now, Mike
and Ikes had a problem at the time. Apparently a bunch of misshapen candies would come off the line that never could make their way into the candy box. But Bob Bourne actually came up with solution. So what if you took all these misshapen Mike and Ikes, added cinnamon syrup to mask their original flavor, and then packaged them together as their own thing. And that is how the
Hot Tamali got it start. It was kind of like this fix for a mis steak, almost the way baby carrots started out as a snack that was made from a stack of misshapen carrots that was going to be thrown away. That's kind of what hot Tomalas were. And they were such a success that Bob actually set aside his bed school to focus on the family business and he ran Just.
Born Candies for nearly four decades.
Now, like I was saying, Bob and Nello Ferrara end up having these parallel lives. The Ferrara Pan company was also a family business. Salvator Ferrara immigrated from Naples, Italy in nineteen hundred and by nineteen oh eight he'd made his way to Chicago, where he opened this bakery in little Italy. But it wasn't the big goods that kept people coming back. It was the Jordan amends he was making, which are those pastel colored candy treats made by coating
the nut and layers of sugar. And that's when he started a company focused on making what they did best, candy. Now, Ferrara Pan had actually been making red Hot since nineteen thirty two, so they weren't new to the hot candy trend, but Sal's son, nell is the one who took it to the next level. Nello, like Bob Bourne, served in World War Two. He was in the army and he had a degree from DePaul Law School, and he was
actually about to start his life as a lawyer. He was even admitted to the bar, but then he got the candy bug and nineteen fifty four he had this idea for the atomic fireball and there was really no looking back after he put that out.
I mean, is that true? Was it obvious right away that he was better sticking to candy than starting off on this law career.
I mean, what's amazing is that the atomic fireball really took off immediately, Like within the first weeks they were selling fifty thousand pieces a week. That's just enormous hit for the candy business. And he's the one who later invents the lemonhead and then all the other flavors that are kind of similarly made. And for the lemonheads, he used real coatings of citric acid between layers of sugar to get that super puckery taste, so it kind of mimics that process. You were talking about.
All right, well, mango, I've been waiting on this one here because it's not too often that you get to talk about consumer advocacy see Ralph Nader and atomic fireballs all at the same time. So I am pleased to have this opportunity to share my next fact.
This sounds really special. So let's hear it.
You're ready, Okay, here we go. So Ralph Nator has sometimes been known as the nation's nag and has spent much of his life as a political activist, and in fact, he's a huge part of the reason that we have seat belts in cars today. But at one time he was also focused on getting Americans to consume less sugar.
That's so funny. I always think about him and cars and like Pinto and stuff like that, but I didn't realize he was focused on sugar.
Yep, No, that's exactly right. And he disparaged sugar whenever he could. And this really stuck in Nello for ours craw So, according to an interview his son sal gave with NPR, Nello challenged Natter to quote a teeth fight.
What's a teeth fight?
You don't know a teeth fighters? I think it's just comparing teeth. I don't know at the time he wrote Natter's saying quote, I eat candy every day and I have all my teeth. That's such an amazing way to brag. But I guess he thought he was pretty convincing, and apparently not convincing enough though, because Nello Ferar went further. He decided to prove the strength of his teeth by lifting a one hundred pound bag of sugar with his teeth.
I love the idea that he thinks this just like proves his points somehow.
And I love that like Ralph Nader is like, Nope, he's right, you won the nice teeth. I'd be so afraid of like chipping my tooth or like cracking mine like a hundred pounds of sugar is no joke. We have got to pause for some commercials, but we've got more atomic fireball facts right after the break. Please don't go anywhere.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're talking about atomic fireballs, and man, our mouths are on fire with facts, of course, So mengo, where do you want to go next?
How about burning men? Okay, So, in addition to Part Time Genius and NASA it turns out that Burning Men is also known for sending out atomic fireballs with their tickets. And of course there's a whole heat, fire and fun component that sort of overlaps between the candy and the Desert festival. But there's also another reason that they mail out candy with the tickets, and this comes from this guy named Nimbus, who was the former head of ticketing. He says, quote, as the event was growing, so were
our operations, and some unexpected challenges were introduced. Among them, ticket deliveries were being mishandled by the postal service, and so they're trying to figure out how to like improve their ticketing system and they get this advice from a local postbuster. He advises two things. One manually highlight the label with the green highlighter to call out that it
was a signature confirmation. And two, include something small more than half an inch thick to make the package uneven, so that it has to be hands sorted and couldn't be machine sorted. And so that's basically how the atomic fireball gets stuffed into these packages. Years later, they were told that they didn't have to include the fireballs to get the tickets handled with care, but by that time it was already a tradition. And Nimbus actually has these
two other funny stories about the fireballs. One was that there was actually a year where there was a shortage and apparently fans were both really confused and also livid that they received lemonheads and other treats instead of fireballs, and as this puts it, he was just happy that they didn't go with dumb dums, which had been their backup choice.
That's pretty great.
And also for years, apparently the guy who did the fulfillment used to have to store about thirty thousand fireballs in his office every year, and what they didn't know at the time was that he hated the smell of cinnamon. So this poor guy just had to endure it without complaining as part of the job.
But is wild, I will say, I mean, I know, I'd much rather have a fireball than a lemonhead or a dumb dumb, but you know, if somebody sent me one, I'd still eat it. I'm not going to say no to a dumb dumb, especially when it's the mystery flavor.
You know, screw it, I'm not going to burning menus.
No, exactly, Yeah, forget it. They're sending me a dumb dumb All right, Well, let's get back to the hot candies again here. And I was actually curious why anyone wanted to make a candy that was hotter than a jalapano in the first place, and why did that happen when it did, like in the nineteen fifties. Well, it turns out that until that time, Halloween had no particular connection to candy. But the fifties were the time of the baby boom, and an American particular, the great expansion
of suburbs. Trick or treating took off with waves of kids and suburbs, you know, perfect to walk around in these neighborhoods as ghosts and witches, scaring their neighbors and handing over candies. So with the rise of trick or treating came the incentive to find a candy that would, you know, be spooky or scary. So enter the atomic fireball. It was a double whammy. First, with those thirty five hundred Scovil points, it was frighteningly hot. Like we had
talked about. The hot Tamali and the red Hot were already on the scene, but they couldn't make you tear up quite like the fireball.
Yeah, for my last fact, I want to talk about why we love atomic fireball so much, even when they make our mouths burn. And that's not an attack because, as we mentioned earlier, their tagline is burned so good.
But why can't we lay off these candies? I'm curious about that. So the truth is we like the pain.
Psychologists called this benign masochism, and it isn't just with candy. Like, think about watching the scariest movie you can just so you can scream your head off at a jump scare, or riding a roller coaster with a hair raising drop, or even watching Toy Story four. Right, you know you're going to cry your eyes out. But sometimes it feels good to have these kind of bad feelings. But it can only feel good because you know there isn't really
a threat. And actually this is a funny aside, but apparently the candies inventors Nello Ferrara thought that the nat high from the spiciness of the candies could make a great alternative to drugs. So in nineteen fifty four he wrote to a journalist saying, quote, we have many letters from university campuses, such as quote, you can get a better blast out of atomic fireballs than from a puff
of marijuana. Now, we make no claims of preventing the use of marijuana, but I am personally quite confident that many young people went the fireball route who might have gone the marijuana route.
I love that. I love that quote. And you know what, I'm going to go ahead and say it. I actually do fireballs and don't do drugs, and so you know what I think this is Maybe.
They're right, well, that trend of spicy candies that atomic fireballs kicked off is one that is definitely not going to stop. Today. There are a few new candies made with boot Jlakia, which is also better known as the ghost pepper, including some jellybeans. These candies have a Scoville rating of nearly one million, making atomic fireballs kind of look like a G rated movie by comparison. And as much as I love spice, that just sounds unpleasant to me.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
But you know what doesn't sound unpleasant to me? Watching a tooth fight between Ralph Nader and the creator of the tomic fireball, and just picturing that heavyweight a bout makes me smile really wide. So I'm going to give you today's trophy.
Oh wow. That means a lot to get to talk about fireballs and to win the trophy. But I also appreciate just being able to sit here and talk about super hot and delightfully painful candy and sometimes super painful candy as well. But from Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and also Lizzie Jacobs, who wrote for today's episode and likes to live life at the very bottom of the Scovill chart. That's it for this week's Part Time Genius. Now, if
you like our show, please reach out. We love hearing from you on our insta at part Time Genius, and you never know when we're going to reach out with mail or another giant batch of fireballs to our listeners, So keep riding in. But in the meantime, thank you so much for listening.
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongash Chatikler and research by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is Executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey.
For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.