Two Accidental Inventions

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Tracy Happenstance
has been on my mind a lot lately for a
variety of reasons. Things that are coincidental or um the

(00:24):
people accidentally have fallen into good fortune have just come
up in lots of conversations lately for no particular reason
I can discern um. And I have also had a
list brewing for a while of topics that are kind
of happy accidents, and so uh, it seemed like maybe
the universe was conspiring to tell me to look at
that list again. One category of those happy accidents that

(00:47):
I have on my list is accidental inventions. So we're
going to talk about a couple of those today. Here's
my true confession upfront. I had planned to make this
three accidental inventions, but the two that we're covering today,
as I was researching, got too big, and so another
got cut. But that means that probably another installment or

(01:10):
two of of accidental inventions happened on the road, and
a wonderful confluence of happy accidents see it's all about UH,
accidents and happiness. Both of these accidental inventions, although one
might not have been an accident we'll talk about that
have to do with cooking and food. So first we'll
have a main course if you will UH and if

(01:32):
you're nice and flexible in that definition, and then a
dessert but has a little bitterness to be how you
look at it. You will see what I mean when
we get there. So today we're covering two accidental inventions.
We'll start with a very very common household appliance. Microwaves
are high frequency electromagnetic waves, and as it turns out,

(01:53):
you can use them to cook food. Here's a very
quick and simple explanation of how that works. If you
put food in an electromagnetic field, the fats and water
and other elements of the food will absorb those waves
and then start to vibrate. They're excited to a point
of hyperactivity, and they vibrate so much that it produces

(02:14):
heat within the food itself. That's a faster way to
cook things than when the heat is coming from an
external source like an oven. Right, So usually you'll see
people say that it's UH fats, waters and sugars that
are the primary drivers of that heat. Just as an aside,
I wanted to get this out there because I bet
people are like ready to dash off a listener mail.

(02:36):
If you have heard that cooking with a microwave destroys
food nutrients, that is a myth because the cooking time
is so reduced, nothing is ever cooked long enough for
the microwave radiation to actually destroy any nutrients. And you're
also not using any additional water like you might if
you were boiling something to cook it, so no nutrients
are leaching out into the cooking substance like a water

(02:59):
at all, just stays right there. You're fine. Uh. When
I was in massage school, one of my massage school
classmates insisted that one should not cook with the microwave
because microwaves made all the molecules in the food you
were cooking spin backwards. And yeah, I've heard lots of
similar myths. We had an argument about that on like

(03:23):
last day of massage school. Even though that is not true.
You can get uneven cooking with a microwave when you're
heating something up that has different ingredients with different moisture content,
and that's why you'll sometimes take something out find that
part of it is still cool, presumably a drier part

(03:44):
like the crust, and then another part is blazing hot
like a filling. Of course, that means you can't really
get something crispy on the outside either. Crisping sleeves help,
but you're not gonna make fried chicken in a microwave.
That's what's up um. This year, while we're recording this two,
will be the fifty fifth anniversary of what's usually called

(04:04):
the first home microwave oven. Uh, there's actually a precursor,
but that's the one that gets all the credit. That
was introduced to the market by manufacturer Amana. But that
wasn't the first microwave oven, even though it was the
first successful consumer one. Industrial kitchens started using them in
the nineteen fifties, well before the nine seven debut of

(04:25):
Amana's home use radar range. All of this is older
than I thought, because my households first microwave was much
later than that. Oh, I have plans to ask you
all about it, Okay, in our behind the scenes so
radar as you may recall the text objects by sending
radio waves and then identifying objects when the waves bounce

(04:46):
back from the surface. Of those objects. Radar was first
used to create a detection system by physicist Sir Robert
Watson watt In and radar systems require magnature wants to
produce all those radio waves. So during World War Two,
the military needed magnetrons. They needed a lot of magnetrons.

(05:08):
They needed more magnetrons than they could possibly get their
hands on. Yes, you will sometimes see this contract as
happening that we're about to talk about coming from the
US military or from the British military. I think after
reading a bunch of different versions of it, what had
happened was the British military was kind of asking the

(05:32):
US to help them as well, and that's how it
kind of gets confused there of who actually wanted to
contract this company called Raytheon, and there was an engineer
named Percy LeBaron Spencer. Spencer was born in eight in Howland, Maine,
and his early years were really marked by pretty extreme poverty. Uh.

(05:53):
He started working when he was still just a kid,
taking a job at a weaving mill at age twelve,
because he had to take care of himself and his
aunt who was raising him at the time. He was
a very very smart kid, just a couple of years later. So,
when he was still a pretty teenager, Percy, who had
no formal education past grammar school, taught himself everything that

(06:15):
he could about electrical wiring so he could apply for
a job at a paper plant that needed someone to
wire the entire factory for electricity. And he got that
job and did it. In nineteen twelve, at the age
of eighteen, Spencer joined the Navy as a radio operator,
and he devoured all the information he could about radio technology.

(06:36):
And he didn't stop there. He was curious about almost everything,
it seems, and he continued to be an autodiet act.
He taught himself calculus, chemistry, physics, and even metallurgy. He
did all of that from books. Later on in life
he said, quote, I just got hold of a lot
of textbooks and taught myself while I was standing watch
at night. I have such admiration for him. Uh. The

(07:00):
World War One had ended and Percy Spencer had fulfilled
his enlistment contract. He took a job with a new company,
the American Appliance Company, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late
ninety twenties. The company went through several reorganizations and a
reincorporation and it became Raytheon Manufacturing Company. Raytheon in partnership

(07:21):
with M I. T. That allowed the company to use
the school's radiation laboratory. Got this government contract to build
magnetrons pretty early in World War Two, and Spencer got
to work and he did innovate magnatron production. He developed
a way to cut pieces needed for assembly from sheet
metal instead of needing every single component to be made separately,

(07:44):
and he kept working with the magnetrons that Raytheon produced
to work on improving them and expanding their uses. Raytheon
ended up developing a shipboard radar system and producing about
eighty percent of the magnetrons that were used by the Allies.
But the expansion into cooking was really an accident. Yeah,

(08:05):
they were a defense contractors. They were not like and food.
So the story goes that one day at work, Spencer
had a candy bar in his pocket that was a
peanut cluster according to his grandson, because he used to
break up the nuts and feed them to squirrels and
chipmunks during his lynches. And after working near a live

(08:26):
magnetron with this candy bar in his pocket, he noticed
that it had gotten a bit melty. He had not
been near a heat source, so he suspected that the
magnetron and its radio waves might have had something to
do with it. So he got to work and did
some testing. The first thing that Spencer purposely targeted with
the radio waves was an egg, and after just a

(08:48):
brief exposure, the egg exploded. Next, he tested corn kernels,
so that's right. He basically made microwave popcorn. After some
additional testing and refinement of magnetron's them for cooking food
instead of producing radar, Spencer filed for a patent for
what he called method of Treating food Stuffs. That opens

(09:09):
with quote, my present invention relates to the treatment of
food stuffs and more particularly to the cooking thereof through
the use of electromagnetic energy. Yeah, if you look at
this story, depending on your source, some people will say
the popcorn came first. His grandson did a recent interview
last year with Popular Mechanics and he said the egg
was the first thing. People's memories are sieves could go

(09:33):
either way, right, so uh. In this patent application, Spencer
goes on to describe all of the various parts needed
for the device and how they function together. And then
touts quote, with the system described, I have found that
an egg may be rendered hard boiled with the expenditure
of two kilowatts per second. This compares with an expenditure

(09:54):
of thirty six kilowatts per second to conventionally cook the
same I have all so found that with my system,
a potato requires the expenditure of about two hundred forty
kilowats per second, when compared with the seventy two thousand
kilowat seconds necessary to bake the same in an electric oven.
These examples are, it is to be clearly understood merely illustrative.

(10:17):
I have observed similar results with other food stuffs. In
each instance, where the wavelength of the energy is of
the order of the average dimension of the food stuff
to be cooked, the process is very efficient, requiring the
expenditure of a minimum amount of energy for a minimum
amount of time. He also indicates that cooks will no
doubt find many uses for his invention, writing quote, other

(10:40):
objects and advantages of my present invention will readily occur
to those skilled in the art to which the same relates.
The patent request was submitted on October and was granted
as Patent number two four nine five four to nine
on January nine fifty. But even before the patent was

(11:01):
officially awarded, Raytheon had started working on microwave ovens, and
the first was the commercial Radar Range, which was named
via an employee contest. This was first demonstrated in a
Boston restaurant got the chance to use one as a test.
Was the size of a refrigerator, and depending on specific features,

(11:23):
that costs between two thousand and three thousand dollars. It's
a lot of money. In a moment, we were going
to talk about how that behemoth machine was followed by
smaller models and how the microwave became a household standard,
but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Thanks

(11:49):
to the commercial microwave oven, it was soon on the
minds of many engineers at manufacturing companies that a smaller
version of the radar Range or a similar device could
be marketed for home use. Raytheon partnered with Tappen Stove
Company in nineteen fifty two to produce a reduced sized model,
and they had one available to consumers in nineteen fifty five.

(12:11):
This is that precursor I mentioned earlier, but it was
twelve hundred to thirteen hundred dollars depending on the source
you look at, far outside the budget of most homes.
We always caveat that converting currency through time is a
tricky and inaccurate thing. But I looked at several different
inflation calculators. They all quoted an equivalency of more than

(12:33):
twelve thousand dollars in current currency, some quite close to
thirteen thousand. So, needless to say, the tap and radar
range really did not catch on. In nineteen sixty five,
Raytheon acquired a company called a Manner Refrigeration, Inc. At
the time, they made, as the name suggests, refrigerators as
well as air conditioners, and the company had already started

(12:54):
working on commercial and industrial microwave ovens. Under Raytheon, the
company expanded to include a consumer division, and this meant
that not only was a Manna already working on a
home microwave, but it already had a consumer distribution process
that made it easy to get to market once all
the engineering and design were perfected. As we mentioned a

(13:16):
moment ago, the first consumer model, the r R one
radar range, became available in nine That was a one
volt countertop model that cost a little less than five
hundred dollars, so still very much a luxury item, but
much less expensive than that earlier attempt. It had a
start button and a timer, obviously not digital, and it

(13:40):
did not have a stop or cancel button. You just
had to open it to stop it. The following year,
a new model appeared with a stop button and a
timer that allowed for up to thirty minutes of cooking.
That was an addition of five minutes from how long
the first model would have allowed. The reliability and the
lower cost of the Amana radar range compared to it's

(14:03):
it's briefly run predecessor made it very popular, very quickly.
By the middle of the nineteen seventies, it was estimated
that one million microwaves were being sold annually, and we
really cannot overstate how much of a sensation this was.
It was reported in papers regularly. In December of nineteen
sixty eight, the daily Memphis Tennessee paper, The Commercial Appeal,

(14:26):
ran an article about microwave ovens that featured a huge
photograph of the first Memphis woman to have one. She
is referenced as Mrs Ralph ur Sneed. We don't know
what her first name was, and even the delivery man. J. L.
Jetting of Jetting Appliances gets a shout out for this
momentous occasion. Yeah, there's a very cute like the delivery

(14:49):
man standing there having handed it off, and she's already
starting to put something in it. Like I'm like, are
you cooking for the delivery man? I don't know, but
it's what seemed very exciting for everyone involved. This article
goes on to list the details and capabilities of this
quote cooking method of tomorrow. And some of these I
found extraordinarily charming because when you look at them through

(15:11):
today's lens, they're quite witty. So I'm going to read
them off. It gave it a bulleted list. So number one,
the microwave oven is priced under five hundred dollars to
it operates on a hundred and fifteen volts. Just plug
it in. Three it brown's meat, will cook anything. Four
it saves seventy cooking time. Five it saves on the

(15:35):
fuel bill. It uses less electricity than an ordinary frying pan.
Six it saves on the food bill. Seven it produces
a much cooler kitchen, no heat whatsoever. Eight foods actually
taste better for natural juices are retained and not lost. Okay,
most people would probably agree that the microwave is not

(15:58):
really the best way to took most meals, and whether
they taste better or not depends a lot on exactly
what you are cooking. But you can see how the
idea of a more efficient kitchen that is not swelteringly
hot would have a huge appeal and also feel legitimately revolutionary.
One of the funnier attributes of the microwave mentioned in

(16:18):
that particular article is portability. There's this suggestion that you
can take it out on the patio or even into
your living room to cook if you wanted. That cracked
me up so much when I was reading it, like
just picturing putting a meal in the microwave, as I
said on the couch, I don't know, I don't know.
It just made me crack up. Um. The Honolulu Star

(16:41):
Bulletin ran an article of its own in December nine
under the headline microwave ovens put the space age in
the kitchen and it offers, in addition to the article itself,
a pictorial on just how fast you can make cake
in a cup. It shows a user setting the time.
It's like this four part developmental chronological pictures thing, So

(17:03):
it shows the user setting the time like a close
up on the hands, and then how the cake looks
at ten seconds and twenty seconds, and then tenda done
at thirty seconds. The paper's food editor, Betsy Ballsley tells
readers quote, I recently spent a weekend using a radar
range for all of the baking and roasting I normally
would do in the oven of my stove. It was

(17:25):
a fascinating experience. Fascinating is a good choice of words there.
It's not really committing to whether roasting something in the
microwave worked out. Betsy, though, gives a really truthful account
of for learning curve at first overcooking everything because she
couldn't adjust to the speed. But she claimed that by Sunday,
her third day using the microwave, she'd gotten the hang

(17:47):
of it and even cooked a turkey quote to perfection
in an hour and fifteen minutes. So that's a lot
quicker than the four hours that would have taken in
the oven. I still have questions about how me too.
She's honest that anything that needs leavening is just not
gonna work, but that vegetables convenience foods and leftovers all

(18:10):
come out perfectly. Yeah, she's pretty balanced in her thing
of like. I mean, she says that turkey was great,
and she cooked a roast in there, like she did
a lot of meats which I would not usually cook
large meat entredes in a microwave, but she claims it
went quite well. Um. These two write ups and many
others like them, Alright, we're talking about them because they

(18:31):
showed just how excited people were to have an entirely
new way of cooking, and one that seemed completely futuristic
and almost unreal in its speed. The word microwave dates
back to nineteen thirty one. It was used to describe
the short waves that are kind of at the heart
of this whole story in its technology, and it was
used to describe the appliance itself right from when it

(18:53):
was introduced. But this method of cooking changed things so
much and so quickly that by nine seventy three, so
just six years after the Amana radar range came out,
the word microwave was being used as a verb. Safety
regulations have been in place for consumer microwaves for decades,
so for example, you could put your candy bar right

(19:14):
next to your modern microwave while cooking something, and unlike
Percy Spencer's experience, it will not melt unless your kitchen
is incredibly hot, which is a situation I for sure
had before. While the microwaves certainly won't replace the oven
completely when it comes to making things like bread and pie,
or the grill for things like burgers or steaks, it's

(19:37):
just it's a everyday part of life for many people.
I would say, every day a microwaves something, yeah, yeah,
and Raytheon technology still exists, focused on aerospace and defense,
although Amana is no longer part of the company. Amana
was sold to Goodman Global in and then the company

(19:58):
was split into its heating and cooling division, which Goodman retained,
and its home appliance division, which was sold to Maytag
in two thousand one. Whirlpool acquired Maytag in two thousand six,
and a manner remains part of Whirlpool, still making a
wide range of home appliances, including microwaves. Percy Spencer saw
his inventions early success as a consumer product, but not

(20:20):
how deeply it became a part of modern life. He
died on September eight, nineteen sixty nine, which was two
years after the amount of rador range had been introduced.
And now we're moving on to our other invention, which
is chocolate chip cookies. Who doesn't love cookies? Okay, I'm
sure some people don't love cookies. I'm not going to judge.

(20:42):
I don't get it, but that's fine. Um, But whether
you like cookies or not, I think most folks were
recognized that the chocolate chip cookie is one of the
most popular bake treats to pop out of an oven,
old school or even microwave. And like the microwave, they
were invented accidentally. Maybe uh, there's actually so conflicting information here.

(21:03):
But to talk about the rise of the chocolate chip cookie,
we have to talk about the woman credited with inventing them,
and that is Ruth Wakefield. That is someone we've gotten
requests to talk about on the show before. I don't
know if they would like how it goes. So. Ruth
was born Ruth Graves and East Walpole, Massachusetts, on June

(21:25):
se n oh three. She grew up in eastern Massachusetts
with her parents, Fred Graves and Helen vest Jones Graves.
She attended the precursor to Framingham State University which was
Framingham State Normal School, Department of Household Arts. Graduated from
there in nineteen Ruth had a number of jobs early

(21:47):
in her adult life after she graduated. She taught high
school economics, she worked as a dietitian in a hospital,
and she even worked for a utility company and customer service.
She managed their customer service team. But she eventually became
an innkeeper. Really a restaurant tour that happened after she
met Kenneth Wakefield and married him. Wakefield had worked in

(22:09):
meat packing. He was an executive when they met, but
the couple decided that they would like to run a
restaurant together, so they bought a place in Whitman, Massachusetts,
on Bedford Street, and they started there in in nineteen thirty.
She had a very recognizable name, the toll House. In
this house had a sign out front that read toll
House in seventeen o nine, and you will see on

(22:32):
occasion write ups that say that it was once used
as a toll house and that it was built in
the early eighteenth century. But that was apparently a quaint
fiction that was cooked up by the Wakefields for marketing purposes.
The house was really built by a man named Jacob
Bates and his brother in law Lebas Smith in the
eighteen teens. And it may have been on a toll road,

(22:56):
doesn't appear to have actually been used as a toll house, right. Ah.
That's you know, just just kind of adding to the mystique.
This was to be very clear. I mean, you've probably
already thought this a dicey time to open a restaurant.
The Wall Street crash of had just happened, plunging the
US into a depression. But according to Ruth, she and

(23:20):
Ken had always noted the various disappointing things they had
encountered when they went out for dinner, and they thought
that they could do better. They basically had like the
dream of the ideal restaurant their heads. So they bought
this building. They renovated it, they burned through most of
their investment money in the process. Ruth later said that

(23:40):
they only had fifty dollars when they opened their doors
to customers in August nine thirty, and after just a
couple of days of serving only a handful of customers,
that fifty dollars had dwindled in supply purchases and one
really messy miscommunication where the Wakefields thought they had a
large table of paying customers, and the woman who brought

(24:03):
them believed that they had understood she was bringing her
ladies group as a way to help them get the
word out about their new business, and that it was
going to be a compt affair. But within a few
months it had all turned around. By Christmas, they needed
to hire ten more employees in addition to the two
they started with. By the end of the nineteen thirties,
they had a hundred employees and the seven tables they'd

(24:25):
started with had expanded to dozens. They had to add
on to the building to accommodate this growing stream of
regular customers. Many of those people that they were seeing
were locals, but a lot were travelers. And for a dollar,
diners got a full meal with whatever they desired with
it from soup to dessert. If you wanted seconds, no

(24:46):
extra charge. That was all part of your dollar. It
was a pretty good deal. But it was also a
very nice experience because Ruth Wakefield had extremely high standards.
The linen's were always perfect and a augily. Wait staff
were not allowed to write anything down. They were expected
to memorize all orders as part of making the customers

(25:08):
feel at home. We'll talk more about Ruth and Ken's
restaurant after we hear from one of the sponsors that
keep Stuffy miss and History class going. So for all
of its homeliness, the toll house end did have a

(25:29):
rather stern side, at least when it came to the staff.
Ruth was very, very particular in the way everything ran.
We mentioned already that servers were not allowed to write
down orders. Servers also had a three month training period
to learn the seven page service manual before they worked
a shift on their own, and they only got two

(25:51):
tables on a shift. Few have ever waited tables, that's nothing,
but that was because they were responsible for those tables
in their hirety, including setting them perfectly with silver placed
quote one thumb print away from the edge of the table. Apparently,
if you had not done it correctly, you had to
clear the whole table and reset it. Ruth was also

(26:14):
known to yell at staff that did not perform as expected,
and the food had a reputation for excellence. Ruth had
a background in food from her college days, and she'd
also inherited her grandmother's recipes. She was just a really
good cook with a gift for recipe creation. Once the
restaurant was successful, she and Ken went on a trip

(26:35):
to an overseas location once a year to taste foods
of the world and seek out flavors they might incorporate
into their menu. The Toll House in became well known
enough that all manner of celebrities started stopping in when
they were in New England, so everyone from Betty Davis
to Eleanor Roosevelt said to have stopped there for a meal.

(26:55):
In Ruth published a cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes.
That cookbook was reprinted twenty eight times in less than
twenty five years. I read that ultimately it got reprinted
something like thirty nine times. Don't quote me on that number,
but it's in that range. And it grew with each
subsequent printing because she would expand and add new recipes

(27:17):
they were using at the restaurant. Ruth's recipes and particularly
her desserts, were renowned, and even food critic Duncan Hinds
raved about her meringue. So how did this lead to
a chocolate chip cookie? There are multiple versions, and probably
the most commonly repeated version of the story Ruth was improvising.

(27:38):
She had run out of the nuts that she usually
put in her brown sugar cookie dough or baker's chocolate,
and added in bits of dark chocolate that she broke
off of a semi sweet chocolate bar. The nut version
of the story was told by almost all of her
employees and ex employees for years. Another version was that
the vibration of a mix sir had caused the chocolate

(28:01):
to fall into the cookie batter, and in both of
these versions, the batter was baked into cookies and Vala
it was delicious. So there are some other less popular
versions of this story, like one that she had run
short of butter and was trying to make up the
moisture with chocolate, but that and similar tales aren't really
supported by any of the accounts given by people who

(28:23):
actually worked at the toll house. In There is also
a version that says Ruth expected the chocolate to melt
into the dough and create a chocolate cookie, But that
version kind of suggests that she would have had subsizeable
gaps in her knowledge of mixing ingredients, and that makes
no sense because remember, she had a degree in what

(28:43):
was called household arts. At the time, and she taught
home mac and she had also just been a really
good cook for a long time. There is also another version,
Ruth's version, but we're going to get to that in
a minute. However, it happened, and that mixer story seems
like a long shot because it would have dumped a
whole or mostly whole bar of baking chocolate into the

(29:05):
mix instead of broken apart pieces. Probably still would have
been big pieces, even after going through one giant chocolate
chip that's eight ounces. Yeah, Regardless of that, a new
cookie was born, and restaurant visitors loved it so much
so that if you asked afterward how to make these
cookies yourself, you would get a hand typed card with

(29:28):
the recipe from your server. The recipe went into the
toll House Cookbook in the late nineteen thirties. Yeah, they
just got so tired of people asking that they just
started typing up recipe cards and having them ready at
the start of every ship. The restaurant and it's amazing
cookies were featured on a radio show called Famous Foods

(29:49):
from Famous Eating Places, which was hosted by Betty Crocker herself,
whose name was actually Merjuri hosted the recipe and variations
on it soon started a peer in papers, and from
there the company known as Lamont Corless and Company, which
was making Nestle chocolate products in the US and eventually
became part of Nestleie, became interested in part because their

(30:12):
semi sweet chocolate bars were suddenly being sold in greater volume.
They sent a representative to the toll House in and
while Nestley was not the only chocolate company that had
approached Ruth and wanted to talk to her about this,
it was their chocolate that she liked to bake with
and they struck a deal. This is another point that
is told sometimes with some variations, because you might also

(30:35):
see it told that Ruth approached Nestle and not the
other way around. According to Ruth Wakefield, Nestley paid her
a dollar and exchanged for the rights to the toll
House cookie recipe. We don't know the exact details of
the deal that Ruth and Nestley worked out, but she
was shrewd enough not to give up her recipe for
just a dollar. Speculation over the years has been that

(30:59):
she was given in a complimentary chocolate supply for life
and also that she served as a paid consultant for
nest Lee on recipe development as part of that deal.
That would make a lot more sense than just saying
sure for a buck. Uh. If you live in the
United States, you have probably seen that recipe printed a
bazillion times on the backs of packets of chocolate chips,

(31:21):
but for a while it was just printed on the
wrapper of solid bars of chocolate. To add interest and
appeal to getting the recipe and chocolate from Nestley, the
company started scoring their bars so that they could easily
be broken into one hundred sixty pieces that were, according
to them, exactly the right size for baking cookies. The

(31:41):
chocolate morsel soon followed in the early nineteen forties, so
that that's when it went into bags and those cute
little drops, And soon after that, other chocolate companies were
introducing their own chocolate chips perfect for baking, and often
their own cookie recipes as well to try to compete.
But Wakefield's toll House Cookie had the benefit of the
name recognition that the Toll House in had achieved in

(32:03):
the decade plus it had been in business, so that
kind of continued to reign supreme even during World War Two,
when chocolate was in shorter supply, Nestlee used the shortage
as a marketing angle. They ran ads that read quote,
now that Nestlee's semi sweet chocolate is harder to get,
put it to the best possible useless add went on

(32:24):
to suggest that women make toll House cookies to send
to their soldiers overseas. Ruth also started selling the cookies
from the restaurant to be shipped overseas to troops. This
is according to employees at the end, when they shifted
the recipe to exclude nuts because they just didn't hold
up that well in shipping. The recipe that appears on

(32:46):
bags of chocolate morsels has actually changed several times over
the years as ingredients have changed and things like pre
sifted flour have become readily available. I'm pretty sure the
recipe now does have nuts. As one example. It might
but gross, Yeah, I don't. I don't put them in mind.
I will talk about my favorite chocolatep recipe in our

(33:09):
Behind the Scenes um. In nineteen sixty seven, after thirty
seven years in the restaurant business and being very successful
about it, Ruth and Ken sold the toll House in
and they retired to Duxbury, Massachusetts. Ruth died ten years
later in nineteen seventy seven. The toll House in burned
in nineteen eighty four and it was not rebuilt, although

(33:29):
the sign has been restored and there is now a
historical marker plaque on the site. For a very very
long time, Ruth herself was kg about how the chocolate
cookie was invented. She never explained what prompted the change
and the recipe, and in the nineteen eight version of
her cookbook she even says that it's quote really a
story by itself, but doesn't elaborate any further. And then suddenly,

(33:54):
in nineteen seventy four she told a very different story.
She told a reporter for The Boss and Harold American
that it had been very carefully invented, not an accident,
and her account quote, we had been serving a thin
butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream. Everybody seemed to love it,
but I was trying to give them something different, so
I came up with the toll house cookie. She claims

(34:17):
she had worked out the recipe as they were traveling
home from Egypt. She also told a reporter from the
Christian Science monitor that she had worked on the recipe
with her pastry cook Sue Brides once she returned to
the restaurant. There was incidentally, both a nut tea wafer
and a chocolate crunch cookie in the nine edition of
her cookbooks, So there is some evidence that backs up

(34:39):
her story, but because Ruth was so evasive about it
for four decades and she was known to do some
savvy fibbing for marketing purposes, it's hard to know for certain. Incidentally,
the original recipe for Wakefield's cookies that was first used
in the restaurant isn't quite like the cookie that you'll

(35:00):
it if you make the recipe. If you find it today,
it's a lot less sweet and lighter and crunchier. It
was to be baked all the way through and not
left chewy in the middle. I mean, why would you
not want chewy in the middle. I don't, Ruth, we
gotta talk about this. UM. So that is where microwave

(35:23):
ovens and chocolate chip cookies from. UM. I'm suddenly having
a reminiscence about those microwave chocolate chip cookie packs when
they were introduced, which I think you can still get,
but I do not use them. Um, we'll probably have
more accidental or not accidental inventions in the future because
they're kind of fun. They're a nice uh refresher after

(35:47):
we talk about murder all the time, which I've been doing.
Uh so all of that. I also have listener mail
from our listener cam which is going to talk about
one of the murders. Are several murders in fact, Cam Rights.
Hello ladies. I am a longtime listener and have emailed
about transcripts a few times as many of your podcasts
are very useful for my criminal justice class. I feel

(36:08):
they're well researched and they provide insights that students might
not get from a textbook, and the material you cover
is often barely glazed over. I wanted to write to
applaud your discussion about the relationship between crime and media
and the Widemont episodes. I spent a lot of time
in class talking about the media and how it impacts
how we see crime and criminal justice in the United States.

(36:29):
Our perceptions of how dangerous the world is and what
appropriate punishment for a crime might be depends greatly on
how it's portrayed. I always ask students to think about
why a particular victim or offender is getting so much
media attention and who is not receiving the same levels
of attention e g. Is one of the victims or
offenders attractive, does the offense violate societal norms and expectations?

(36:51):
And what role is race ethnicity playing in these portrayals.
There's a significant amount of research in this area that
I won't bore you with, but I'm glad you highlighted
this issue. We must always remember that very few media
outlets are not for profit and they need to gain
an audience, which often occurs through interesting headlines and selecious details.
Preach cam Uh and then says thank you for all

(37:13):
your hard work. I'm including a few pet photos. One
is from Luna Ray Cosmos fluffy uppies first Gotcha Day
a few days ago, are good, good boy, Prince Fury,
Gronkey Bear, these names are spectacular, by the way, sitting
lying next to his little sister, one of our kittens,
Nebula and Aurora. When they were little, it took two
kitties to fill the space left by my giant orange

(37:34):
basketball of a cat bite. And finally, one of Nebulous
sitting with her boy. She is the most patient kitty,
who thankfully also gently enforces boundaries. I hope you're having
a lovely day. Uh. Cam gives some episode suggestions and
then writes, PS. I am listening to the Maria Gratrudis
Barcelo episodes as I write this, and wanted to mention
one funny thing. I grew up in Nevada and my

(37:56):
mom was a casino worker, often dealing cards, which is
a very common job. When I moved to upstate New
York and people would ask what she did, I would
use the common parlance I grew up with, she's a dealer.
When that obviously confused folks, I would say she's a
card dealer, but people would often mishear it and then
wonder what vehicles she sold. Never would I have thought

(38:16):
about that as being a locational confusion problem as you
move away from that location. But see how that would go.
I was talking to my hygienist about the episode when
I got my last teeth cleaning, and I think she
thought I was talking about drugs, right, Cam, Thank you

(38:38):
so much. Also, man, those are beautiful pets, um and
kiss every one of their faces for me. Uh. If
you would like to write to us. Tell us your
funny story about how you accidentally make your mom's career
sounds delicious, or how you are working to make sure
people understand that there is nuance in the ways stories

(39:00):
are told in the media. Well, any of the or
any of the other show. Just send us your kiddies
and puppies. That's good too. You could do that at
History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can
also find us on social media pretty much everywhere as
Missed in History, and you can subscribe in the I
heart radio app or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

(39:23):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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