Events of August 1

Today’s Food History

on this day in…

10 B.C. Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus was born. (Emperor of Rome A.D. 41-54). Known as Claudius I, supposedly he was poisoned with mushrooms by his wife Agrippina, after her son Nero was named as his heir.

1137 Louis VI “The Fat” died. (King of France).

1733 Richard Kirwan was born. Kirwan was an eccentric Irish chemist who hated flies. He had dysphagia, which is the inability to swallow food without convulsive movements. He always dined alone.

1744 Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck was born. A French naturalist, he believed in the inheritance of acquired traits. Some of his ideas influenced Darwin.

1790 First U.S. census. We had a total of 3,939,214 mouths to feed.

1793 France introduces the first metric weight, the kilogram.

1817 Sir Joseph Henry Gilbert was born. Gilbert and his partner, Sir John Lawes, conducted agricultural experiments at Rothamsted Experimental Station, the oldest agricultural research station in the world. They are considered founding fathers of the agricultural sciences. They are also the co-inventors of superphosphate fertilizer.

1870 Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was born. Ivanov was a Soviet biologist. Others had previously shown it was possible to artificially inseminate domestic animals, Ivanov developed the practical procedures in 1901. Initially working with horses, by the early 1930s the procedure was being used on other farm animals.

1889 It rained ants at Strasbourg, Germany.

1893 Henry D. Perky and William Ford patented Shredded Wheat. Whole wheat is boiled, dried, pressed into thin shreds and finally baked. They presented it at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois in 1893. When their patent expired in the mid 1930s, the name became generic.

1932 The Mars Bar, candy bar, was introduced.

1960 Chubby Checker’s ‘The Twist’ was released.