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The BrainFood Show episodes
- The Junior High Dropout That Created Dunkin' Donuts
In 1847 at the tender age of 16, seaman Hanson Gregory looked at some frying dough and said, “Everything is better with holes”… except his ship hull probably… and created the staple of breakfasts the diabetes lovin’ world over- the doughnut! Or so the story goes anyway. In truth, Captain Gregory’s account of how and why he supposedly invented the doughnut varied over time, and despite a statue being made of him in Rockport, Maine in 1947 commemorating his fried genius, nobody really knows where the holed doughnut came from. Some, including Captain Gregory, claim putting the hole in it makes it so you don’t get a mouthful of grease when you eat the center, but plenty of doughnuts exist that have no holes with no such issue. And people have been frying up such cakes for millennia with no apparent inclination to take the center out, except for occasionally to replace it with things like fruit and other fillings.
Nevertheless, it was in the late 19th and early 20th century that suddenly many decided a hole should be present in such fried dough. As to why, the timing of the change gives arguably the best hypothesis, or at least potentially why it became popular. Around the same time doughnuts with holes first popped up in New York City, bagels were also becoming very popular in the same place and were commonly put on display and sold stacked on wooden dowels. Thus, it is sometimes hypothesized that bakers in New York first got the bright idea to put holes in the dough before frying when one or more of them thought to sell the doughnuts in the same way as bagels- on dowels, which saved display space and, perhaps more significantly, made it easier to sell en masse on street corners. With this hypothesis, making more evenly fried dough may or may not have come into play.Whatever the case, this holey fried dough rapidly gained in popularity in the early 20th century, particularly receiving a huge boost thanks to WWI and soldiers’ love of them in the trenches.This all leads us to the topic of today- that time a Jr High dropout might as well have put a hole in people’s pockets with how fast they started throwing money at him when he created one of the most successful franchise businesses in history- The Open Kettle…Author: Daven HiskeyHost: Simon WhistlerProducer: Samuel AvilaSponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood
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14 min - Inventing Color in a World That was Black and White
When we think of the past prior to the 1960s or so, we tend to picture it in black and white. Much of the visual media of this period - including still photographs to films to television - was rendered in shades of grey, making relatively recent history seem that much more distant and alien. But colour photography did exist in the first half of the 20th Century; just think of classic films like The Wizard of Oz, released in 1939. But if this technology existed, why wasn’t it more common? And who first figured out how to capture the world in full living colour? Well, prepare to go from sepia to technicolour like Dorothy as we dive into the fascinating - and surprisingly long - history of colour photography.
Throughout the black-and-white photography era, people added colour to photographs and film by hand-tinting them with paint and ink. However, the development of true colour photography required a scientific understanding of how humans perceive colour. In 1850, German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz developed the trichromatic theory of vision, which postulated that the human eye contained three different kinds of light receptors - today known as cone cells - each sensitive to one of three colours: red, blue, and green. In 1861, English photographer Thomas Sutton, working with Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, applied Helmholtz’s theories to create history’s first colour photograph. Sutton took three separate photographs of a tartan ribbon through a red, blue, and green filter, then converted these photographs into slides and projected them back through their respective filters, the three slides combining to create a full colour photograph. Though this image could not be fixed on a physical medium, Maxwell’s demonstration nonetheless pioneered the additive colour process, which would form the basis of colour photography for the next few decades.Shortly after Sutton’s experiment, French physicist...Author: Gilles MessierEditor: Daven HiskeyProducer: Caden NielsenHost: Simon WhistlerSponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood
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19 min - How Astronauts Go to the Bathroom in Space and How Women Can Safely Pee Standing Up
In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we begin by following up on a previous discussion on what the first good movie based on a computer game was. We then jump right into the various ways in which astronauts have managed their necessary expulsions over the years and some hilarious stories and interesting related facts that go along with that, including the teased Apollo 10 incident from The Final Frontier Part 1.
We then discuss the lost skill of women peeing standing up without getting any pee on themselves or their underwear in the process, and how exactly this is done with no equipment required.
Sponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 15 min - How They Ruined Superhero Movies
“In mutant heaven there are no pearly gates, but instead revolving doors.” - Professor X
In the realm of comic books, the rules of the respective universe you’re reading about tend to differ wildly from the rules of our own. Besides the obvious thing of the world of say Marvel or DC being populated with virtual gods, iron plated dictators who sit atop flying laser thrones and a CEO who beats up criminals in a billion-dollar ninja-themed fur suit, problems in these universes sort of seem to just, go away.
Property damage, the judicial process and paper works are just a handful examples of things that don’t particularly seem to matter in comics and as a result, are rarely dwelled upon. There are exceptions of course, but for the most part the stories told by comics are allegorical so such details don’t really matter. Perhaps the most unusual reality of life comics have made a habit of sidestepping though is the idea of death, which is often portrayed as being about as much of an inconvenience to a comic character as an out of office hours work email. A trope so common even the characters in these stories have started to call it out.
Now, to begin with, think of a comic character. Do you have one in mind? Good. Okay so there’s a good chance that, at some point, that character has died, been buried, mourned and memorialised before springing back to life to continue slapping aside criminals and supervillains in form-fitting spandex as if nothing happened. And if they haven’t “died” there’s a good chance they were presumed dead after an explosion or something and then came back as if nothing had happened.
Starting with some of the heavier hitters from the DC side we have Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Martian Manhunter, Green Arrow and Robin. All of whom, at some point in their comic history have “died” and then came back.
Author: Karl Smallwood
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila
Host: Simon Whistler
Sponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood
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19 min - Britain's Most Disastrous "White Elephant" Airliner
On April 27, 2005, the gigantic Airbus A380 airliner took to the skies for the first time, lifting off from Toulouse-Blagnac Airport with test pilot Jacques Rosay at the controls. At that moment the A380, weighing more than 500 tonnes and capable of carrying up to 853 passengers, became the largest commercial airliner ever to fly, dethroning the previous record holder, the venerable Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. But while such giants might seem like products of the jet age, the dream of enormous ocean liners in the sky has been around for a lot longer. In the years immediately following the Second World War, Britain set out to build a truly gargantuan airliner, with which it hoped to revolutionize air travel and knit its crumbling empire together. Instead, the project turned out to be a technological dead end and a costly white elephant. This is the story of the Bristol Brabazon.
In 1942, the British Government began thinking ahead to the future of the British aviation industry. The demands of war had forced the British to cancel pre-war airliner projects and devote its wartime production capacity to building combat aircraft like fighters and bombers. As a result, nearly all transport aircraft used by British forces during the war were American designs like the Douglas DC-3. Even Britain’s national air carrier, the British Overseas Airways Corporation or BOAC, was forced to fill out its fleet with American aircraft like the Boeing 314 flying boat. This state of affairs, the Government realized, would leave British aviation at a serious disadvantage once the war ended - as a December 24, 1942 article in Flight magazine opined:“The whole British Empire at the present time has an operational fleet of transport aircraft, comprising conversions, makeshifts and cast-offs, totally inadequate to represent the Empire in serving the air routes of the world in the peace to come. Have we to rely upon other nations to do it for us? The British aircraft industry is equal to the task. The Government should decide this vital question at once.”Author: Gilles MessierProducer: Samuel AvilaEditor: Daven HiskeyHost: Simon WhistlerSponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
22 min - Real Life Space DJs and the Pillownaughts
In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we kick off a series on space related facts. Before we get started in that, however, we do some follow up answering the question of whether the Allies in WWII used prisoners of war as slave labor. We then jump into the topic of the real life job of Space DJ, then the saga of the Pillownaughts.
Sponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 8 min - Making Children Cry for Fun and Profit
If you’ve spent any time whatsoever on the internet you’re probably already quite familiar with how attached people are capable of getting to their favourite fictional characters. While this invariably manifests as arguments, because internet, it is by no means a new or novel phenomenon. For example, consider what happened when the powers that be decided to kill Optimus Prime in the 1986 feature, The Transformers: The Movie, and indeed at one point planned to kill literally all the main characters, all so that they could boost toy sales by introducing an entirely new set of characters children would now need to buy. A decision that resulted in untold masses of crying children in theaters, upset that Hasbro had killed their robotic dad. Not hyperbole. We’ll get into it.
Now your first instinct might be to scoff at the idea of people giving this huge of a crap en masse about a talking truck, but we’d like you to keep two things in mind, we’re talking about children and there’s no doubt a fictional character out there that you would be, at the very least, a little upset to see shot in the back by a car-sized laser gun. How that would manifest would invariably, well, vary, but the fact you’d have some kind of reaction is the point we’re trying to make.But, we’re just saying, if you didn’t tear up at Iron Man’s death, you are a soulless monster.Author: Karl SmallwoodEditor: Daven HiskeyHost: Simon WhistlerProducer: Samuel AvilaSponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
20 min - WTF is Up with the Bermuda Triangle?
For those who didn’t grow up in the late 20th century, it may seem strange to learn that for a time many people genuinely believed things like that humans randomly burst into flames for no apparent reason, with the occasional speculative news report or Unsolved Mysteries episode highlighting the latest instance, as well as that there was an area dubbed the Bermuda Triangle where almost certainly aliens were snapping up ships and planes for, we can only assume, maximal probage. This all brings us to the topic of today- how did the idea of the Bermuda Triangle first become ingrained in public consciousness, and was there ever actually any evidence of weird things happening there, or is it just yet another instance of the truism that humans will believe anything if a human in a suit says it on TV or it’s otherwise published in book form?
To begin with, let’s start with what exactly constitutes the Bermuda Triangle. While there is some disagreement among Bermuda Triangle truthers, the commonly accepted boundaries of the Triangle are the area formed if you drew direct lines on an oceanic map between the ports of Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico where allegedly a lot of weird stuff happens.What kind of weird stuff? Well, legend holds that ships and planes passing through the Triangle occasionally just up and disappear like your dad when he went out for milk that one time.Now, the skeptics among you may hear that and think, “Well, the ocean is pretty big and a generally dangerous place to exist, especially back before GPS and awesome satellite weather, so maybe a handful of the planes and ship traffic in that region just sank or something? I mean, it is a super high trafficked part of the ocean.”Now, this is a very reasonable explanation.But hear us out- what about if instead it was actually aliens?This level of reasoning is essentially how the idea of the Bermuda Triangle took hold.More specifically, the first to speculate towards this very reasonable and in all ways rational idea can be traced to an article written in 1964, titled, appropriately enough, The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.Authors: Karl Smallwood and Daven HiskeyProducer: Samuel AvilaHost: Daven HiskeySponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
30 min - The Forgotten Gun That Changed Everything
When the Great War broke out in August 1914, the soldiers of the belligerent nations marched into battle carrying broadly similar weapons: modern bolt-action, magazine-fed rifles firing full-powered cartridges. British Empire troops carried the 1903 Rifle No.1 Mk.III AKA the Short Magazine Lee Enfield or SMLE; the Germans the Gewehr 1898, the Austro-Hungarians the Mannlicher M95, the Russians the 1891 Mosin-Nagant, and so on. Yet when it came to infantry weapons, one nation stood out…and not in a good way: despite having one of the largest and most modern armies in the world, the French armed its soldiers with a long, heavy, and awkward-to-use rifle some three decades out of date. Ironically, when first introduced, this rifle was state-of-the-art, a groundbreaking piece of military technology that launched a revolution in firearms design. But like many technological pioneers, the French military fell victim to its own ingenuity, its innovative weapon being swiftly copied and vastly improved upon by rival nations until its original developers found themselves hopelessly left behind. This is the story of the Model 1886 Lebel, the forgotten rifle that changed warfare forever.
Since their introduction around the 13th Century C.E., for nearly a millennium firearms - whether in the form of cannons, mortars, or half-portable muskets and pistols - were exclusively powered by a single substance: black gunpowder. Developed around the 9th Century in China, black gunpowder is composed of just three ingredients: charcoal, sulphur, and sodium or potassium nitrate - the latter traditionally known as “saltpetre.” When heated, saltpetre decomposes to produce oxygen, which catalyzes the combustion of the charcoal and sulphur to produce deflagration, a rapid burning that produces a large volume of hot, high-pressure gas that, if adequately contained, can be used to propel a projectile down a gun barrel or to burst artillery shells, grenades, mines, and other explosive weapons.Yet despite being the only practical propellant and explosive known to humanity for over a thousand years, gunpowder suffered from a number of serious drawbacks. For one thing, for many centuries one of its key ingredients, saltpetre, was relatively rare and difficult to obtain. In nature, saltpetre mainly occurs in the form of Nitratine, a mineral deposit formed by the evaporation of ancient lakes and found in arid regions such as Egypt, South Africa, Peru, and Chile. Prized not only as an ingredient in gunpowder but also a potent agricultural fertilizer, Nitratine has long been a highly coveted strategic resource, with two large-scale military conflicts - the 1480-1510 Saltpetre War and the 1879-1884 War of the Pacific - even being fought over large Nitratine deposits in Central and South America.The only other economical source of saltpetre was from certain caves as well as barns and stables, where the compound naturally crystallized from the manure or urine of farm animals like cows and sheep and the droppings of birds and bats AKA guano.Author: Gilles MessierHost/Editor: Daven HiskeySponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfoodLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
42 min - Who Invented the Egg McMuffin?
Breakfast truly is the monarch of meals, that time of the day when one is allowed to gorge on a cornucopia of nonchalantly combined delicacies ranging across the sweet and savoury spectrums, all washed down with streams of the world’s favorite drug in caffeine, as well as the white liquid excretions of cow’s, and/or the juices from the mangled, crushed bodies of our fellow living entities on this earth of the fruiting variety.
Besides, one can happily plow through such a caloric smorgasbord with the reassuring knowledge that our bodies may need huge amounts of energy before tackling another day of heavy toil, depending on what exactly your exact profession is. For example, skipping breakfast is attributed to costing the Roman Republic a massive defeat at the Battle of the Trebia River in December of 218 BC.
On that occasion, brilliant Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca unleashed his elite Numidian cavalry against the Roman camp at daybreak, to provoke them into an early battle. Ancient historian Polybius clearly stated that ‘His object [was] to get at the enemy before they had had their breakfast, or made any preparations for the day.’ Dehydrated, calorie starved soldiers in the end performing worse than their better nutritioned counterparts.
Host: Simon Whistler
Author: Arnaldo Teodorani
Sponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfoodLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
29 min
About The BrainFood Show
From the publisher's feed
In this show, the team behind the wildly popular TodayIFoundOut YouTube channel do deep dives into a variety of fascinating topics to help you feed your brain with interesting knowledge.
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