I was just at the grocery shop, buying some comfort food to be ready for a low-activity weekend, when I saw a box of gingerbread. It was not, however, the one I liked from the brand Prosper. After a quick search, I learned that the production stopped.
It’s been so long that I didn’t even realize it. Well, at least, it led me to explore the history of gingerbread out of curiosity, because now I want to make my own (will see how it turns out).
Who Created Gingerbread?
Before answering that question, let’s talk about what is gingerbread? Nowadays, the term “gingerbread” describes a wide range of baked foods that are frequently spiced with ginger and other ingredients like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Cookies, cakes, loaves, and even gingerbread buildings can be made from gingerbread. These delectable sweets are known and referred to as “gingerbread” all throughout the world. As a result of their regional or cultural associations, some types of gingerbread may also go by special names, such as ginger snaps, gingerbread men, or gingerbread cake. With that in mind, let’s go back to the beginning.
The use of ginger as flavoring dates back to ancient times, and gingerbread finds its earliest traces in Greek cuisine around 2400 BC. Chinese recipes for gingerbread emerged during the 10th century, while in Medieval Europe, ginger cookies became prominent features of Northern European Christmas tables. These cookies were precursors to the gingerbread we know today.
In Europe, the British are the ones who introduced ginger biscuits like “ginger snaps” and gingernuts. They were traditionally made by melting treacle, golden syrup, brown sugar, and butter before adding flour. They were not the only ones as we can also find German gingerbread biscuits, known as Pfeffernusse, and Scandinavian variations like pepparkaka and peppernott. These biscuits often featured various spices, including cinnamon, cloves, aniseed, nutmeg, and cardamom.
“Serve Man-Style Gingerbread” A Dromeday ad from 1941 featuring George Washington!
Why is it Called Gingerbread?
Despite the name “gingerbread,” the cake bears little resemblance to bread. Originally known as “gingerbras” in the 13th century, a name that was borrowed from Old French and meant “preserved ginger,” the term gradually shifted to “gingerbread” by the mid-14th century. Early recipes, like those found in the 15th-century cookery book “Good Cookery,” describe gingerbread made with breadcrumbs boiled in honey and flavored with ginger and other spices. Over time, treacle replaced honey as the sweetener, shaping gingerbread into its modern form.
Gingerbread gained popularity at Medieval fairs throughout Europe. Those were of the hard cookie type, often adorned with gold leaf and shaped like animals, kings, and queens, delighted visitors.
Speaking of royalty, the history of the gingerbread is famously connected to Queen Elizabeth I who played a role in popularizing these intricately decorated cookies, inspiring their use in mimicking visiting dignitaries at her court. The cookies became known as “fairings” and gingerbread festivals were referred to as “Gingerbread Fairs.” In England, the term “to take the gilt off of gingerbread” originated from the gold leaf decorations commonly used on gingerbread cookies–more bout this here.
Why is Gingerbread a Symbol of Christmas?
The tradition of gingerbread houses can be traced back to 16th-century Germany. These edible marvels, with their cookie walls and decorative foil and gold leaf, became intricately associated with Christmas festivities. The story of Hansel and Gretel, popularized by the Brothers Grimm, further entrenched gingerbread houses in the Christmas tradition. It remains unclear whether the fairy tale inspired the creation of gingerbread houses or vice versa.
Betty Crocker’s Gingerbread
Gingerbread in America
English colonists brought gingerbread to the shores of the New World. These cookies played intriguing roles, with reports of using gingerbread to sway Virginia voters during elections.
Amelia Simmons’ “American Cookery,” the first American cookbook published in 1796, featured three gingerbread recipes, including a soft variety baked in loaves—reflect the early American approach to gingerbread, highlighting the use of molasses or treacle as a sweetener and the inclusion of spices like ginger and cinnamon, which give the gingerbread its distinctive flavor. Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother, even served her special gingerbread recipe, known as Gingerbread Lafayette, to the Marquis de Lafayette during his visit to their Virginia home.
I recently rewatched the documentary Obit. (2016) about the people at the New York Times who wrote the obituaries. I find it entertaining and inspirational at some levels.
During an explanation about how the length of the article is decided, someone says that the inventor of the Slinky and Borbatchev wouldn’t get the same word count as one had a bigger impact on the world, but that doesn’t mean that both can’t be interesting subjects for articles. I didn’t know who invented the Slinky, so now I need to know!
There’s a new old CSI show on CBS with the famous Gil Grisson played by William Petersen. It’s watchable television, but I’m just here for the Grissom bits like when he was overjoyed to take a trip to the Body Farm. Of course, it led me to ask myself:
Who Created the Body Farm?
First, for those who don’t watch too many police procedural dramas, a Body Farm is a research facility where human decomposition is studied in various settings, as a way of objectifying the timing and circumstances of death from human remains (source).
Did you know the phrase “Beam me up, Scotty” was never said in a Star Trek Episode? The first time it was used was in the audio adaptation of the novel, “Star Trek: The Ashes of Eden” by William “Captain Kirk” Shatner. Nevertheless, when you say it, everybody knows you’re talking about being teleported.
Teleportation is a popular science-fiction concept. Star Trek used it, but it was not invented for the most famous sci-fi TV show of all time. In the real world, as I write this article, teleportation is still a dream, per se. There are innovations, not the kind we think of in the domain of quantum teleportation, but I simply don’t understand them. Oh, but I forgot…
It’s been awhile since I talk about food—since I looked into the history of Peanut Butter. But I was looking into some recipes recently and this led me on a road that ended with Buffalo wings. It picked my curiosity:
Who Created Buffalo Wings?
Weirdly enough, it’s not clear. There are contradictory testimony, confusion about dates, and bars… But it definitely came from Buffalo, New York. We are going to start with the most popular story.
“It was Friday night in the bar and since people were buying a lot of drinks he wanted to do something nice for them at midnight when the mostly Catholic patrons would be able to eat meat again.” — Dominic Bellissimo, New Yorker Magazine, 1980.
Parmesan Cheese is my favorite cheese. I buy it in quantity from Italy because I eat a lot of it, and it’s weirdly cheaper for me than buying a small package at the supermarket here in France. Recently, as I was searching for recipes to find a way to add more Parmesan cheese to my diet, I went looking into its history.
Who Created Parmesan Cheese?
Parmigiano Reggiano (the original name of Parmesan cheese) first appeared in the area surrounding the Italian cities of Parma and Reggio Emilia, during the Middle Ages. To preserve the excess milk they were producing at the time, Benedictine monks who lived in this region invented the cheese.
It seems that more people ask “who invented electricity?” than “who discovered electricity?” There’s a difference between inventing and discovering, but there’s also a difference between discovering the existence of electricity and the invention of technic to produce it.
What is electricity?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines electricity this way:
a fundamental form of energy observable in positive and negative forms that occurs naturally (as in lightning) or is produced (as in a generator) and that is expressed in terms of the movement and interaction of electrons.
a science that deals with the phenomena and laws of electricity
Who discovered electricity?
The best way is to begin with the natural occurrence of electricity. In that domain, the Greeks seem to take the first place (not Benjamin Franklin, he’ll come way later in history). In fact, the word “electricity” comes from the Greek elektron which means “amber,” because they rubbed amber with fur and observed the attraction of feathers and other objects. That was the discovery of static electricity—this phenomenon was not perceived as connected to the electric current until the 19th century.
It was in about 600 BC. With time, researchers and archeologists discovered what they believe may have been ancient batteries meant to produce light at ancient Roman sites, but also in archeological digs leading to Persians artefacts.
Who invented electricity?
The famous Ben Franklin’s kite experiment—with a kite, a key, and a storm—occurred in 1752. It proved that lightning and electric sparks were connected. But it didn’t lead to the use of the word “electricity.’ That came even before. English physician William Gilbert used the Latin word ‘electricus’ in the year 1600 to describe the product of that first Greek experiment. And a few years later, another English scientist, Thomas Browne, used the word ‘electricity’ in a paper in which he talked about his research based on William Gilbert’s work. That said, Franklin’s work inspired a lot of Europeans.
Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky (1816)
English scientists were really dedicated to exploring the possibilities of electricity. In the early 1700s, Francis Hauksbee invented the first electrostatic generator based on German scientist Otto von Guericke’s invention—it was a primitive form of the frictional electrical machine. But it’s another discussion, one about lamps.
Francis Hauksbee was a member of The Royal Society—formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge—as was William Nicholson who, with surgeon Anthony Carlisle, discovered electrolysis in May 1800, the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen by voltaic current. This led Italian physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta to the discovery of the voltaic pile, a battery. That’s why batteries are rated in volts.
Englishman Michael Faraday is also famous for the construction of a voltaic pile, one with seven British halfpenny coins stacked together with seven disks of sheet zinc, and six pieces of paper moistened with salt water—as it was learned in 1812. A few years later, in 1821, after the Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted discovered the phenomenon of electromagnetism, Faraday built devices to produce what he called ‘electromagnetic rotation’—one of these is known as the homopolar motor, and helped build the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology. These discoveries can’t all be credited to Faraday though. He based his work on the failed experiments of William Hyde Wollaston and Humphry Davy, fellow members of the Royal Society.
Michael Faraday English Scientist is a drawing by Mary Evans
But Faraday didn’t stop there. He explored the electromagnetic properties of materials, worked with light and magnets, and more. In 1831, he discovered electromagnetic induction—the production of an electromotive force across an electrical conductor in a changing magnetic field. What he established was then modeled mathematically by James Clerk Maxwell as Faraday’s law. This discovery leads Faraday to construct the electric dynamo, the ancestor of modern power generators and the electric motor. Finally, Faraday established that only a single ‘electricity’ exists—at that time, it was thought that there was more than one.
Faraday was not the only one influenced by Hans Christian Ørsted’s discovery. Another one was André-Marie Ampère, a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as ‘electrodynamics.’ For him, it really started when his friend François Arago showed the members of the French Academy of Sciences the discovery made by Ørsted. After that, Ampère began developing a mathematical and physical theory to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism. He showed that two parallel wires carrying electric currents attract or repel each other, depending on whether the currents flow in the same or opposite directions, respectively. This is what laid the foundation of electrodynamics and, of course, Ampère’s law, which states that the mutual action of two lengths of current-carrying wire is proportional to their lengths and the intensities of their currents. The base unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI) was subsequently named after him—the ‘ampere’ or ‘amp.’
In 1826, German physicist Georg Ohm defined the relationship between power, voltage, current, and resistance in what is now known as ‘Ohm’s Law.’ That’s why the ohm became the basic unit for resistance.
Really, the late 19th century saw the greatest progress in electrical engineering. As you may have noticed, I avoided talking about lights, and more precisely the light bulb, because it will be the subject of another article. For now, let’s go back to electricity.
James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish scientist who specialized in the field of mathematical physics. In 1865, he published ‘A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,’ a paper on electromagnetism in which he derived an electromagnetic wave equation with a velocity for light in close agreement with measurements made by experiment, and deduced that light is an electromagnetic wave. Basically, he demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves move at the speed of light. His work made him a founder of the modern field of electrical engineering.
It certainly influenced German physicist Heinrich Hertz who, in 1886, was the first to conclusively prove the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. Hertz’s proof of the existence of airborne electromagnetic waves led to an explosion of experimentation with this new form of electromagnetic radiation, which was called ‘Hertzian waves.’ That was until the 1910s when the term ‘radio waves’ became current.
Other discoveries were made after that. A lot. We will explore those subjects in subsequent articles.
The Commercial Electricity
Discoveries, theories, and experiments had to lead somewhere. We needed practical uses of electricity. Michael Faraday’s power generator set the stage for an electrical revolution—this is where the history of the light bulb became important. Having light bulbs was useless unless you had a practical source of energy to power them. Thomas Edison wanted to provide that. In order to make electricity practical and inexpensive. In 1882, he built the first electric power plant that was able to produce electricity, the Pearl Street generating station’s electrical power distribution system, which provided 110 volts of direct current (DC) to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.
Nikola Tesla
By working in Paris with the Continental Edison Company, Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla gained a lot of practical experience in electrical engineering. Soon, he started to design and build updated versions of generating dynamos and motors. In 1884, he moved to the United States with the help of his manager, Charles Batchelor. He ended up working on street lighting but quit after six months with the company. That didn’t stop his work and his new systems didn’t go unnoticed. Nevertheless, investors were not interested in his ideas for new types of alternating current (AC) motors and electrical transmission equipment.
Thomas Edison’s direct current had limitations that were overcome by the AC. In fact, in Europe, the AC power system was developed and adopted rapidly after 1886. In the US, Edison tried to discredit alternating currents as too dangerous in a public campaign called the ‘war of the currents.’ But progress can’t be stopped and, in 1888, alternating current systems gained further viability with the introduction of a functional AC motor—Nikola Tesla’s design for an induction motor was one of them. With Thomas Edison leaving the electric power business, direct current lost the war, and, by October 1890, Edison Machine Works began developing AC-based equipment. Mergers, patents, and other financial deals pushed AC power to the front. Well into the 20th century, some cities still used DC, but most adopted AC quickly.
A lot of people contributed to the ‘invention’ of electricity as we think of it today. Now, the difficulty is to produce more and more of it. That leads to new inventions!
