Kellogg Brothers: a family feud and the creation of a cereal empire

Summary

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You're Dead to Me – "Kellogg Brothers: A Family Feud and the Creation of a Cereal Empire"

Date: August 22, 2025
Host: Greg Jenner
Guests: Dr. Vanessa Heggie (historian), Ed Byrne (comedian)

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Overview

This lively episode dives into the fascinating — and often bizarre — story of the Kellogg brothers: John Harvey and Will Keith. Their feud spawned the global cereal giant but was rooted in Victorian health fads, religious zeal, and deeply personal family conflicts. With signature wit, Greg Jenner, Dr. Vanessa Heggie, and comedian Ed Byrne dissect the brothers' upbringing, the wellness crazes powering their inventions, and the grudges that changed modern breakfast forever.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing the Kelloggs: Family and Upbringing

• The Brothers: John Harvey Kellogg (b. 1852), the elder, sociable, and regarded as gifted; Will Keith Kellogg (b. 1860), younger, less favored, considered less intelligent by the family.
• Family Life: Enormous blended family (16 children). Early deaths and illnesses were rampant, fostering Anne Kellogg’s interest in home medicine.
• Sibling Rivalry: John bullied Will, both verbally and physically.
  • "John physically and verbally bullied his younger brother, and he used his storytelling ability to get Will in trouble." [06:18, Heggie]

2. Early Hardships and Religious Influence

• Frequent Tragedy: Disease and death throughout childhood, skeptical attitudes towards local doctors.
• Seventh Day Adventism: The Kelloggs joined this faith, which emphasized vegetarianism, abstention from stimulating foods, and healthy, virtuous living.
  • Adventist dietary rules: "no stimulating food, so nothing spicy, nothing fried, nothing pickled, no alcohol, no drugs. But also no wigs, no corsets, no tight dresses." [11:35, Heggie]
• Religious Motivation: Health and diet perceived as moral choices; fear of “overstimulation” leading to sexual urges and sin.

3. Education and Early Careers

• John Harvey's Path: Backed by church elders Ellen and James White (Ellen regarded as a prophetess), John’s education combined alternative medicine (hydrotherapy, natural health) and formal medical training at Michigan and Bellevue.
• Will’s Path: Considered less bright, put to work early in the broom factory, excelled in business, became a skilled salesman and eventually an accountant.

4. The Battle Creek Sanatorium (“The San”)

• John as Medical Director: Ellen White anointed him, and he quickly rebranded the institute and made it a mecca for radical wellness, combining strict Adventist diet, hydrotherapy, and business savvy.
• Will as Right-Hand Man: Managed the books, worked long unpaid hours, still subject to John’s caprice. Their frayed relationship didn’t improve.
• Working Dynamics: John dictated his publications constantly—sometimes in the middle of the night or while cycling—forcing Will to transcribe everything.
  • "If John wanted to dictate a chapter at three in the morning or when he's on the toilet, that's Will's shift." [24:30, Heggie]

5. Medical Innovations and Questionable Cures

• Treatments at the San: Included vibrating chairs, light baths, yogurt enemas ("aim for four bowel movements a day"), rigid vegetarianism, and abstinence from sex and masturbation.
  • "John is actually advocating the use of corrosive acids and circumcision as treatments for people who can't give up masturbating while they're staying there." [27:06, Heggie]
• Eugenics: John Harvey became a fervent eugenicist, organizing conferences and supporting state sterilization laws, even as the San itself seemed racially progressive in other ways.

6. Family and Personal Lives

• Wives & Children: Will married, had five children (only two surviving), later remarried and lived conventionally. John married Ella Eaton; their marriage was never consummated due to his beliefs. Instead, they fostered 42 children.
• Ella Eaton Kellogg: Major contributor—created vegetarian recipes, published influential health books, and invented "Proto's," an early meat substitute.

7. Birth of Breakfast Cereal

• Invention of “Granola” and Cornflakes:
  • Experimental kitchens at the San yielded early cereals, influenced by prior products like “granular.”
  • Cornflakes Origin: Multiple, competing stories—John claimed a happy accident, Will described painstaking joint experimentation, Ella credited a dream.
    • "Will says it was the two of them deliberately working on it... and then they realized it worked really well." [38:11, Heggie]
• Early Cereal Market: Battle Creek became cereal central, with over 100 companies by 1900, fierce competition, and rapid innovation.

8. The Great Feud and Business Split

• Feud Intensifies:
  • John patents the flaking process solo, leaving Will out.
  • Will splits, launches his own business—Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company (1906), later the Kellogg Company.
  • Long legal tussles over use of the “Kellogg” name; Will ultimately wins exclusive rights by 1917.
    • "He sued him for control of the family name... Will wins the case out of an out of court settlement... And then finally... in 1917 will actually succeeds in fully winning back the entire brand name." [45:17, Heggie]

9. Marketing and Innovation

• Will’s Brilliance:
  • Pioneered mass marketing: first Times Square billboard, toys in boxes, targeted advertising in women’s magazines.
  • Early adopter of automation, “scientific management.”
  • Created enduring mascots (e.g., Snap, Crackle and Pop).
    • "[He] invented the concept of putting toys inside the package to lure kids in." [47:32, Heggie]

10. Endings & Legacy

• Rift Never Healed: John Harvey and Will never reconciled.
• Different Legacies:
  • John: Died 1943, left estate to the Race Betterment Foundation (eugenics).
  • Will: Died 1951, left fortune to children’s charities (W.K. Kellogg Foundation).
    • "He leaves his entire estate to the Race Betterment Foundation." [50:21, Heggie]
    • "Kellogg is still here today." [51:12, Heggie]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "John physically and verbally bullied his younger brother, and he used his storytelling ability to get Will in trouble by telling tales on him when he'd done something wrong." — Dr. Vanessa Heggie [06:18]
• "A diet of grains and vegetables. It's vegetarianism. It's no stimulating food, so nothing spicy, nothing fried, nothing pickled, no alcohol, no drugs. But also no wigs, no corsets, no tight dresses." — Dr. Vanessa Heggie [11:35]
• "I resent the amount of parenting I have to do versus the amount of parenting I myself have received." — Ed Byrne [07:43]
• "John is actually advocating the use of corrosive acids and circumcision as treatments for people who can't give up masturbating while they're staying there. So that's problematic." — Dr. Vanessa Heggie [27:06]
• "He invented the concept of putting toys inside the package to lure kids in." — Dr. Vanessa Heggie [47:32]
• "Will had set up the factory for making granos... they were churning out 113 thousand pounds." — Dr. Vanessa Heggie [40:04]
• "Kellogg's is still here today." — Dr. Vanessa Heggie [51:12]
• "I am off to go and squirt yoghurt up my bum and sue my brother for control of the family name." — Greg Jenner [59:32, closing joke]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:45: Greg introduces topic, guests
• 04:13: Pop culture—The Road to Wellville movie
• 06:59: Sibling rivalry, family dynamics
• 10:43: Early religion & Adventism
• 13:26: Adventist restrictions; humor on forming a cult
• 16:54: John’s alternative and formal medical training
• 22:10: Setting up Battle Creek Sanatorium
• 24:30: The wisdom stenographer: Will’s miserable dictation duties
• 26:09: The infamous San treatments quiz
• 27:06: Colonic irrigation, masturbation “cures”
• 35:03: Ella Eaton Kellogg and vegetarian “Proto’s”
• 38:09: The real science behind cornflake making
• 40:51: The Battle Creek cereal boom
• 45:07: The feud and lawsuit over the family name
• 47:32: Will’s advertising genius
• 50:02: Brothers never reconciled; their divergent legacies
• 51:53: Nuance Window: “Technosolutionism”
• 54:59: Quickfire quiz — Ed Byrne aces it!

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Nuance Window: "Technosolutionism" in the Kellogg Era

Dr. Vanessa Heggie (51:53)

• John Harvey Kellogg and institutions like the San reflect “technosolutionism”—faith in technology to solve not only health but social problems.
• Rise of novel diseases with rapid industrialization and urbanization created a market for new “healthy” industries and “solutions.”
• The paradox: These reformers pined for naturalness and tradition while aggressively embracing modern technology (e.g., processed foods, electric light baths).
• Kellogg didn’t want to return to a pastoral past; he wanted to use technology to engineer better humans for a new, industrial age.

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Tone & Style

True to You’re Dead to Me’s signature, the episode alternates irreverent humor with careful historical detail. Ed Byrne’s quipping (“You think, how altruistic of him. But then you think, oh, no, he's not the one actually raising them.” [35:05]) keeps the pace light without diminishing the gravity of topics like eugenics or commercial exploitation. Dr. Heggie provides necessary context, correcting myths and highlighting nuance, while Greg weaves everything together with banter and the quickfire quiz at the end.

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Conclusion

Ultimately, the Kellogg story is one of innovation borne from zealotry, abuse, and ambition. Their family feud fueled a breakfast revolution but is also a cautionary tale of ego, science gone awry, and the dark side of “healthy living.” Will Kellogg’s name—and his company’s—lives on, a staple of global culture, while John’s name lingers mostly through his more notorious convictions. Whether you like your cereal with history or your history with comedy, the episode offers surprising depth behind that bowl of flakes.

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Transcript

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.

[Greg Jenner]

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

[Greg Jenner]

Join me, Alex von Tanzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts. Hello, Greg here. Just a reminder before we get going that episodes of youf're Dead To Me are released on Fridays. Wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else. First on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to youo're Dead to me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are grabbing our spoons and tucking into a big old bowl of cereal as we saunter back to 19th century America to learn all about the Kellogg brothers. And to help us, we have two very special breakfast buddies in History Corner, she's Associate professor in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Birmingham's Department of Applied Health Science. He you may have read her excellent book Higher and On the History of Extreme Exploration. And you'll definitely remember her from our episodes on Victorian bodybuilding and the Northwest Passage. That's not one episode. It'll be weird if it was. It's Dr. Vanessa Hegge. Welcome back, Vanessa.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It's great to be back.

[Greg Jenner]

And in Comedy Corner, he's a comedian, actor and writer. You will know him from loads of television programmes including Mop the Week, qi, have It Got News for your and Live at the Apollo. Plus, he's a staple of BBC Radio 4 shows like the Unbelievable Truth, the News Quiz and the Infinite Monkey Cage. Maybe you've seen one of his amazing live tour shows, including the award winning Tragedy, Tragedy Plus Time. That's right. It's Ed Byrne. Welcome to the show, Ed.

[Ed Byrne]

Thank you very much indeed. I feel like I shouldn't even be here. When I had toast for breakfast.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It.

[Ed Byrne]

Feels like I really left the side down already.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, you. You said you had toast and then.

[Ed Byrne]

You added with Bon Maman chocolate hazelnuts bread on it. Yeah. So just for the really healthy kick.

[Greg Jenner]

There's nuts in there. That's good. Right, Ed, your first time on the show. We're delighted to have you in. First question I have to ask, contractually obligated. Are you a history fan? Love it. Admire it. Did he like it at school? Do you partake?

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah. I mean, history at school, it's interesting. Like, as an Irish person, I have massive gaps in what I'm expected to know living in England. Like, anything to do with the British monarchy that people here just take for granted as knowing I'm just absolutely out in the cold. And I have. And I have no notion of who came where. I mean, having numbers in the King's names helps.

[Greg Jenner]

That helps, yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

But I would have absolutely no idea beyond that. I know that Edward III would have come after Edward ii. And even as those words came out of my mouth, I'm not sure there was three Edwards there. So, you know, that's how. That's absolutely no knowledge whatsoever from an almost political decision to not know about the British royal family. Like, it was almost ingrained in you that it was something you weren't supposed to know about, that even having lived now in Britain since the age of 18, I am determined to keep it as a black spot in my knowledge. Always lets me down when I'm watching University Challenge or anytime at a pub quiz or anything like that.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, well, today we're talking about America, so you don't have to do any royal stuff. What do you know about. Well, I mean, breakfast cereal? Are you. Have you ever been a breakfast cereal guy?

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah, totally. Yeah. No, absolutely. And it's one of those ones where if I have even an ordinary breakfast cereal, like Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, I pat myself on the back for not having a cinnamon swirl. I do feel quite good about myself if I. If I. If I haven't had a fry up or basically cake. So. Yeah. And even if it's the sort of sugary end of the market, I feel quite pleased with myself.

[Greg Jenner]

Fair enough. So what do you know? This is the. So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I think, like Ed, most of you are familiar with the Kellogg's brand. If you eat cereal like Ed, you're going to recognise their various popular products and their mascots that go with them, including Snap, Crackle and Pop and the iconic Tony the Tiger. He's fine. He. He's fine. But I'm guessing the history of the Kellogg family specifically might be less familiar. Unless you are a serial, serial botherer or you've seen the 1994 movie the Road to Wellville starring Anthony Hopkins, which you have, Ed.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah, I have a vague connection with that film, only with Matthew Broderick in that. My second cousin, that is my mother's cousin's daughter, used to go out with Matthew Broderick.

[Greg Jenner]

See, basically in the film.

[Ed Byrne]

That's what I'm hearing. My other movie connection is that her brother Sean Fry was one of the K on the bikes in E.T. so, yeah, we have some Hollywood ass connections in my family.

[Greg Jenner]

All right, so how did a family feud lead to the creation of such an iconic company? What? Wellness fads were popular in the late 19th century, and what has yogurt got to do with it? Let's find out.

[Ed Byrne]

What's yogurt got to do with it? The Tina Turner classic that never was.

[Greg Jenner]

Dr. Vanessa. Let's start with the basics then. Who were the Kellogg family? And we talked about the Kellogg's bro brothers.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

So the two brothers we're talking about are John Harvey Kellogg, who was born on 26th February, 1852, and his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, born on 7th April, 1860. But they are part of a large family. Their dad, John Preston Kellogg, had five children with his first wife, Mary Ann, and then 11 with his second wife, Anne Stanley. So John and will are numbers 10 and 14 for John Preston out of his total of 16 kids.

[Ed Byrne]

This is back in the day when you used to shoot out.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

You had a lot. Yes, especially with two marriages.

[Ed Byrne]

You were gonna lose anyway somewhere in the shop.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Spoilers. That's coming up.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Okay. So when John was born in 1852, the family are still trying to make it as farmers in Michigan. But shortly after his birth, they sold the farm. They bought a broom factory, and then in 1856, they moved with their new business to Battle Creek, a small town, which is where Will's born. And while John Harvey is charming and sociable, Will is not those things. He is not as outgoing. His family definitely thought he wasn't as smart as his older brother. John and the brothers do not have a good relationship. John physically and verbally bullied his younger brother, and he used his storytelling ability to get Will in trouble by telling tales on him when he'd done something wrong.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean. I mean, I don't know what your family situation was. How would you have coped growing up one of 16 kids? That's. That's quite the dynamic, isn't it?

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah. I mean, I resented having to share a room with one other person. Yeah, that's. Yeah. But that is. That's just how they did it. And it doesn't. I don't want to say that life was cheap or anything like that, but you did used to just fire out quite a few, and then it becomes a thing of. Your children are expect the elder ones are expected to raise the younger ones.

[Greg Jenner]

Sure.

[Ed Byrne]

You know, yeah. I think as we've gone, you know, forward through the generations, the amount of parenting one does has definitely increased. I mean, I already resent the amount of parenting I have to do versus the amount of parenting I myself have received.

[Greg Jenner]

Gotcha.

[Ed Byrne]

I think when my kids were, say, five and four, I could have easily just left them in a field and I would already have done more parenting than my dad did his entire life, having had twice the number of children.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so 16 kids. That's extraordinary. You know, a lot of breakfast bowls around the dinner table. But tragedy struck and those breakfast bowls diminished.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, and tragedy struck many times. So as you'd probably guess by the fact that there were two wives. Mary Ann Kellogg, John Prescot, first wife, dies of tuberculosis in 1841. And amongst the siblings, the direct siblings of John and Will, four of the eleven of them die, three of them in infancy, and one of them is a sort of in their early teenage years. And even for those that survive, this is a childhood that's marked out by sickness. When their mum, Anne, isn't giving birth, she's usually nursing or caring for one of the kids or even for her husband. She's nursing them through illness and infection. It makes her very sick, skeptical about the skills of local doctors. And she's quite interested in developing her own medical and nursing skills, particularly when she manages to get the whole family through about what could have been fatal measles in 1850.

[Greg Jenner]

Her interest in medicine started because of the poor standard of care from the local doctor, you said, but also John Preston, the father of the family, he'd sustained an axe wound. Do you know what the local doctor recommended to cure that?

[Ed Byrne]

Walk it off, rub dirt on it.

[Greg Jenner]

Not far off, actually.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It's sew it up, cover it with a piece of shoe leather and then bandages, and then maybe wash it with carbolic soap every now and again. It takes two months for this to heal up. And this is a big deal when you're having to care and earn money for a family of this size.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

And the two brothers also had their periods of sickness as well.

[Ed Byrne]

Sorry, what else would one have done in those days? Like, what else could you do other than sew it up and Keep it clean. I mean, it didn't have.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It's the shoe leather that's the issue.

[Ed Byrne]

Right, okay. That would exacerbate the problem.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It would make it all sweaty. Yes, yes.

[Greg Jenner]

And also shoe leather is made from tanned leather, which is feces.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

And we don't. Yeah, we don't know how that was produced, whether it was hygienic. They had their own farm, they may have made their own. It's just, it's not a great product.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, this era is sort of not quite germ theory yet.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

We're a long way off germ theory at this point, which is the understanding that diseases, particularly infectious diseases, are caused by microscopical organisms, bacteria, viruses, maybe fungi, something like that.

[Ed Byrne]

Well, it's still humourous. And miasma at this point.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It's miasma. And which is making a comeback.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes. Thanks, TikTok.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It's not good when my stuff becomes really contemporary again. I don't.

[Greg Jenner]

John Harvey himself, as a boy he claimed he had TB that he said lost his use of a lung.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yes. Apparently he caught tuberculosis and it made basically one of his lungs, his left lung, completely non functional for the rest of his life. And it certainly wasn't the only one of his diseases. I think perhaps more important to his later life, he really suffered from digestive disorders. He developed colitis, he developed an anal fissure and he said that passing a stool was like having barbed wire pulled through his anus.

[Ed Byrne]

Surely William was able to bully him about that.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, surely Will was busily having malaria.

[Greg Jenner]

So it's very time consuming. Malaria. That's a. That's it.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah, that's a in the Top Trumps. I mean, one lung versus two lungs with malaria. Yeah, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So it's a pretty crappy situation for poor little John Harvey. He's. He's having difficulty going to the toilet. It's very painful. And so he turned to religion. It's not the sort of classic American Baptist or, you know, Lutheran.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It's.

[Greg Jenner]

It's something called the Seventh Day Adventist.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah. And religion was a huge part of the Kellogg family life. Obviously prayer is one of the interventions they're using to try and keep their kids healthy. And they converted to Adventism and that was the reason why they went to Battle Creek because they wanted to live with a community of like minded Congregationalists.

[Greg Jenner]

This is in Michigan.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

This is in Michigan, Yeah. So it's the same state.

[Ed Byrne]

It's Mormonism.

[Greg Jenner]

No, Mormonism is in Utah, isn't it?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah. This is different.

[Ed Byrne]

Okay.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

John Harvey's dad, John Preston, they All. There's a lot of familiar names here, so we're going to try and keep them apart. So John Preston was.

[Greg Jenner]

Mr. Kellogg.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Mr. Kellogg. Mr.— Kellogg Senior.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Was close to the spiritual leaders of the Adventists, and that's Ellen and James White. And Ellen is the person who's really important to shaping the faith because she's regarded as a prophetess. So she has visions that are basically the principles of Adventism. One of those is that the second coming is coming really soon. But the other is how to live a virtuous and healthy life, which is dietary advice, exercise advice, a diet of grains and vegetables. It's vegetarianism. It's no stimulating food, so nothing spicy, nothing fried, nothing pickled, no alcohol, no drugs. But also no wigs, no corsets, no tight dresses.

[Ed Byrne]

Well, you're not supposed to eat those anyway. I never eat.

[Greg Jenner]

You've never eaten a corset, you haven't lived? Delicious.

[Ed Byrne]

Find them very binding.

[Greg Jenner]

Hello. All right, so John Harvey, as a sort of young boy growing into adolescence, you know, he believed that these, these indulgences, he believed they would lead to. What particular indulgence, Ed?

[Ed Byrne]

Oh, now, it's. It's self pleasure. No, it is, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Very good.

[Ed Byrne]

I mean, eventually all roads lead there.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, it is it. The idea here is that if you treat your body like that, you will have cravings for sex and masturbation.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

You'll become overstimulated and seek out over stimulating things in the world, particularly sex.

[Ed Byrne]

See, to me it would be the other way around. Surely, if you can seek adventure and excitement, perhaps in your food or even in the way you dress, whatever it is that might divert your attention. Whereas if you got nothing, all you're eating is bland food that keeps you regular as clockwork. So you don't even have any excitement about when that happens, you know, Then what else are you gonna do to pass the time? They didn't have tv.

[Greg Jenner]

No, they didn't. They didn't. Ed, if you were starting a wellness cult now, and there's a lot of money in it, so maybe you should.

[Ed Byrne]

Oh, there is.

[Greg Jenner]

What would you ban people from consuming?

[Ed Byrne]

I don't know. It's gonna be one of those things where it feels like it's gonna be doing you good, but it just won't hurt you, I guess. Something I just don't particularly like.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Peas.

[Ed Byrne]

I ban peas. Peas that I'd just be surrounded by like minded people who would all come, who'd flock to me for the fact that they can be guaranteed no peas, no Sweet corn. So all those things that peas and sweet corn show up in uninvited, they know, hey, it's curry night. We're, we're following the religion of edism. So we don't have. We're not going to spend the first 10 minutes of curry night kicking the peas out of our beef chow mein. Sorry, chow me is always not a curry.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

But it's your religion. You can do what you like.

[Ed Byrne]

Wow, I've suddenly turned in this moment. I suddenly now see the appeal of starting your own cult.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, you've made a monster forming the.

[Ed Byrne]

World as you wish to live it.

[Greg Jenner]

Vanessa Mange too will be allowed.

[Ed Byrne]

They are seen as the thin end of the wedge. Anyone eating mange too will be monitored closely.

[Greg Jenner]

Vanessa how did Ellen White's spiritual beliefs and her visions influence little John Harvey Kellogg?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

His relationship with the Adventist church and the faith and does have its highs and lows over the rest of his life. He doesn't always stick entirely to her spiritual rules but he definitely absorbs a lot of these ideas about pure simple living. This is understandable because given if he's eating spicy and greasy food, this is actually going to be exacerbating his gastrointestinal issues. So it has a practical function for him. Ellen and James White clearly identified John Harvey as this promising young man and they acted as mentors and supporters for his career going forward. So at 12 they get him a job in their printing press. So he's helping with their religious publications will less influence and I think that might be because he was younger or he didn't get the same amount of tension and support from.

[Ed Byrne]

He's eight years younger, wasn't he?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

There's a significant gap between the two of them. I will say we have to be quite wary about the childhood stories from these times. John Harvey is not completely consistent in the tales that he tells about his childhood. So like his vegetarianism, there's two different stories about why that happened. One is he accidentally kills a robin and he's so distraught that he can't ever harm another animal. But the other one is that Ellen White said if you stop eating meat you'll grow taller. And he was anxious about his height and he says that's also one of the stories he tells.

[Ed Byrne]

It sounds more like the first one sounds a bit like the George Washington shopping ill. Well, these people didn't foresee the invention of the history podcast. They did. So they thought they could get away.

[Greg Jenner]

With very short sighted. What about formal education? We haven't really heard about like school.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

So the Kellogg senior were not that keen on sending their children to school. And that's partly because if you think the second coming is coming, there's not much point in sending your kids to school. But they did get persuaded to send both of them. John starts attending at the age of 10. He's immediately identified as this gifted child. He starts to pursue a career in education. But Ellen White had a very different plan for him. And in 1872 she persuades him to go and pays for him to go and study medicine at trials. Hygeotherapeutic college. This is a college that we would probably today say is teaching alternative medicine. So hydrotherapy and things like that. At this point in the 19th century, the legislation around medical qualifications is a lot looser and it's a lot easier to set up your own college and call yourself a doctor and not really any functional legislation that's going to do anything about that. It's in the process of change right into the 20th century. There would be quite a lot of doctors in America who would have had this sort of training rather than a more traditional form of medicine.

[Greg Jenner]

So hydrotherapy is like cold bath therapy, right? Cold showers, cold baths, cold baths.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Sometimes it's also drinking the water as well. It should be inside and outside.

[Ed Byrne]

And they wouldn't have been viewed at the time as alternative therapies as such. It would be all considered just different versions of the mainstream, I imagine.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Well, it would depend a little bit. But no, they sometimes set themselves up as deliberately against contemporary medicine or university medicine, partly because with pre germ theory, contemporary medicine can't do a lot of good for a lot of diseases. There aren't a lot of cures and therapies. So actually the alternative people were able to say, well, your wound got infected, so therefore your doctor was no good. Why don't you try water cues instead? So they had this opportunity to step in where there's this gap in therapy. So that's why it was quite so popular.

[Ed Byrne]

Right, okay.

[Greg Jenner]

So John Harvey attended Dr. Trall's Hygeia therapy group, but he then has formal training later as well.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, he does. So he, he was not very impressed with the education he got from Dr. Trall. He thought it was a bit of a waste of time and a bit of a. He calls it a bogus diploma and he doesn't ever sort of mention it when he talks about certificates later on. But he manages to persuade the Whites to continue funding his education. He actually goes and takes some courses in medicine at the University of Michigan. And then he manages to go to Bellevue Medical Hospital, all the way out in New York City. And that's where he's taken as many classes in medicine, but also medical science as he can possibly manage.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so he's classically trained as a doctor. Yes, and he's alternatively trained. He's technically seen both sides. His diet as a student. Ed, do you know what he was eating every day?

[Ed Byrne]

Scrambled eggs. Boiled eggs. Boiled eggs? No, for me it was fried eggs. And I'm thinking, well, he can't fry stuff. So boiled eggs. Boiled eggs would have been the. And at the weekend. Potatoes. Would he be allowed to mash it? Would that be considered too off the ball?

[Greg Jenner]

That, I mean, that sounds very sexy. Mashed potatoes. No, the diet he.

[Ed Byrne]

Anything soft enough to put your genitals in is off the table, listeners.

[Greg Jenner]

Please don't do that. No, he was eating every day two apples and seven crackers per meal.

[Ed Byrne]

Well, it just sounds like what you've.

[Greg Jenner]

Got left back of the cupboard.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah. What you found on a train. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So, Vanessa, while John was.

[Ed Byrne]

And for how long was he living on that?

[Greg Jenner]

Well, sort of two, three years, I guess. We studied.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

How did you survive for two or.

[Ed Byrne]

Three years on just apples and cranberries?

[Greg Jenner]

I guess he's probably eating other stuff.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah. Is he lying?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

I think that we know this because he later talks about oats that'll come up later. So we know he's having other stuff as well. Again, John stories.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So, Vanessa, while John Harvey Kellogg is off at med school, little Will is.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Doing what he's not treated as the brightest kid, but they do still send him to school. They still think it's a waste of time and probably even more for him because he does not do so well academically. Although I think to be fair, that might be because he's struggling having to go to school with Horse for having a job. So from the age of six, he's working in his parents broom factory.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh my word.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

And by 12, he's so good at it that he's become a factory floor supervisor for a team of other boys working on brooms.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah. But at the end of the day, Nepo, baby.

[Greg Jenner]

That's the problem with the broom industry. I've always said it.

[Ed Byrne]

It's sewn up. It is.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Well, he may have been better than his dad. Actually at 14, they've got him out on the road selling stuff. And that's really where Will Blooms. He is an excellent salesman, but he's also really good at the numbers and good at the maths and good at the business studies and the logistics. So he manages to get to go to Parsons Business College in Kalamazoo, also in Michigan. And he. This is in 1880, and he therefore qualifies as a bookkeeper and an accountant. So business studies, basically.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So he's sort of come good, actually. Yeah, he worked his way up from the factory floor. What were you doing at 12 professionally, Ed?

[Ed Byrne]

Were you professionally babysitting?

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, okay.

[Ed Byrne]

I was doing a lot of babysitting for the neighbors. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

At way below the minimum wage. And it was very junior babysitter position in that if the babies woke up, I was basically a baby monitor. That was essentially before baby monitors.

[Greg Jenner]

One of those little cameras that just says, your baby is awake.

[Ed Byrne]

I would just. I would just come and. Yeah, Kira's awake. That was. That was my. That was my first job.

[Greg Jenner]

All right, so Will did get to go to university, and he had the willpower to educate himself against his dad's wishes, which is always very nice. Let's get back to John. What did he do with his fresh out of the cereal box medical degree? Did he go and practice medicine?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

So after his studies, he goes back to Battle Creek, and this is what Ellen and James White had planned for him all along. They get him to run their western health reform institute because it's struggling. That's why they sent him to study medicine in the first place. He reorganizes it. He reinvents it. He focuses on what he considers a healthy diet as well as the hydrotherapy they were already doing in 1877. He renames it the Battle Creek Sanatorium. I'm saying sanatorium, not sanitarium. Yeah, because he wanted to distinguish it from the other institutes. But it quickly becomes nicknamed the San to save any effort, and it thrives. And by 1880, he needs a new manager, and so he turns and offers the job to his brother Will.

[Greg Jenner]

Reunited at last. He invented sanatorium as a word, didn't he?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

No.

[Greg Jenner]

No. Or did he not?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

No, he says he did.

[Greg Jenner]

He claimed to.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

There's some evidence that people were already using it before him, which, again, classic John, this guy. There was this sudden explosion of all of these companies, and they all have the same names, and then they all change names, like, six different times. And it's the sanatorium Company for flakes, the Flake Sanatorian Company, the Brand Flakes Company, the Battle Creek Flake Company, and so on. So it can be quite hard to untangle.

[Greg Jenner]

The origins of Python isn't it. Yes.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

And then they steal everybody's ideas. So who knows?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Okay, so John and Will are now working together at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, nicknamed the San. Will is in charge of the bookkeeping. He's the accountant. And John is in charge of the patients, I guess the health staff. He's the doctor. Do the brothers now get on? They're now both in their 20s or 30s, I guess.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

No, things are still really bad between the two brothers. Will had to work at the San for seven years doing 18 hour days, including working Christmas before he was allowed to take two weeks off for vacation. He's paid really badly, and that's partly because the San is associated still with the church. So a lot of people are working voluntarily or for low wages because it's church work.

[Ed Byrne]

Well, how well is John doing out of it at this point?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Well, John technically isn't paying himself out of the San. He is paying himself out the publications he's putting out. And Will is running his publication company. So that's the other side of the business that they're also.

[Greg Jenner]

He's a health author. He's kind of putting out pamphlets. And so I don't.

[Ed Byrne]

You can't know everything. Why is William doing this? William sounds like he's a very qualified business person. Why has he gone to work for no money with a brother that he hates who bullies him?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It's harder to know because it's harder to get access to Will's personal papers than it is John Kellogg, who wrote a lot of his stuff down. The guess would be that it's still family loyalty and also possibly post traumatic stress from being bullied, that this is what he's used to, this is the relationship he's used to.

[Greg Jenner]

It's sad, isn't it? But the other thing I do love about John, he has a rotating staff of men too. Well, you tell us.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, so this is. This is the publishing house. So the publishing house, the San, is putting out journals and newspapers and books and pamphlets. And nearly all of that is stuff from John Harvey himself. And the way he managed it was by having a team of men who would be with him at all times writing down everything that he said. And then that would go to Will to make into beautiful prose to go into the publication.

[Ed Byrne]

Do you guys not have one of those? No, I mean, we all have those. Oh, everybody in the comments.

[Greg Jenner]

That's how you're writing a new show every year, right?

[Ed Byrne]

I mean, mine aren't with me today because once it reaches over 28 degrees I give them the day off, they overheat. I see. Malfunction.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Is it your brother that you use for this?

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah, I used to.

[Greg Jenner]

Because this is.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

This is the thing between the color. Because it's that Will got the worst shifts. So if John.

[Ed Byrne]

Oh, he was part of.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Oh, yeah, he was part of the rotating committee. If John wanted to dictate a chapter at three in the morning or when he's on the toilet, that's Will's shit.

[Greg Jenner]

To go in and listen. So it's like a wisdom stenographer. You're just following a man around as he says. I think diets is very important.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

And sometimes he's on a bicycle as well, just to make it difficult.

[Ed Byrne]

I mean, I guess this is before, you know, you had the notes app on your iPhone.

[Greg Jenner]

Sure.

[Ed Byrne]

I mean, obviously there was, you know, women had jobs in these days. Would the idea of having a woman on staff be completely out of the question?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

No, there are plenty of women on staff. There are women working as nurses.

[Ed Byrne]

But on his staff of people to write down notes.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Not taking the notes.

[Greg Jenner]

No, because women can't write it, as we all know.

[Ed Byrne]

Fill their heads with ideas above their station. You won't be able to understand.

[Greg Jenner]

And there have been women doctors, I think, in the hygiea. Dr. Trolls. Right.

[Ed Byrne]

Yes.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

He'd been trained by a female doctor as well. This is the thing about the American system, because it's so open, actually, women were able to be doctors because you could qualify in a lot of different ways. In some ways it's a more equal system.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, it was more progressive than Britain, wasn't it, at the time. Let's talk about the treatments you could receive at the San Sanatorium.

[Ed Byrne]

Colonic irrigation. Come on.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, I mean, I've got a little mini quiz for you, Ed, actually, because we've got. We've got a few options here. One of these is not true. Okay. You could have been off.

[Ed Byrne]

Only one of these.

[Greg Jenner]

Only one of these is not true.

[Ed Byrne]

I've been on Unbelievable truth.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, exactly. Sorry, got to steal the format from somewhere. Being shaken on a vibrating chair, yogurt, enemas, circumcision, light wave baths, coffee, intravenous drips and sexual abstinence. Which of these was not offered as a treatment to patients at the San?

[Ed Byrne]

Coffee intravenous drips. Surely.

[Greg Jenner]

Very good.

[Ed Byrne]

That's a stimulant.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a stimulant. Yeah. Yeah, well done. But being shaken on a vibrating chair, Vanessa, and.

[Ed Byrne]

Well, I mean, they still do that. That was a big thing with 70s health firms was just being. Just standing there and being vibrated with a strap that wobbled your arse.

[Greg Jenner]

You know, that was a digestive thing. Right, to try and get the old bowels shifting.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It was. Yeah. It's a stimulation to try and move the bowels. Because the real focus of the SAN at this point is on digestive health.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

I mean, there's a lot going on. By 1900, this is an incredibly large institution. It has about 700 patients, it has a thousand staff. It has 400 acres of farmland. It has luxurious suites of patient wings. This is full modern plumbing, it's electric lighting, all of that sort of stuff. It also has a full hospital, operating theatre, scientific analysis laboratory. It has an orchestra, it has regular choir evenings for entertainment.

[Ed Byrne]

Gotta have an orchestra.

[Greg Jenner]

You gotta have an orchestra.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

There's all the bars, there's the light baths, there's massive dining rooms. There is a full experimental kitchen. And that's because the real focus here is. Is on the diet. So it's being run on the Seventh Day Adventist principles. So that is vegetarian diet, vigorous exercise, no drugs, no alcohol, no tobacco, no tight corsets, no sex. And that includes no solo sex, absolutely no masturbation. And John is actually advocating the use of corrosive acids and circumcision as treatments for people who can't give up masturbating while they're staying there. So that's problematic.

[Ed Byrne]

How are you monitoring that? That's the question.

[Greg Jenner]

Me, personally, I don't think I would, but, you know, I'd not mention it.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

But it's putting the fear into people so much that they will tell you they're doing it because they want to be cured of it. It or it's reported.

[Ed Byrne]

Children, if you convince them enough.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And people are coming. People are paying to come to this facility. Right.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It's quite an expensive place to come and stay.

[Greg Jenner]

And celebrities come, presidents come, like luxurious.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

And you're gonna pay all that money to come and stay? You don't want to stay and come.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Oh, I didn't mention the yogurt. So yoghurt, it's hydrotherapy, light bars. But it's mostly diet. And what John thinks is really important is that the food mustn't stagnate inside you. You mustn't have rotting food in your body. It has to pass through really quickly. So you eat this particular diet.

[Ed Byrne]

And yet spices weren't allowed.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

That would have acted as an accelerant.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So yogurt enemas.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yogurt enemas. If it doesn't come out fast enough, aim for four bowel movements a day. And if all else fails, vibration to vibration.

[Greg Jenner]

And chew your food 40 times. Is it Fletcherism, this thing?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yes. So that's named after the health guru Horace Fletcher. So you have to chew your food, each bite of food, at least 40 times, to sort of pre digest it before it gets into your stomach, shoot straight through.

[Greg Jenner]

And when you say light baths, he was fascinated by exposure to light, so he was bathing people in light, which at the time felt like a new science.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, it was. This is, this is partly why they had such good electricity, because he needed it to run all these gadgets and gizmos that they had as their therapeutics. But it's also kind of marketing because a lot of the sanatoria would have been in sunnier places and it was for curing tb. But obviously, where he's based, you don't necessarily have nice sun all year round. So one way of getting around that is effectively to have a sad lamp, to have indoor lighting as well.

[Greg Jenner]

Come to Michigan. It's dark and overcast, but we have.

[Ed Byrne]

A lab, but not indoors.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. Ed, would you have voluntarily gone to one of these health farms in the night?

[Ed Byrne]

I'm a nightmare just even thinking about it. And I'm not, you know, I'm not going to go into detail on the thing that really puts me off at the most. But yeah, a vegetarian diet? No.

[Greg Jenner]

No.

[Ed Byrne]

I mean, I've never been to any kind of herbertries of this nature. You know, I do find something where every. Where everything is dictated to is like. I don't even like it when you go to a hotel and you have. And it's a buffet. I kind of feel like that's. It just. It just feels a bit too communal. You know what I mean? I like a menu I can order from.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Well, you get a menu, you get a specifically tailored menu. John Harvey would design one for you that will tell you exactly what you.

[Ed Byrne]

Want, whether you have grains before you have your. Your yogurt or yogurt and then grains.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

And then you have to take them, your samples to make sure it's working for you.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, so you're doing the poo samples?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Oh, yeah, the whole. And gastric acid samples.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, wow.

[Ed Byrne]

I mean, people are still doing versions of this.

[Greg Jenner]

You can.

[Ed Byrne]

You can say.

[Greg Jenner]

This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

You know, he would look at these men. And he would, would say, don't worry, Sunny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

[Greg Jenner]

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Byrne]

End off your poo sample.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

To people who will then send you eight in inverted commas. Tailored diet.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so a fairly, fairly wacky. I mean some of this is kind of sensible science and exercise, diet, whatever. Good. And some of this is bonkers stuff. We have to obviously talk about John Harvey Kellogg's pretty nasty views, which are fairly typical of the era. But he was particularly keen on eugenics and he went further than some.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, he was a supporter of eugenics and this can seem confusing to some people because obviously he's also advocating all these lifestyle, diet, the sort of nurture side of nature and nurture changes. And also because the San itself could look like quite a racially progressive institution. There was no real racial segregation there. He had some very high profile clients, including the abolitionist Sojourner Truth. But he also had African American nurses and doctors working and training there. But he also believed in the supremacy of the white race. And he thought that we should be tactically breeding better men and women. And these are his words, like horses, cows and pigs. So he organizes and hosts a series of national conferences on race betterment at the San. The first of these is in 1913. And he's a strong advocate of what we call positive eugenics. But that's where you try and encourage some people to have more kids, but also supported negative eugenics, which is where you try and stop people from having children through sterilization if necessary. And it's probably relevant that Michigan did pass these eugenical laws about sterilization, compulsory sterilization in 1923, and he supported them. And, and because of the way that it's defined, it's looking for what they called mental defectives and degenerates. And it's tied into the criminal justice system and as a consequence of that, it's disproportionately forcibly sterilizing people from poor and particularly non white backgrounds in Michigan.

[Ed Byrne]

Are you going to come to me now for my hilarious take on that?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, Ed, if you could just follow that up with a hilarious banger, that'd be great. No, I mean, obviously it's, it's, you know, there's an awful lot of eugenicists in this time of history, some of them quite progressive in other ways.

[Ed Byrne]

And I Hate to say this, but again, something else that seems to be making a bit of a comeback. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Doesn't it just. Yes. Okay, so we've met the Kellogg brothers, We've met the Kellogg father and mother. But we need to meet the Kelwags, the Kellogg wives and girlfriends. Right. So Will got married, John got married.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah. So Will has a fairly conventional family life. It's much more modelled on his dad. He got married just before he got the job at the San, to Ella, who he refers to as Puss. And like his father's first marriage, they have five children together, although three of those die really, really young. And he and Puss are together for about 20 years before Puss dies in sort of her early 50s. He then gets married, actually to a woman, Dr. Carrie, for the rest of his life. John Harvey's family is not conventional. He does get married. This is with Ella Eaton Kellogg, and he's married to her for 41 years. But they never have children of their own. And this is apparently because John's belief that sex would enervate him, it would drain and SAP his energy, meant that they never consummated their marriage. Instead, they fostered 42 orphaned children.

[Ed Byrne]

It doesn't chime with his eugenics then, you know, and the idea of wanting the right people to have more kids.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

So this is the problem, like John's views on these sorts of things do change over time. And there is some suggestion that he fostered this many children and they were all poor orphans and that some of them were not from ethnic minorities as well. And. And the part of the idea was possibly to show that if they were nurtured properly and raised properly, they would all become great citizens. And because some of them did not have great outcomes that might have actually hardened some of his more, you know, eugenical.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, I see. Yeah. So he started with good intentions and then he was like, ah, look, yeah.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

There'S a proof of principle there for that many kids.

[Greg Jenner]

That's sad.

[Ed Byrne]

Well, that's him going, well, it can't be that I have failed.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, it's.

[Ed Byrne]

Their genetics has failed.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, yes.

[Ed Byrne]

And therefore. Yeah. So you could. Yes. Yeah, It's. He would have. It would have been. No serious. That would have been like a purely ego driven ideological path. He went down, say, it's not that. It's not that nurture can overcome nature. It's not that nurture can't overcome. It's just that it obviously can't because he wouldn't admit to his own. His own system failed. Yeah, his system was perfect. And if it didn't work, then therefore nature was king. That would.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, that's depressing, isn't it?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

I think we should highlight his wife.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, Ella. So Ella Eaton Kellogg, who is not.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Only raising these 40 orphaned children.

[Greg Jenner]

Busy woman, right? Yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

You think, how altruistic of him. But then you think, oh, no, he's not the one actually raising them.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

So Ella, his wife fostering all these children, also dealing with him. She's also the key filigur in the experimental kitchen. So she's writing books on recipe books and health advice books, particularly for mothers. And she's also inventing new foods just like they did. So I think the most important one for her is Proto's, which is probably one of the first branded vegetarian meat substitutes and was apparently really quite delicious and sold really, really well.

[Ed Byrne]

How delicious? If there was no spices allowed, it.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Was mostly made of peanuts.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, well, I'm allergic to peanuts, so I can't have that. So there we go. All right.

[Ed Byrne]

So she's got, for a second, you were going to say peas.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, there we go. The Ed Pern cult finds a new member. Okay, so we're talking about food innovators in several ways, which means we need to talk about the breakfast cereal market because so far we haven't really talked about breakfast. And that's why we're here. We're here for breakfast. How. Why did the brothers break into the cereal market again?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

So they have an experimental kitchen at the San, which is really useful for them. And John's story, and we have to again take it with a pinch of salt, is that when he's at medical.

[Greg Jenner]

School in New York, is a pinch of salt allowed? No, no, no, no.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

A sprinkling of.

[Greg Jenner]

A sprinkling of oats.

[Ed Byrne]

I don't think we're going to popularize that as a new phrase. He should be taken with a sprinkling of oats.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

So John's story that might be apocryphal about why he got into cereals was that when he was having this terrible diet as a student in New York, he wanted to find something that was quick and easy for breakfast. And there were in theory, pre prepared oats, but you still had to cook them for quite a long time and apparently this is too much. So he's looking for no cook breakfast. Basically. He is not the only one. There are a lot of doctors and entrepreneurs are all trying to think about this same sort of easy breakfast morning product that's also healthy and made of grains and Things like that. His key inspiration is probably granular. And granular is made by the Dr. Jacob Caleb Jackson, who also ran a health institute that was the inspiration for the whites to set up their health institute. And granular is this baked whole wheat flour, crispy bits that have to be soaked overnight to become edible. So they're not really quick cook. So John and Will are kind of experimenting with different sorts of flours and grains to try and make an easier version of this. And eventually they have this mix of, of wheat and oat and corn. They bake at high temperatures, they crumble it up, it still needs soaking for a couple of hours. So it's not immediate, but it's still.

[Ed Byrne]

Slightly better, still less hassle than chia seeds.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

And they market this under the name, the really brand new name of granola.

[Ed Byrne]

So that is genuinely a brand new name. Obviously your granular is already a boat. That was.

[Greg Jenner]

So they change one letter. Yeah, they complete the U, turn into an O. It's a brand new food. But we haven't got to confirm for how do we get cornflakes because I know there are multiple stories of how they come up with it.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Okay, so the key step for cornflake making here, I'm not going to do too much science, but there's a little bit which is tempering. So you, you soak this, whatever you're using and then you boil it and then you sort of put it into a sheet and it's that drying out as a sheet that means that the moisture in it is evened out and it becomes easy to bake and flake. So that's the essential thing.

[Greg Jenner]

Bake and flake.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

John's story, happy accident he's playing about at home, gets called away to the sand, forgets what he's working on, leaves it overnight and when he comes back and tries out, he sudd realizes, ah, a miracle has happened and now it flakes really easily. And that's the discovery of how you make cornflakes. Will says actually it was the two of them deliberately working on it in the experimental kitchen and that the mash was left for a lot longer and had become mouldy. But they didn't want to waste it, so they tried flaking it, baking and flaking it. And then they realized it worked really well. And then John wrote up a whole series of experiments for him to try and will put in 120 hour weeks in order to try and perfect this particular method. There is a third story and that's Ella's story and she Says it all came to John in a dream.

[Greg Jenner]

Ah. Like Paul McCartney with yesterday. But breakfast flakes. Okay, so three different stories.

[Ed Byrne]

I'm gonna go with the second one there. I'm gonna go with William's version of events.

[Greg Jenner]

You're gonna go with the brothers spending.

[Ed Byrne]

Hundreds of hours just doing it.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, that's how most foods are made, right?

[Ed Byrne]

You just, I mean, that's oftentimes how my dinner is made. Many, many hours spent trying to work on it.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so we've got three different takes. That's, that's interesting. Ed's deciding on the brothers working together, which I think feels plausible to me. So John feels like a serial liar because he's writing his brother out of the story, isn't he? Vanessa, do we have a sort of instant breakfast revolution in America?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Actually, yes. It is a massive boom time for serial entrepreneurs, basically. So John applies for a patent for the process for making these flaked corn pieces, which is granted to him him on the 14th of April, 1896, and only him. He doesn't put Will's name on the patent application, but it was good to get the patent because they'd actually already gone all in on producing this stuff. The previous year in 1895, Will had set up the factory for making granos, as they called it, and they were churning out 113 pounds.

[Ed Byrne]

That's what they were calling cornflakes.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

That's what they were calling cornflakes granos.

[Greg Jenner]

So £113,000. £113,000, which is what, in tons? I'm not a pounds guy. 60 tons.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Three elephants. I don't know.

[Greg Jenner]

Double decker buses times nine. Yeah, I'm one hundred and thirteen thousand pounds. Are you a pounds guy?

[Ed Byrne]

No, I only know things in terms of Olympic sized swimming pools. That's my unit of measurement.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

That's the milk, not the cereal. Right?

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah. And then when you get bigger, it's how many the size of whales? What's the proportion of whales or how many?

[Greg Jenner]

But okay, so they're making an absolute some metric ton of breakfast cereal. Okay. And there's literally a hundred other companies doing similar.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, they're not allowed. And Battle Creek becomes this hub for cereal production. By 1900, there's over a hundred companies there all trying to make cereals. Some of them are innovating, some of them are just copying each other, Some of them are literally stealing each other's ideas.

[Greg Jenner]

And they have quite good names.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah. So the ones actually in Battle Creek, some of them are familiar. Grape Nuts are going to come out of Battle Creek, but also the first really sugary cereals like Maple Flakes, which are made with maple syrup. But outside of Battle Creek, there's ones which have very forceful names like, well, Force, Vim and things like that.

[Greg Jenner]

Zest.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Zest, yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Would you. Would you eat Vim?

[Ed Byrne]

No. No. Didn't Vim become a. It was like a bleach, wasn't it?

[Greg Jenner]

Maybe. Maybe.

[Ed Byrne]

I feel. I feel like.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, we've looked into it. Vim is a scouring powder with added bleach. Lovely. But the most crucial thing we have to say, of course, is they were making these with wheat.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And then Will goes, hang on a second. Corn.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah. So Will really wants to go for nationwide advertising and getting this product out there. And John says, no, I'm not interest.

[Ed Byrne]

Was it just that wheat at the time was the dominant sort of crop?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Ah. So, no, Will wants them to switch. And when we say he wants them to switch to corn and we mean maize, just be emphatic. It's American corn, not British corn. So Will wants them to switch to corn because it's easier to handle and it's sweeter and it just tastes better than wheat. And John says no, because he thinks wheat is really healthy and that corn.

[Ed Byrne]

Is not healthy because corn tastes denied. And therefore you just. Yeah, yeah. My wife has a term for things that taste like they're good for you. It's like, tastes very worthy. That's her subtle way of saying, I don't like the taste of this, but I'm sure it's good for me.

[Greg Jenner]

Could we launch Worthy Flakes?

[Ed Byrne]

Worthy Flakes.

[Greg Jenner]

I'm getting a sense here that the brothers are still at loggerheads. You know, John is removing Will from all the patent law and all the kind of. He'd write about the stories, and then they're disagreeing on what they should make it out of.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Of.

[Greg Jenner]

Are they still able to work together?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

No. Will decides he has enough, and he leaves his job at the sand in 1901. Unfortunately, six months later, the sand burns down and he gets roped back into the rebuild, the massive rebuild that. That John has planned.

[Greg Jenner]

Poor Will. He was free.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

He was free. And then he was sucked right back in again.

[Greg Jenner]

Just one more job time, I think I'm out.

[Ed Byrne]

They pull me back in.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

He finally.

[Ed Byrne]

How do we know he wasn't the one who burnt it down? Oh, hello. Definitely got motive.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

There are many rumors, but it was probably the really complex electric plant. Just had a bit of a spark.

[Greg Jenner]

I was going to say it's probably the. It's probably the kind of the machines in there that's sort of too much vibrating and too many electrical lights, too many circumcision machines. I don't know. Okay, so it burned down. Will came back in, but then he goes on his own. He's like, I'm going to launch my own serial.

[Ed Byrne]

Are you sure they didn't just slack off on the no masturbation rule and everybody just that one.

[Greg Jenner]

Friction just.

[Ed Byrne]

Or is that how they put it out? Sorry, sorry, sorry.

[Greg Jenner]

Radio 4. Come on. We're in the Desert Island Disc studio. This is hallowed ground, Vanessa. You know. Will launches his own company, which will become known as the company that is now famous as the Kellogg's company. But that's not what he calls it to begin with.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

No. So in 1906, February, he launches the Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company. Really catchy name.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

I mean, I could see why he didn't stick with that.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

He changes the name of the. The food he's making to the sanitous Toasted Cornflake to Corn Crisp with a K. And then finally Kellogg Cornflakes. And then he changes the name in the company to match it in 1909 to Kellogg Toasted Cornflake Company, which becomes the Kellogg Company in 1922.

[Greg Jenner]

Quite a lot of rebrands. Yes.

[Ed Byrne]

You see, so he. He landed on eventually just his own name as the brand name was that that had his name become. Because of the sanatorium and stuff like that. Had his name become a famous name or did. Did the name become famous after the. The cereal became manufactured?

[Greg Jenner]

Great question. Right.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

So the Kellogg name was known as. Associated with health food products and with the San and with all the publications that John was putting out. But their food company was called the Sanitas Company, not the Kellogg Food Company. And this is the source of a lot of the conflict that they had. So it would have the Kellogg name on it, but that wasn't the brand name they were using.

[Greg Jenner]

And so, I mean, John being a super chill guy as he was, he reacted to his brother sort of launching a rival business in typical fashion. He was, you know, very, very relaxed about it. He sued him for using what is.

[Ed Byrne]

Also his own name. Right.

[Greg Jenner]

He sued him for control of the family name. What legal framework does he have there? Because Kellogg Wales called Kellogg, he's allowed.

[Ed Byrne]

To use his name.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah, A lot of it is to do with the use of the signature on the box and the branding names. And basically, basically the two brothers get kind of locked into this series of suit and countersuit against each other and what I think we can probably call some quite petty recriminations. So John starts copying Will's advertising style and then when John starts making bran cereal, Will brings out all bran and bran flakes in response. Will wins the case out of an out of court settlement in 1911. So he has the right to use the Kellogg brass. But John Harvey doesn't stop with this process and brings yet another suit against him. And then finally, it's not until 1917 when will actually succeeds in fully winning back the entire brand name. He can use Kellogg and his brother cannot use Kellogg in the branding anywhere at all. So he wins out in the end.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah. And so if John hadn't sued William, he probably still could have used his name.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

That was the agreement they reached sort of in 1911 and. But he continued to pursue terrorists about it.

[Greg Jenner]

And Will, how are you feeling about.

[Ed Byrne]

All that bullying now?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ed Byrne]

Stick that up, you're already damaged. Art.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, we have to say Will is obviously, you know, he's a food pioneer in some ways. He's also an advertising genius. He's one of the sort of early great pioneers of marketing to a mass media world, isn't he? You know, he's doing, you know, mascots and branding and decorative boxing.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Absolutely. And that might be why he's better in court than John, that he actually presents much better and is much better at persuading. But he does these huge scale advertising things. Like he put up what was at the time the world's biggest billboard in Times Square. In London. In London, in New York. Be good if it was impressive. If it was in London, the Times Square in New York in 1912. He invented the concept of putting toys inside the package to lure kids in. And he also, he had these amazing advertising schemes that he particularly targeted towards women who were doing most of the grocery shopping. He had these like glossy full page adverts in women's, women's magazine, like, like Ladies Home Journal and things like that. And his innovation wasn't just advertising, it was also, he was really good at inventing new technology for making cereals and developing cereals. But he also got really early on into things like time and motion studies and stuff we call scientific management. He just had a really good business brain basically.

[Ed Byrne]

So tell me, he got incredibly rich by the end of a day.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, yes, incredibly rich. He's sort of Henry Ford of food, isn't he? In some ways he's kind of, it's Almost kind of the industrial.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah. And they were friends with Henry Ford, so.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Okay. And he also came up with Snap, Crackle and Pop, his invention. So he's really pioneering in terms of how to sell a product as well as how to make it.

[Ed Byrne]

Well, that's been a Kellogg's sort of thing, hasn't it? Where of. Of whatever. Just side effect that they can't get rid of. They sell it as a. As a virtue. So they're like. They probably went, okay. I mean, this stuff tastes all right and it's good for you, but it makes a funny noise when you put milk in it. Why don't we sell that as a bonus? That's the Elvish characters coming to life in the cereal. Yeah, it was the same thing. You know, it was Cocoa Pops. They're so chocolatey, they turn the milk brown. You know, that was after months of going, how do we stop this cereal turning the milk brown?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

No, we say it's a good thing.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a feature, not a bug.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

I feel at this point I should probably do a sort of impartial BBC voice and check. Just say other breakfast cereals are available.

[Ed Byrne]

Because my producers, unfortunately, we have chosen to concentrate on one particular company. I don't think I'm showing them in a great light.

[Greg Jenner]

I am having a pop, actually, very quickly, Ed, we can show you, I think, just a little image, I think. Turn that over for us. Ed. This is a lovely advert from the Kellogg's company. Do you want to describe it for the listeners?

[Ed Byrne]

Well, it looks like. I feel like I'm looking at it through, like steamed up glasses. It's got a very sort of ethereal look to it. There seems to be a woman hugging. It looks like. I guess it's a plant. I guess it's a maize plant. Remember that thing, Trump, when he was hugging the American flag?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

It's a similar kind of pose to that. And it's. And it's headed the Sweetheart of the Corn. I guess she. Is she a personification of the cornflake production process?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Is she a mum?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

She's an ideal purchaser. See, she's buying this help for her family and apparently having an affair with a ear of maze with a corn.

[Greg Jenner]

I was gonna say it's the same height as her, so it's almost like they're dating and she's.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Well, it's got its arms around her as well. Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. Where does our story end then, for the Battling Brothers? Vanessa, you said that they're suing and counter suing. And eventually Will wins the right to have the Count catalog name and his brand. Do they ever reconcile? Do they ever get together at Christmas and go, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I love you, really?

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Unfortunately not. There isn't a happy ending here. John gradually gives up control of the sand through the 1920s. It's sold off to the US government in 1942, and he dies in Battle Creek in 1943 at the grand old age, it has to be said, of 91. So some of his lifestyle was very effective. He leaves his entire state to the Race Betterment Foundation.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, John, come on.

[Ed Byrne]

That bit's not a happy ending. I mean, for those of us who see John as the bad guy and William as the good guy, that you could argue that their lack of. Of. Of. What's the word I'm looking for, their lack of reconciliation is actually, you know, that is a good thing.

[Greg Jenner]

It's certainly helpful that one of them is like an, you know, just still team Eugenics all the way, and the other guy is giving money to charity and generally being quite a useful industrial.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Yeah. Because, I mean, Will spends lots of time at his massive horse farm in ranch in California, but he also dies at the same age, 91, in Battle Creek. He had set up a philanthropic organization about 20 years earlier, which is the W.K. kellogg foundation, and he leaves all of his estate to that. And it's a foundation that particularly looks at challenges facing children and childhood development and children's charities. And obviously Kellogg's is still here today.

[Ed Byrne]

I'd like to think that in, you know, as a counterpoint to the eugenics, that he ran his horse far in a way where he didn't breed. He just let them fall in love with each other. He didn't put any thought whatsoever into breeding better, stronger horses. He just let the horses just find their own partners.

[Greg Jenner]

Polyamorous horses just chilling out.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So there we go. So that's the end of the family story. And as you say, the corporation obviously is still going pretty strong. The nuance window. Time now for the nuance. Nuance window. This is the part of the show where Ed and I sit quietly for two minutes while Dr. Vanessa takes to the factory floor to tell us something we need to know about the Kellogg brothers. My stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Vanessa.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

So I want to introduce a concept to try and understand the Kellogg's and the San, which is technosolutionism, that is faith in technological innovations to solve all our problems, including our social problems. It might seem counterintuitive for John Harvey Kellogg and the Sam because they're part of this broader health reform movement. It tends to talk about nature rather than necessarily science. It's a response to anxieties about modern life. In industrialised capital, populist cities, there's been very rapid social change. People aren't living, eating, working the same way that they had even a generation ago. The move from rural to city living had disconnected people from their food ways. They don't know where the food's being grown, how it's being transported, if the packet is truthful about what's inside it. And although we're having fewer deaths, perhaps from things like cholera and plague and smallpox, we're now having new, mysterious modern diseases, particularly amongst the middle classes, particularly amongst those who work in offices. Headaches, digestive disorders, fatigue, stress, anxiety. And modern medicine doesn't have, at this point, a lot to offer to those people. And that's where the doctors, health reformers and entrepreneurs step in. Not to reform society, but to offer these lifestyle changes, these new diets, these new regimes, these new health resorts to deal with these problems. A lot of them use a rhetoric not only of naturalness but also the past. So looking nostalgically back to how we used to live a generation ago, but also even further, looking to anatomy, biology, evolution, to say how we should live and how we should live in a healthy way. The past will cure modernity, but that relationship is complicated when you bring the science in, because science and technology can make society too fast. It can process our food, but can also enable us to make a lovely, healthy, digestible cornflake. And we can have now sunbathes in the middle of winter. So people like John Harvey Kellogg don't want us to go back to that pre industrial life. They don't want us to live like the people he called primitive savages. Instead, he wants to use technology to solve these problems. Our stomachs can't handle modern life, so let's use technology to pre digest our food for us and then we can move through the modern world, perhaps more like a machine hybrid, a cyborg than a natural animal for this new, exciting modern world.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing. Two minutes on the dot. Look at that. Bang on. Thank you so much. Techno solutionism. So it's the opposite of the Paleo diet, right? It's, you know, he's, he's, he's not saying Stone Age. Stone age. He's going future, yeah, he's looking more.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

To the future, but it's still the same people who are Also saying, oh, but we're using the science of evolution to prove that our diets are therefore appropriate.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, fair enough. Interesting stuff, isn't it?

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah. I mean, I have to say, I'm someone who has. I'm more so into eating now, but as a kid, I just found eating food was just something I didn't. Something I had to do and I never wanted to do. I never had much of an appetite. So I've always dreamed and looked forward to this future where we were. Have pills for breakfast. Pill.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, yeah.

[Ed Byrne]

You know, and I'm still. I'm more annoyed by. By that than. Than rocket packs. We all thought we'd be flying around in jet packs.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, where's my hoverboard?

[Ed Byrne]

Exactly. No, none of that bothers me as much as the idea that we had just pop a pill and that would do us for the day.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, yeah. Oh, there we go. So, what do you know now? It's time now for the Siwadi Know Now. Now it's our quickfire quiz.

[Ed Byrne]

I have written. Do you know what I've written down? John Harvey Kellogg's William Keith. I didn't even write Kellogg's answer and Seventh Day Adventists. That's it. That's my notes. Well, there was so much coming at me. As soon as I write something down, I'll miss the next thing.

[Greg Jenner]

It's fun. Some comedians write reams and reams and reams and some just go, no, no, just, you know, commit it to memory.

[Ed Byrne]

We'll find out that I haven't committed anything to memory right now.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, Well, I got 10 questions for you.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

You.

[Greg Jenner]

Question one. What was the name of the.

[Ed Byrne]

I did not get into this job to have to work.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

It's hard.

[Ed Byrne]

Come on. Sorry.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. Question one. What was the name of the town where John and Will Kellogg lived and worked and set up the sanatorium?

[Ed Byrne]

Battle Creek.

[Greg Jenner]

It is in Michigan. Well done.

[Ed Byrne]

I remember that because it does sound like a level on. On Call of duty.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 2. How did a doctor attempt to cure the father's axe wound when they were kids?

[Ed Byrne]

Oh, no. Stitch it up and cover it with leather and just occasionally wash it with carbolic soap.

[Greg Jenner]

Very good. Well done. Question 3. Which Christian religious tradition did John belong to?

[Ed Byrne]

Seventh day Adventists.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 4. What nickname was given to the health institute run by John Harvey Kellogg and his brother? Oh, the sanatorium and the short. The nickname was the San Da San. Yep. Very good. Question 5. Can you name two cures that were offered by John at the San Yogurt Enemas. Yes.

[Ed Byrne]

And abstinence.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, abstinence.

[Ed Byrne]

Abstaining from. Particularly from self pleasure.

[Greg Jenner]

Exactly. As well.

[Ed Byrne]

I don't know why that one just keeps sticking in my head.

[Greg Jenner]

Plus the shaking machine, light baths, chewing your food 40 times and vegetarian diet. Question 6. How old was Will when he became a supervisor in his father's broom making factory?

[Ed Byrne]

He started working there when he was six. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And supervisor by.

[Ed Byrne]

Was he supervisor by 12?

[Greg Jenner]

He was. Well done, we remembered. And he was out on the road at 14 as the head of sales.

[Ed Byrne]

You could say he cleaned up. It's a broom factory. Huh. Huh. Cleaned up. Hello.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 7. What was the name of John's wife who helped to pioneer various meat substitutes? Do you remember? It was a sort of.

[Ed Byrne]

Yeah, I know. She was a doctor. Yeah. And it was. Oh, no, sorry, it was something eaten. Kellogg.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, very good, Ella. Eaten in Kellogg.

[Ed Byrne]

Okay, I'll let you have that.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 8. Ella claimed John invented cornflakes after having a dream. How did Will Keith Kellogg say that he invented it?

[Ed Byrne]

Oh, he said that they basically worked on it together for hundreds of hours.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, absolutely. In the same kitchen. You're doing very well, Ed. Question 9. Why did.

[Ed Byrne]

Are you quite pleased with me?

[Greg Jenner]

Honestly?

[Ed Byrne]

I could get the rest of them wrong now and I still feel like I've done All right.

[Greg Jenner]

8 out of 10 would be a very solid score. The 10 out of 10 is within reach. You can do it. I believe in it. Question 9. Why did John sue will in 1906.

[Ed Byrne]

For using the Kellogg name.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And his new serial business. And this are a perfect round. 10 out of 10 on the way.

[Ed Byrne]

Apart from Ella. I mean, I did forget Ella.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, come on. I gave you that.

[Ed Byrne]

It's fine.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 10. Name two of Will's innovations in the production and advertising of cereal.

[Ed Byrne]

The toy in a box.

[Greg Jenner]

Yep.

[Ed Byrne]

And glossy adverts in magazines.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, very good. Very, very good. You could have had mascots and automation and all sorts, but, yeah, 10 out of 10. Edburn, never in doubt. Absolutely rock it.

[Ed Byrne]

It started off like a. Like a nightmare that I was. Oh, my God, I'm being tested. Let me just check I have trousers on and then. No, no, Boy, boy came good.

[Greg Jenner]

Boy came good. Not. You're not naked at school. Not yet.

[Ed Byrne]

Well, thank you, Vanessa, for putting it all. Putting it all into easy bite size, appropriately enough. Information easily digestible.

[Greg Jenner]

Ah, there we go.

[Ed Byrne]

Lovely, lovely.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you so much, Ed. Thank you so much, Vanessa. If you want more from Vanessa, check out our episode on Victorian bodybuilding. And the one on the Northwest Passage. Both fascinating and for more American entrepreneurs, why not listen to our episode on P.T. barnum? He was an absolute monster. Or Madam C.J. walker. She wasn't a monster. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to youo're Dead to me on BBC Sounds to get the episodes 28 days earlier than on any other platform. And switch on your notifications so you never miss an episode. I just want to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the fantastic Dr. Vanessa Heggie from the University of Birmingham. Thank you, Vanessa.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

Thank you for having me back.

[Greg Jenner]

It was a pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, what a debut we had the exceptional Ed Byrne. Thank you, Ed.

[Ed Byrne]

I have to retire undefeated. I'd love to come back, but I can't guarantee I'll get 10 out of 10, so I'll have to just decline any future offers.

[Greg Jenner]

One and done. Perfect score. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we rummage through the pantry of history for another delicious box of facts. But for now, I'm off to go and squirt yoghurt up my bum and sue my brother for control of the family name.

[Ed Byrne]

Bye.

[Greg Jenner]

Your debt me into BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4. Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

[Ed Byrne]

I'm Robin Ince and we're back for a new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

We have our 201st extravaganza where we're.

[Ed Byrne]

Going to talk about how animals emote when around trains and tunnels or something like that. I'm not entirely sure.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

We're doing one on potatoes.

[Ed Byrne]

Of course we're doing one on potatoes. You love potatoes. I know, but, yeah, you love chips. You love chips.

[Greg Jenner]

I'll only enjoy it if it's got curry sauce on it.

[Ed Byrne]

We've also got techno fossils, moths versus.

[Greg Jenner]

Butterflies and A History of light.

[Ed Byrne]

That'll do, won't it?

[Greg Jenner]

Listen first on BBC Sounds. This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

[Dr. Vanessa Heggie]

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

[Greg Jenner]

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcast.