I have no idea how aged I was when I first discovered about the famed Minnesota scientist and inventor Alex P. Anderson, AKA Puffed Wheat Anderson. My Dad knowledgeable me about him when I was consuming a bowl of cereal, you know, the 1 that is shot from guns. Or does not Quaker use that line any much more? They certain did when I was growing up. I’d listen to it a dozen times in a fifty percent hour when I utilized to pay interest to Sgt. Preston of the Mounties as a six-years-aged. I normally wondered if he was a relative. He was not, but I couldn’t envision how shooting rice or wheat out of a cannon could make them puff up.

I thought of that once much more as I was shopping in Byerly’s, a local grocery shop, and occurred to pass by the cereal area. I made the decision I needed to find out how it was carried out so when I got house, I immediately appeared up Anderson in Google. I was not prepared for the intriguing tale bordering his existence and accomplishments. Or the Quaker company’s marketing track record, for that matter.

It appears that Alex Anderson could have been well-recognized for an entirely various reason. According to a Minnesota Public Radio job interview with Robert Hedin, Anderson’s grandson, Grasp Alex of Goodhue County was the youngster who gave directions to the Jesse James gang about how to get to Northfield, MN. These of you who aren’t up on your individuals track record might not know that robbing the Northfield monetary institution was the biggest error ole Jesse actually produced. Two of his members had been killed by the local townspeople and problems got so scorching that the rest of the gang was fortunate to escape with their lives. (An even much more intriguing coincidence from a person standpoint, is that the gang camped out on the point in Cedar Lake close to Annandale. Our lake cabin was just a couple of of hundred yards down the shore from precisely where they cooked a meal and licked their wounds prior to heading back to Missouri.)

Hedin states that Anderson integrated an account of the fateful meeting in an essay about Silurian fossils. Alex was also interested in Phrenology and could tell you your character by sensation the bumps on your head. Even though he was a fine poet and memoirist, his greatest accomplishment was to invent a way to break down the starch in grains by subjecting them to extreme warmth and stress, greatly enlarged the kernels in so carrying out. To do this he devised a big wood gun. Albert Lasker, an early marketing genius employed by the Quaker company, defined the process. The lab should have been a hundred ft long. The so-recognized as gun was truly a drum that was tremendous-heated with the mouth covered. When it arrived at the correct temperature, employees eliminated the cover with a pulley. The grains exploded out and flew wildly around, expanding to eight times its original dimension in the process. Hedin places it much more colorfully. &ampquotIt produced the lab sound like a battlefield, scent like a bakery and look like a snowy winter early early morning.&ampquot

Happy with his development, Anderson made the decision to show it off. Puffed rice produced its premier look at the St. Louis World’s Honest in 1904. A small hit as a novelty, it also caught the eye of an unnamed government of the Quaker cereal company in the process.

In the late 19th and early twentieth Centuries, cereal was regarded as to be a well being meals and the Quaker company saw a virtual gold mine in Anderson’s process. They had been correct, but for the incorrect reason. Aftey they purchased the rights they invested a significant amount of cash marketing the product to the Japanese. Puffed rice was normal rice, they stated, but numerous times larger and it took much less to fill you up. A lot better nonetheless, it was scrumptious. The campaign turned out to be a total flop. Lasker proved that Us residents had been the correct target, so to talk, and beneath his tutelage ‘shot from guns’ became a household phrase. No 1 requirements to be reminded that the Quaker company survives to this working day promoting the exact same items.

Anderson died in 1943 after donating his house to the Red Wing School District. It turns out that he became a patron of the arts. Now it is a haven for writers and other artists. The Kiwanis maintain normal meetings there, generating the citizens sing for their supper by learning Shelley and William Blake. But that is not all. If you like modern art or improvisational jazz, you’ll find somebody with those skills at the Anderson Home. I wonder what Jesse James would have thought of it all.

John Anderson is a Minnesota author who has not invested any time at the Anderson Home. His novel, The Cellini Masterpiece, was produced beneath the penname of Raymond John and is a mystery- thriller set on the island of Malta. John invites you to study the first chapter of his manual at http://www.newsletterjournal.com. If you have any concerns or feedback, you might contact him there.