Was there really a Granny Smith? What did Bing have to do with cherries? Here's a look at nine fruits and vegetables that are named after people.]]> The other night my parents were having a discussion about the origins of the name of Fordhook lima beans—apparently their empty-nest existence is not quite as thrilling as I’d suspected—when my mom started researching and emailed me her findings. It raised the very pressing question of what other people have fruits and vegetables named after them. Here’s what I found:

1. Hass avocados

Rudolph Hass didn’t set out to get his name on 80% of the avocados grown in the world today; he just wanted to earn a little bit of extra cash. Hass was working as a mail carrier in California during the 1920s when he saw a magazine article touting a way to make money by growing avocados, which were a popular luxury product at the time. Inspired, he started a small orchard and began to plant seedlings.

One of his seedlings was particularly troublesome. Hass kept trying to graft other varieties onto it, but none of the grafts would take. Hass decided that this pesky tree was commercially worthless and wanted to chop it down. His children loved the tree’s fruits, though, and persuaded their dad to let it grow. When Hass realized that the avocados from his problem tree were actually delicious and that it yielded abundant fruit, he named the new variety after himself and patented it in 1935.

Any Hass avocado you buy in the store today traces its roots back to that single mother tree in Hass’ orchard. The tree itself isn’t around anymore, though; root fungus killed it off in 2002. Just how big is Hass’ discovery? Hass avocados are a billion-dollar-a-year industry in the U.S. alone.

2. Granny Smith apples

In 1868, Maria Ann Sherwood Smith found something odd in her apple orchard. Smith, who had immigrated to Australia from England, had a strange new type of apple growing near her creek bed. She thought that the apple might have been a mutation of a French crab apple that was popular Down Under, and she thought it was tasty enough to share it with neighbors. Although she died just two years later, “Granny” Smith’s name is still on the tip of everyone’s tongue when pie-baking season rolls around.

3. McIntosh apples

When John McIntosh discovered the apples that bear his name near Dundela, Ontario, in 1811, he knew he was on to something. The red apples were delicious, but he had a serious problem: he couldn’t grow any more of them. The apples came from a seedling that McIntosh discovered on his farm, but whenever he tried to use their seeds to grow new trees, he failed. It wasn’t until his son learned about grafting in 1835 that the McIntoshes were able to move their fruit into serious national production and distribution.

4. Bing cherries

Seth Lewelling first cultivated Bing cherries on his farm near Milwaukie, Oregon, during the 1860s. Why aren’t they called Lewelling cherries, then? Because Lewelling didn’t work his hundred-acre farm alone. Much of the farm’s success stemmed from the hard work of Lewelling’s foreman, a Chinese immigrant named Ah Bing. Bing worked for Lewelling for over 30 years before eventually returning to China, and Lewelling named his new cherry cultivar after his trusty right-hand man.

5. Fordhook lima beans

The bane of picky children everywhere didn’t come from a Mr. Fordhook. They’re actually the creation of Washington Atlee Burpee, the horticulturist who founded Burpee seeds. When he perfected this new type of worm-resistant bean, he named it after his family’s estate, Fordhook.

6. Loganberries

These raspberry-blackberry hybrids are the result of a happy accident by James Harvey Logan, a lawyer and judge who also dabbled in horticulture. At some point around 1880, Logan set out to cross two blackberry varieties in his garden in Santa Cruz, CA. Luckily for fruit lovers, he planted them too close to a raspberry plant, and the raspberry crossed with the blackberries to make a delicious new type of fruit.

7. Bartlett pears

These tasty fruits could just as easily be known as “Carter pears.” James Carter was the first person to import the variety into the United States—in 1799, he planted a few of the trees on a friend’s estate in Roxbury, MA. Years later, Enoch Bartlett bought the estate and thought he’d discovered a new type of pear on his new land. He spread the variety to the rest of the country, and it now bears his name.

Of course, in the rest of the world, Bartlett’s name is not so well known. By the time the pears made it to the States at the turn of the 19th century, they were well established in England as “Williams pears,” in honor of the horticulturist who helped popularize them.

8. King Edward potatoes

Englishman John Butler developed this roasting and baking potato around 1902. When it was finally time for him to introduce his new variety, King Edward VII was preparing for his coronation. Since Edward’s ascension to the throne and the spud’s debut coincided, the variety ended up being called the King Edward potato as a tribute to the new monarch.

9. Boysenberry

In 1923, horticulturist Rudolph Boysen created a new type of hybrid berry at his California farm, but he couldn’t make it a commercial success and eventually gave up on his experiments and abandoned the plants. A few years later, though, a fellow experimenter named Walter Knott heard of Boysen’s berries and tracked down the few remaining vines on Boysen’s old spread.

Knott took the dying vines back to his own farm and nursed them back to health. In 1932, he started selling the berries at his fruit stand, and customers couldn’t get enough. Knott told the public they were called boysenberries in honor of their creator. It was a nice gesture for Knott to politely give credit to the berry’s originator, and as luck would have it, his name wasn’t forgotten, either. The fruit stand kept growing bigger and bigger until it became what we now know as Knott’s Berry Farm.

More from mental_floss…

The Origins of 7 Department Store Chains
*
7 Tasty Facts About Halloween Treats
*
11 Things Wal-Mart Has Banned
*
15 Companies That Originally Sold Something Else
*
10 Secret Menu Items at Fast Food Restaurants
*
11 Offbeat College Essay Topics
*
How Much Do These Umpires Get Paid?
*
31 Unbelievable High School Mascots

You can’t set foot in a mall without seeing one of their names. Here are the stories of Richard W. Sears, James Cash Penney and some of the other people behind the anchor stores.]]> You can’t set foot in a mall without hearing one of their names, but the stories behind the men and women who founded department stores aren’t often part of our food court conversations. Here’s a look back at Richard W. Sears, James Cash Penney and some of the other people behind the anchor stores.

1. Sears & Roebuck

Richard W. Sears inadvertently got his start from a botched delivery. When Sears was in his early 20s, he worked as a railroad station agent in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, and he was on duty when a shipment of watches came in for the town’s jeweler. The jeweler hadn’t ordered the watches and refused to accept delivery, so Sears talked to the watch wholesaler and worked out an arrangement—Sears would buy the watches for $12 apiece and then sell them for whatever he could get.

Sears had such great luck peddling the watches to his coworkers and local farmers that he quickly gave up the railroad business and moved to Minneapolis to start the R.W. Sears Watch Company at the tender age of 22.

Alvah Roebuck entered the story after Sears established his watch company. Roebuck, a young watchmaker from Indiana, was searching for a job when he found an opening doing repairs for Sears’ upstart company. Roebuck went to work for Sears in 1887, and by 1893 their friendship had grown to the point where they incorporated a new business together: Sears, Roebuck, and Company.

So Roebuck got fabulously wealthy as a result of his first watchmaking job, then? Not quite. In 1895, Roebuck talked Sears into buying out his share of their company for just $20,000. Although Roebuck stayed with the company as an employee of its watch division, he never saw the big money Sears made. After Sears’ death, though, Roebuck had a great quip when people asked him if he regretted not having as much cash as his late partner: “He’s dead. Me, I never felt better.”

2. Macy’s

Rowland Hussey Macy played more of an active role in designing his company’s logo than most founders do. Before Macy, a Nantucket native, got into the dry goods business, he worked on a whaling ship that sailed off of the island. At some point during his whaling days, Macy got a red star tattooed on his hand, and the star later became his store’s logo when he opened his first New York shop in 1858.

The famous store was actually Macy’s fifth attempt at opening a shop after four failed tries near his Massachusetts home, and Macy’s shop only took in $11.06 on the day it opened its doors. However, by the end of his first year, Macy had pulled in over $90,000 and was firmly established as a popular New York shopping destination.

3. Nordstrom

John W. Nordstrom began his life in Sweden as Johan Nordstrom. In 1887, a 16-year-old Nordstrom arrived in the United States with five bucks and no command of the English language. He spent 10 years working as a logger and miner in the Northwest before deciding to head to Alaska to look for gold in the Klondike. After two years of searching, Nordstrom finally made a strike.

Nordstrom sold his claim for $13,000 and returned to Seattle to invest his newfound loot. One of Nordstrom’s buddies in Alaska had been Carl Wallin, who owned a shoe repair shop in Seattle, and in 1901 the two friends opened the shoe store Wallin & Nordstrom. Over the next two decades, the pair built up a devoted following in Seattle, and the firm gradually expanded into the largest independent chain of shoe stores in the country. In 1963, the company started selling apparel as well, and the modern Nordstrom’s took off.

4. Neiman Marcus

Herbert Marcus, Carrie Marcus Neiman, and A.L. Neiman might be the only people ever to lose money by founding a giant, successful department store. In 1907, Marcus, his sister, and his brother-in-law were business partners in a sales promotion business in Atlanta. Their firm was so successful that offers to buy it started rolling in, but there were only two deals the partners took seriously: an offer for $25,000 in cash, and a stake in an up-and-coming local soft-drink company.

The three partners conferred and decided they didn’t trust the “sugary soda pop business” and took the cash, which they then used to open their department store. The soda maker they snubbed, Coca-Cola, ended up doing pretty well for itself. Decades later, Herbert Marcus’ son Stanley became the CEO of Neiman-Marcus, and he often joked that the company was “founded on bad business judgment.”

5. Bloomingdale’s

If you ever find yourself desperately needing a hoop skirt, it might be worth checking your local Bloomingdale’s. After all, the wildly popular 19th-century garment gave the department store its start. In 1860, brothers Joseph and Lyman Bloomingdale began selling hoop skirts at their Ladies’ Notions Shop on New York’s Lower East Side, and when these skirts flew off the brothers’ racks, they eventually decided to expand their store’s offerings. In 1872, they opened a revamped store, the East Side Bazaar, that offered all sorts of European duds they bought through a purchasing office in Paris.

6. J.C. Penney

James Cash Penney got his start as regular clerk in a dry goods store. In 1898, he began working for a small Colorado chain called the Golden Rule. In 1902, his bosses offered him an ownership stake in the company if Penney would move to tiny Kemmerer, Wyoming, and start a Golden Rule store there. Penney jumped at the offer. His store was so successful that by 1907, he was able to buy out the other two stores in the Golden Rule chain. By 1912, Penney had over 30 stores in the region, and he incorporated them all under a new name—the J.C. Penney Company.

7. Barneys

Barney Pressman, founder of New York-based luxury chain Barneys, owed a lot of his success to his wife. When Pressman saw a small store in Manhattan going under in 1923, he wanted to buy it and open a clothing store of his own. There was a problem, though: he didn’t have the cash. When Pressman told his wife, Bertha, about this predicament, she slipped off her engagement ring and told him to pawn it. With the $500 Pressman got from hocking his wife’s diamond, he took over the failing store’s lease and bought 40 high-end suits, which were the original inventory when Barney’s Clothes opened its doors shortly thereafter.

More from mental_floss…

11 Things Wal-Mart Has Banned
*
15 Companies That Originally Sold Something Else
*
5 Things You Don’t Know About IKEA (But Should!)
*
13 Bizarre Stipulations in Wills
*
10 Secret Menu Items at Fast Food Restaurants
*
11 Offbeat College Essay Topics
*
How Much Do These Umpires Get Paid?
*
31 Unbelievable High School Mascots

If you’re going to be forking over your money to a casino, you might as well have a few good talking points. ]]> Planning a trip to Vegas in the near future? Never forget that in the long run, the house always wins. But knowing the history of some of your favorite casino games may help soften the blow the next time you’re losing your shirt. If you’re going to be forking over your money to a casino, you might as well have a few good talking points.

1. Roulette

Roulette, which takes its name from the French for “small wheel,” traces its roots back to 18th-century France, and there are a number of interesting tales about its supposed invention. One of the most frequently repeated legends is that mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal invented the game at some point during the 17th century, possibly while searching for a perpetual motion machine. While it’s a great story—as are similar narratives about French monks importing the game from China—it probably isn’t true.

In fact, no one’s quite sure who invented roulette. Encyclopedia Britannica notes that the first record of a similar game called “roulette” dates back to Bordeaux in 1716. The game, which is probably a synthesis of previously existing games called hoca and portique, took a while to evolve, but by the 1790s the familiar roulette wheel layout was in widespread use.

Roulette’s popularity in the United States and Europe exploded during the 19th century, but it wasn’t so widely practiced in its homeland. From 1836 to 1933 roulette, along with several other forms of gambling, was banned in France.

2. Craps

The next time you toss the dice, remember the traditional game called hazard. Hazard dates all the way back to the 13th century and probably has Arabic origins; the game made its way to Europe following the Crusades.

Craps is a simplified version of hazard that supposedly grew rapidly in popularity after Creole aristocrat Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville introduced it to slaves in Louisiana during the early 19th century. Players shot dice against each other throughout the 19th century, but the casino version we now play didn’t burst onto the scene until around 1910. That’s when John H. Winn, a bookie and dice maker, invented “bank craps,” which is what casinos now offer.

What are the origins of the odd name “craps,” though? In the parent game hazard, a roll of two or three is generally referred to as “crabs.” When the simplified game came to North America through French-speaking Creoles, they corrupted the word “crabs” into “craps.”

3. Keno

Think the senior citizens you usually see playing this bingo-like game are old? They don’t have anything on the game itself. Keno traces its roots back to Chinese villages over 2000 years ago. Chinese people played a lottery-like game called “baige piao,” which translates into “white pigeon ticket” and operated like modern keno games. As early as the 3rd century B.C. many Chinese towns had an officially sanctioned baige piao game.

When thousands of Chinese immigrants made their way to the United States during the 1840s, they brought the game with them. Although the immigrants first played the game among themselves, it soon caught on with the general population under the name “Chinese lottery,” which later gave way to “keno,” a slant on the French word quine for “group of five.”

Keno made its casino debut in Reno in 1933, but with an interesting twist. At the time, Nevada outlawed lotteries, so players’ cards couldn’t include numbers. Instead, players bet on the names of racehorses, which were then drawn. In 1951, Nevada law changed, and the familiar numbered cards came into fashion.

4. Blackjack

Blackjack is another game with murky origins. Some historians give the Spanish credit for inventing the game and note that one of the earliest written records of a similar card game comes from Don Quixote author Miguel de Cervantes around 1601. Others point to the 17th-century French card game vingt et un as the closest forerunner to modern blackjack. Either way, by the 19th century, gamblers in Europe and the U.S. had embraced the task of getting cards that added up to 21, and the game’s popularity soared.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the name “blackjack” is just as mysterious as the origins of the actual game. The word “blackjack” goes back to at least 1591, when it was used to refer to a tar-covered jug of beer. By 1889 it had become synonymous with the small club weapon, and only in 1910 did it start referring to the card game. Some sources claim that the name comes from a stipulation in some casinos that getting a blackjack with the ace of spades and a black jack triggered a special bonus payout.

5. Slot Machines

Something like the coin-spewing one-armed bandits that can suck down your quarters so quickly has been around since 1888. Earlier in that decade, similar mechanized gambling devices had started to pop up in American bars, but instead of paying out coins, they usually just earned patrons a free drink or two from the barkeep.

The slot machine didn’t really take off until around 1894, when San Francisco mechanic Charles Fey, a German immigrant, built a slot machine of his own. He talked a local saloon owner into putting the machine on his bar, and it made so much money that Fey soon quit his job to open a slot machine factory. In 1898 he introduced the Card Bell, the first three-reel slot machine with automated payouts like modern slots have.

Within 15 years, Fey had placed over 3000 slot machines around San Francisco, but in 1909 the city of San Francisco banned his wares as an amoral menace. At that point it didn’t matter, though, as Fey’s creations had caught on around the country; he simply shipped his machines out of state.

6. Poker

Records of games like poker exist as far back as 1526, when Europeans played a game called primero or primiera with three-card hands that were ranked like modern poker hands. The bluffing-and-betting variation we now play dates back to around 1700 in England, which later morphed into a French came called “poque.” When the French brought the game to Louisiana in the early 19th century, Americans corrupted the name in “poker,” and the game caught on.

Texas hold ‘em, the popular variation often played in competitive tournament formats, has cloudy origins, but the Texas State Legislature officially recognizes the small city of Robstown, Texas, as the birthplaces of Texas hold ‘em at some point during the early 20th century. Hold ‘em began to catch on in Las Vegas during the 1960s and really took off when the World Series of Poker gained popularity.

More from mental_floss…

Time Stands Still: The Psychology of Casinos
*
4 of History’s Greatest Hoaxes
*
The Quick 10: 10 Celebs Who Worked at Disney
*
Football Coaches Do the Darndest Things (Like Stage Their Own Deaths)
*
A Brief History of Gummy Bears
*
11 Things Wal-Mart Has Banned
*
Why Does Bottled Water Have An Expiration Date?
*
31 Unbelievable High School Mascots