People have been writing words on paper for a lot longer than they’ve had convenient ways to firmly bind those pages together. As families wrap up their back-to-school shopping, let's take a look at the evolution of staples.]]> People have been writing words on paper for a lot longer than they’ve had convenient ways to firmly bind those pages together. As families wrap up their back-to-school shopping, let’s take a look at the evolution of staples.

Attached at the Clip

Before staplers came along, we had tried just about everything, from sewing and gluing to clamping and skewering. Around 1200 C.E., though, an industrious group of medieval academics became the first to adhere pages using ribbon and wax, and while that practice has long since fallen by the wayside, they were also the first to bind them at the upper-left corner, as we do today.

In the 18th century, French toolmakers constructed a handmade stapler fit for a king – King Louis the XV, to be exact. Legend has it that the ornate staples it used were forged from gold, encrusted with precious stones, and bore his Royal Court’s insignia.

Less fancy but more practical was the American “paper fastener” patented in 1866 by the Novelty Manufacturing Company, a precursor to the modern stapler. Of course, one key difference was that it held only one “staple” at a time. Trouble was, the machine would clinch the metal into the paper – achieved by pressing down hard on a large plunger – but it wouldn’t fasten it. That had to be done by hand—a laborious process, to be sure. It wasn’t until 1879 that a machine hit the market that both inserted and clinched a single preformed metal staple. It was called McGill’s Patent Single Stroke Staple Press, but since it required constant reloading, it didn’t exactly spur the stapling revolution.

The Fastening and the Furious

That revolution would come in 1895, when the E.H. Hotchkiss Company of Norwalk, Connecticut, began selling their so-called No. 1 Paper Fastener. It used a long strip of wired-together staples, and thanks to its speedy ease-of-use, became so popular that it became simply known as “the Hotchkiss.” (To this day, in fact, the word for stapler in Japanese is “hochikisu,” though the company has long been out of business.) But the design still wasn’t perfect: it required a heavy stroke on the machine’s plunger to separate the staples from their strip and drive them into your stack of paper. So much so, in fact, that Hotchkiss-users often kept small mallets at the ready. The golden age of stapling was yet to come.

There were lots of competing stapler technologies on the market from the mid-19th century to as late as the 1940s, for one simple reason: no one had gotten it quite right. When stationery wholesaler Jack Linksy founded the Parrot Speed Fastener Corporation in the 1930s, few could’ve imagined that his humble company – later known as Swingline – would change the world of paper-fastening forever. But that’s just what he did when he developed the 1937 Swingline Speed Stapler No. 3. According to Linsky’s son-in-law Alan Seff, to load a stapling machine before the Swingline came along, “you practically needed a screwdriver and a hammer to put the staples in. He and his engineers devised a patented unit where you just opened the top of the machine, and you’d plunk the staples in.”

Amazingly enough, the mechanics of the modern stapler have remained virtually unchanged since Linksy perfected it in 1937.

This article was excerpted from ‘In the Beginning: The Origins of Everything,’ which is available in the mental_floss store.

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Given how many horrendous karaoke performances we’ve been subjected to, we weren’t at all surprised to learn that the guy who invented the karaoke machine can’t sing, can’t read music, and plays the keyboards about as well as your average third-grader.]]>

Given how many horrendous karaoke performances we’ve been subjected to, we weren’t at all surprised to learn that the guy who invented the karaoke machine can’t sing, can’t read music, and plays the keyboards about as well as your average third-grader.

Songs in the Off-key of Life

We were, however, surprised to learn that poor Daisuke Inoue has made almost no money from his invention, and that he didn’t even give it a try himself until 1999, on his 59th birthday. Inoue’s happy-go-lucky ineptitude has been pretty much the driving force of his entire life. In high school he picked up the drums, which he chose as an instrument because, hey, all you had to do was hit them. Eventually, he took his limited talent and started playing with a Hawaiian band that frequented old dance halls from the days of the American World War II occupation. Inoue, shall we say, marched to the beat of a different drummer. Noticing this, the other band members quickly, and somewhat mercifully, realized that he’d be of better use on the business side, and he started acting as the band’s manager. But he still served as occasional drummer, particularly on amateur nights playing backup for rich Japanese businessmen.

Because Inoue couldn’t read musical notation, he had to rely on watching the singer’s lips in order to strike the right beat. One of his clients apparently found his drum technique flattering and asked Inoue to accompany him to a hot springs resort as his personal drummer. But Inoue couldn’t go. Time Asia tells what happened next: “[Inoue] obliged by providing him with a tape of his accompaniment. The boss delivered an emotional rendition of Frank Nagai’s ‘Leaving Haneda Airport on a 7:50 Flight,’ Inoue collected his money in absentia and karaoke (a term long used in the industry for house musicians – it literally means ‘empty orchestra’) was born.”

Inoue quickly realized he was on to something. With some help from his buddies, he built 11 prototype machines, kitted them out with amplifiers and background music, and then leased them to bars in Kobe. They were an immediate hit.

But Inoue made one crucial mistake: He didn’t patent his invention.

Big companies quickly realized they could make a mint on machines and tapes and made their own. Inoue only went so far as to patent two things: a type of plastic-covered songbook for wannabe Frank Sinatras, and a concoction he claimed could ward off rats and cockroaches in more downscale karaoke joints. But hey, give the poor guy credit: He certainly did things His Way.

This piece was excerpted from the mental_floss book In the Beginning: The Origins of Everything. You can pick up a copy in our store. Karaoke image credit: Gwen Bell’s excellent guide, ‘How to Rock a Karaoke Bar.’

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Where did SPAM (the mystery meat) come from? And when did it start lending its name to unsolicited bulk email? Let's take a page from mental_floss presents In the Beginning and find out. ]]>

SPAM (The Food Item)

First, let’s get the ingredients out of the way. SPAM is chopped pork shoulder meat with ham, salt, water, sugar, and sodium nitrite. Unless, that is, it’s SPAM Lite, in which case there’s also some chicken thrown in there. Or SPAM Oven Roasted Turkey, which includes (we assume) turkey and is suitable for Muslims.

SPAM was invented in the late-Depression era, in 1937, which may explain at least some of why it seemed like a good idea: people were desperate. According to Nikita Khrushchev’s book, Khrushchev Remembers, SPAM was a godsend for another hungry group — Russian soldiers in World War II. For a further illustration of how bad things were, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – who we really, really can’t imagine eating SPAM — reportedly once referred to it as a “wartime delicacy.”

And what does “SPAM” – sorry, we have to capitalize it that way, Hormel says so – actually stand for? Despite convincing evidence, it doesn’t stand for “something posing as meat.” The company’s official explanation is that it’s short for “spiced ham,” but that wasn’t always its party line. Hormel has also stated in the past that the name stands for “shoulder of pork and ham,” although we can sort of understand why it wouldn’t necessarily want to drive home the whole “shoulder” thing today. The name was suggested by Kenneth Daigneau, an actor who received the $100 prize in a contest Hormel had sponsored. Conveniently, he just happened to be the brother of a Hormel vice president. We think there’s just a little too much mystery in this mystery meat. Then again, SPAM has sold over 6 billion cans, and what have we done lately?

SPAM (The Email Genre)

If you’re sick of blaming dethroned Nigerian kings, triple-X porn sites and mail-order purveyors of Viagra for all the junk in your e-mail box, why not take issue with the real rascals behind the word.

In 1970, the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus came up with one of their most beloved and inadvertently prescient sketches, in which a customer in a restaurant desperately tries to order something that doesn’t contain SPAM, only to find that pretty much everything on the menu features it. In the course of his ill-fated dinner, a nearby party of Vikings – hey, we did say it was Monty Python – breaks into song: “SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, lovely SPAM! Wonderful SPAM!” Clearly, repetition is funny. Also, and more relevant for the relationship between SPAM and email, repetition is annoying.

Apparently, the first people to make the connection between repetitive SPAM and repetitive email were enormous geeks, by which we mean to say they were players in “multi-user dungeons,” or very early predecessors of games like World of Warcraft. Brad Templeton, who has done meticulous research on the topic, writes: “The term spamming got used to apply to a few different behaviors. One was to flood the computer with too much data to crash it. Another was to ‘spam the database’ by having a program create a huge number of objects, rather then creating them by hand. And the term was sometimes used to mean simply flooding a chat session with a bunch of text inserted by a program (commonly called a ‘bot’ today) or just by inserting a file instead of your own real time typing output. When the ability to input a whole file to the chat system was implemented, people would annoy others by dumping the words to the Monty Python SPAM Song. Another report describes indirectly a person simply typing ‘spam, spam…’ in a Multi User Domain with a keyboard macro until being thrown off around 1985.”

Early spam consisted of mass invitations to parties, broad anti-war messages (“THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE. PEACE IS THE WAY”), and appeals for college tuition funding. The classic “MAKE MONEY FAST” appeared as a USENET post in the ’80s, Templeton says, but as a one-off, not a constant barrage of email. Then, in 1994, USENET users were warned of a “Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon” in every single newsgroup. Until then spam had at least been somewhat avoidable. What a quaint era that was.

One Sketchy Breakfast: Items from the Monty Python Menu

• Egg and bacon
• Egg, sausage and bacon
• Egg and SPAM
• Egg, bacon and SPAM
• Egg, bacon, sausage and SPAM
• SPAM, bacon, sausage and SPAM
• SPAM, egg, SPAM, SPAM, bacon and SPAM
• SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, egg, and SPAM
• SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, baked beans, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM and SPAM
• Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce served in the Provençale manner with shallots and aubergines, garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and SPAM

This piece was excerpted from the mental_floss book In the Beginning: The Origins of Everything. You can pick up a copy in our store.

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This marks the first time we've lumped together priests, soldiers and Playboy bunnies in one article. The common element? They all dress for success.]]>

This marks the first time we’ve lumped together priests, soldiers and Playboy bunnies in one article. Common element: they all dress for success.

1. School Uniforms

If you were stuck in pleated plaid skirts or ugly neckties throughout your school days, you probably want to know which direction to launch your spitballs. In this case, the British seem to be the main culprits. Just like today, economics, safety, and prestige were the main justifications for the school uniform.

The first school uniforms appeared in England during the sixteenth century at charity schools. Apprentices and children in charity schools were often dressed in blue because it was the cheapest available dye for clothing. (The aristocracy tended to shun the color for the same reason.) Children at Christ’s Hospital School in Sussex were issued a long blue coat. Still worn by students today, the uniform includes an ankle-length coat, white neckband similar to the ones worn by eighteenth-century clergy, knee breeches, and yellow stockings. (You may want to rethink those complaints about your old dress code right about now.)

By the eighteenth century, uniforms became popular in British public schools for a different reason. Boys from wealthy families showed up to school in their rough-and-tumble clothes and proceeded to play unrestrained versions of rugby, football, and cricket. The games were often dangerous and chaotic, and some families chose to educate their sons at home to avoid the fracas. The institution of uniforms, along with stricter supervision, helped turn the British school system into one of the most prestigious in Europe. Unlike the students in the original Bluecoat uniforms, wealthy boys and girls had several fine versions of dress for different occasions, and the attire soon came to represent school pride.

2. Playboy Bunnies

No joke—the famous costumes, now popular in Halloween stores, were the first service uniform to be registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. (Trademark number 0762884, for those who want to do more research on the subject.)

When Playboy founder and editor-in-chief Hugh Hefner decided to open up Playboy Clubs in 1959, he intended to call the hostesses “Playmates,” like the women in his magazine, and dress them in skimpy lingerie. Ilse Taurins, then girlfriend of Playboy executive Victor Lownes, gets credit for the idea to dress the hostesses like the signature tuxedoed Playboy Bunny character instead. Taurins’s mother made the prototype, which resembled a strapless bathing suit complete with fluffy tail and ears, and Taurins modeled the outfit for Hefner. Hef especially loved the tail and instituted a “look but don’t touch” policy for his Bunnies. (The penalty for a member touching a Bunny tail was expulsion from the club.)

In 1962, Hefner hired French seamstress Renée Blot to “upgrade” the suit. She added a bowtie and cuffs, cinched the waist, and created a stiff D-cup bust, which the Bunnies stuffed with everything from socks to cottontails. The Playboy clubs closed in the United States in 1988, but the outfits live on.

3. Roman Catholic Priests

Religious uniforms have been around since antiquity to show that holy men are different from everyone else, but, ironically, one of the most recognizable religious uniforms sprang from priests just trying to be trendy. At the end of the sixteenth century, Romans started turning down their collars, and, not wanting to appear unfashionable, the clergy did the same. The clergy also adorned their collars with lace and fancy needlework, which made the cloth difficult to clean. To keep the beautiful collars fresh, a changeable sleeve of white linen protected them from soil.

Unfortunately for the fashion-conscious clergy, Pope Urban VIII saw the lacy collars as frivolous and banned the use of lace entirely, but he did allow the protective sleeve to remain. That sleeve soon became the ubiquitous symbol that a priest was available to perform the sacraments, including baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, marriage, confession, and the last rites.

4. Military Uniforms

Before the age of long-range weaponry, it was essential for standing armies to be able to identify their brethren—including different regiments—easily. (In other words: they didn’t want to shoot each other.) Early armies sported superficially similar military dress, but the troops of the Byzantine Empire are the first known army to identify different regiments by costume. In the tenth century CE, each member of the cavalry sported plumes and other items in distinctive colors.

Uniforms grew more lavish over time, with colorful uniforms the norm up until World War I. Amidst the often flamboyant outfits of other countries, the German and the British looked drab. German rifleman wore felgrau (field gray), probably as a symbol of their status as foresters and hunters who were recruited for service, while the British dressed in khaki, a convenience most likely left over from colonialism in Africa and India. Though the uniforms were not designed as camouflage, they soon proved an advantage to the Brits and Germans and other armies began incorporating gray and khaki in their apparel.

After discovering the benefit of blending with the scenery, the Germans took the concept further, to help break up the easily identifiable shape of the human outline. Before the start of World War II, Oberkommando Wehrmacht issued the “splinter pattern” as the first official form of camouflage. Soon every country had a distinctive camouflage uniform that fulfilled both the purposes of concealment and identification. As for those bright colors, they became relegated to ceremonial wear.

This piece was written by Liz Hunt and excerpted from the mental_floss book In the Beginning: The Origins of Everything. You can pick up a copy in our store.

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Let's take a look at the early days of some popular newspapers and magazines. We'll save the humble origins of mental_floss for another time. ]]>

Here’s a look at the early days of some popular newspapers and magazines. We’ll save the story of the humble dormitory origins of mental_floss for another time.

The New York Times

Founded in 1851, the Times made serious history just 20 years later: In 1871, its muckraking brought down the famous Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall. (The term “muckraking” hadn’t actually been coined at the time, however; it was an early-1900s phenomenon.) Bought by Adolph Ochs in 1896, it was soon given its famous slogan “All the News that’s Fit to Print,” which was more than just a boast: it was also a jab at its rivals’ infamous “yellow journalism.” The Times moved into new digs on 42nd Street in 1904, giving its name to the surrounding area, which is of course known today as Times Square.

The Washington Post

Like the Times, the Post—one of the city’s most venerable non-government institutions—produced high-end copy right from its founding in 1877. Unlike the Times, it needed some extra help to increase circulation. In 1889, in a bid to get people excited about reading the paper, the Post management commissioned a theme song. The resulting tune, named simply “The Washington Post,” is often heard by oblivious spectators at patriotic parades: It’s the work of John Philip Sousa.

Time and Newsweek

In 1923, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce—old buddies from the tony Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, as well as Yale—got together and decided to start a magazine. They thought at first that they’d call it Chance or Destiny, which is a little strange considering that they’re opposing concepts. But the magazine’s real destiny was to be named Time. Although the men were only 24, they were able to raise a boatload of cash from wealthy family friends. Still, the first issue was met with “a burst of total apathy on the part of the U.S. public,” as well as some pretty strong criticism from more established editors. Undeterred, the pals redesigned the magazine, adding a snazzy red border to the cover, then crossed their fingers and put out a second issue.

By 1929, the mag was firmly established, and Henry Luce was well on his way to becoming a legend. (Hadden died tragically that year at 31.) Like the Pepsi to Time’s Coke, Newsweek—or as it was then known, News-week—got its foothold just a few years later, during the Depression. Also like Pepsi, Newsweek was an immediate direct rival to Time; its founder had left the latter magazine with hopes of “run[ning] Henry Luce out of business.”

Scientific American

Rufus Porter invented a number of things in his lifetime—clocks, cameras, and an early washing machine—but none of his inventions had nearly as much success as Scientific American, which essentially started as a pamphlet advertising his latest creations. Later on, the magazine would feature articles from more accomplished inventors (Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison), but we think its greatest claim to fame is its prediction in 1849 of underground mass transportation. Readers howled at this for about 20 years, until workers started building a tunnel in lower Manhattan that would become, indeed, the New York subway system.

Cosmopolitan

It wasn’t always about sex. Actually, when Cosmo started up in 1886, it wasn’t about sex at all, nor was it targeted at women, nor was it lowbrow: In 1892, a single issue featured stories by Henry James, James Russell Lowell (the poet and founding editor of The Atlantic Monthly), and Theodore Roosevelt. Early stories, according to Charles Panati, covered “such disparate subjects as how ancient people lived, climbing Mount Vesuvius, the life of Mozart, plus European travel sketches and African wild animal adventures.”

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For today's reading from In the Beginning: A Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything, let's take a look at the stories behind salt, pepper, horseradish and other popular spices.]]>

For today’s reading from In the Beginning: A Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything, let’s take a look at the stories behind some of your favorite spices.

1. Pepper

If you eat enough pepper you’ll start to sweat, which explains why the ancients thought the stuff made an excellent medical treatment. The Chinese employed it as a treatment for malaria, cholera, and dysentery, while Indian monks used it as a sort of PowerBar: they swallowed small amounts of the stuff in hopes that it would help them survive their long treks through the rough countryside. Later, pepper became so valuable that it served as a de facto form of currency; it was used for centuries in Europe to pay rent and taxes. In one exceptional case, it was also used for ransom: Attila the Hun is said to have demanded about 3,000 pounds of the stuff in 408 C.E.; in exchange, he promised to lay off the city of Rome and stop sacking it.

2. Salt

It’s probably been the most valuable food additive in all of history, mostly because it did such a good job of preserving foods in the centuries before the refrigerator was invented. Salt mines in Chehr Abad, Iran, also testify to the stuff’s ability to preserve people. Four “salt men” have been discovered there, eerily mummified by what they were digging for; two of them may date as far back as 650 B.C.E. But the use of salt far predates the Iranian salt men. In China, writings that are something like 4,700 years old testify to its value; the Peng-Tzao-Kan-Mu, the earliest known treatise pharmacology, mentions more than 40 kinds of salt. And a tragic piece of Chinese folklore that has probably been around since the time of the Peng-Tzao-Kan-Mu tells a story of how the phoenix, that majestic mythical bird, first brought salt to the attention of a lowly peasant – who was accidentally put to death by a temperamental emperor before anyone realized the value of what he had found.

3. Cinnamon

Although it’s originally from the hard-to-reach island of Ceylon (a.k.a. Sri Lanka), cinnamon has been a global sensation for millennia. It first appears in Chinese writings that date to 2800 B.C.E. (they called it kwai). Cinnamon was also used by the Egyptians in embalming, perhaps, as with salt, for the same reason that it became a popular cooking spice – its warm aroma and antibacterial properties could hide the stench of food starting to go bad. The Romans had attachments to cinnamon, too, both medical and sentimental. Pliny the Elder records the stuff as being worth about fifteen times its weight in silver. And the Roman Emperor Nero, known for both his evil tendencies and his extravagance, sacrificed a year’s supply of the stuff as an apologia for murdering his wife – although we’re guessing Roman spice merchants failed to appreciate the gesture.

4. Nutmeg

Like cinnamon, this one’s been a popular spice since the days of, yep, Pliny the Elder, who writes about a curious plant that bears two spices: Nutmeg is the plant’s seed; mace is made from a fleshy covering around the seed. Nutmeg’s distinctive scent (think eggnog) has made it consistently popular throughout the ages; Emperor Henry VI reportedly had workers blanket the streets of Rome with the aroma in celebration of his crowning. The vast majority of the world’s nutmeg now comes from the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada – in fact, the local economy is based almost entirely on tourism and nutmeg exports, and the spice is the centerpiece of the country’s flag – but that’s not where the plant originated. In fact, nutmeg didn’t even exist in Grenada until British sailors brought it there in the early 1800s; it’s from the East Indies, not the West Indies. The British had good reason for introducing an invasive species, though: The combination of a blight, political upheaval, and Dutch merchants who burned nutmeg warehouses to keep the prices high had pretty much wiped out the world supply of nutmeg at that point.

5. Ginger

There’s plenty of debate over whether Marco Polo brought back pasta from his trip to China, but one thing is certain: he did bring back ginger. Hugely popular in the Roman Empire, ginger suffered roughly the same fate as said empire; by Polo’s days, it was barely known in the West. Polo and company reintroduced it as a rare luxury, and it stayed that way for centuries. In fact, Queen Elizabeth was a noted enthusiast, and some historians think she may have invented the gingerbread man.

6. Horseradish

Anything that tastes as strong as horseradish has got to have a history of use in medicine – and indeed, horseradish does; in the 3,500 years that humans have been eating it, they’ve used it to treat everything from rheumatism to tuberculosis, from lower back pain to low libido. Hippocrates wrote about it (along with the 400 other spicy medicines he recommended), and the oracle at Delphi was a big fan, too; he supposedly told Apollo that “the radish is worth its weight in lead, the beet its weight in silver, and the horseradish its weight in gold.” Horseradish had a bit of a renaissance during, well, the Renaissance; as a food fad, it spread all over Europe and Scandinavia, and by the late 1600s, it was a British staple, eaten alongside beef and oysters and made into pungent cordials. Which is all fine and good (we like the stuff too), but why is it called horseradish? The answer has very little to do with horses. The Germans call the stuff “meerrettich,” or “sea radish,” since that’s where it grows. English-speakers may have picked up the word and bastardized it to “mare-radish,” which then became not-necessarily-a-female-horse radish. We, however, prefer the more descriptive name that some American settlers used for it; they charmingly (and accurately) called it “stingnose.”

This piece was written by Ransom Riggs and excerpted from the mental_floss book In the Beginning: The Origins of Everything. You can pick up a copy in our store. Magnetic spice rack photo courtesy of Raindogs.

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To get the real story on fake breasts, let's open In The Beginning: A Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything and turn to the page on implants.]]>

To get the real story on fake breasts, let’s open In The Beginning: A Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything and turn to the page on implants.

Nowadays, having one’s breasts augmented seems nearly as commonplace as having one’s hair permed. One of the most frequently performed cosmetic procedures, more than 200,000 U.S. women had the surgery in 2000 alone. But it wasn’t always this way: once upon a time, breast augmentation was a highly questionable, semi-experimental procedure that frequently resulted in disfigurement and health-endangering complications. Of course, people subjected themselves to it anyway, jumping on the bandwagon whenever a new method came along.

The story begins in 1890, when Austrian doctor Robert Gersuny kicked things off by injecting paraffin into women’s chests. The results looked fine for awhile, but over time grew hard and lumpy. Worse yet, infection rates were alarmingly high, so by the 1920s the procedure had been totally abandoned. In its place, surgeons experimented with the transplantation of fatty tissue from the abdomen and buttocks to the breasts, but the fat was often reabsorbed by the body, leaving the subject with asymmetrical breasts and unsightly scars where the fat had been harvested.

Pains and Needles

While the painful failures scared women away from the surgical methods for some time, that did nothing to stop American worship of the well-endowed woman. Icons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner and Lana Turner helped solidify the gravity-defying, bombshell-shaped breast as the de rigueur “new look” in the 1940s and 1950s, and many women turned to “falsies” and bra-stuffing to keep up. It didn’t take long, however, for surgeons to get out their scalpels and needles again, and in the 1950s women began to have various types of synthetic and polyvinyl sponges implanted. This may have been the worst approach yet: the sponges began to shrink and harden a few months after surgery, and infections, inflammations and a cancer scare eventually doomed the s es to the graveyard of failed breast augmentation therapies.

Pros and Silicones

Increasingly desperate, surgeons in the late 1950s went for a collective Hail Mary. They implanted everything from ivory balls and wool to ox cartilage into their unwitting guinea pigs’ breasts – but none of it worked. During World War II, Japanese prostitutes reportedly injected themselves with silicone to better attract the patronage of American GIs, a technique that became so popular that silicone became a precious commodity. Topless dancers in the U.S. also got hip to silicone shots, but it wasn’t long before complications like discoloration and infection put a damper on the silicone fever.

Then, in 1961, everything changed. That’s when a little corporation called Dow Corning collaborated with two Houston cosmetic surgeons to create the first silicone breast prosthetic, made from a rubber sac filled with viscous silicone gel. The basic design remained unchanged for 30 years, though it was modified slightly for safety reasons in 1982. Ten years later, after nearly 100,000 women had the modified version implanted, the FDA announced that the polyurethane in the implants could break down into the body and form a carcinogen. As a result, many U.S. surgeons turned to the safer, but less natural feeling, saline implants (pictured) designed in France back in the 1960s.

This piece was written by Ransom Riggs and excerpted from the mental_floss book In the Beginning: The Origins of Everything. You can pick up a copy in our store.

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