1897: Dr. John Kellogg, believing that a strict diet (along with vigorous exercise, fresh air and plenty of rest) benefits the patients at his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, serves up the world's first cornflakes.
Kellogg was a Seventh-Day Adventist and a passionate adherent of the "healthy living" tenets of the church, which embraced a holistic approach to health in the days when there were no antibiotics and few effective drugs of any kind. He carried his beliefs with him into his professional life as a doctor and surgeon.
The cornflakes he served at his Battle Creek Sanitarium (the word "sanitarium" having been coined by Kellogg) were sugarless, that is to say nearly tasteless, and meant not to fill you up but to round out a healthy diet.
His brother, Will, was the one who recognized and exploited the commercial value of cornflakes. He added sugar to the flakes and sold the stuff as breakfast food, deeply offending the sensibilities of John, and causing a fallout between the brothers that became a legal battle when John sued to stop Will from marketing the cereal.
Needless to say, John lost. And Will marketed as few had ever done. His signature became the company logo, and he devoted millions to advertising. In 1911, he put up the world's largest electric sign in Times Square in New York City: 80 feet by 160 feet, with the letter K in Kellogg standing more than 60 feet high.
John Kellogg, meanwhile, was a prolific author of medical books and used the royalties to subsidize his sanitarium, which became a working laboratory for putting his strict theories on healthy living into practice. The sanitarium, which he billed as a "place where people learn to stay well," became famous -- for the services, not the cornflakes -- and attracted a mainly wealthy clientele, who tended to check in for several weeks at a time.
Kellogg was no slouch as a surgeon, either, introducing new techniques (primarily to abdominal surgery) and performing more than 22,000 operations in a career spanning nearly seven decades.
The sanitarium operated at its original site until 1942, a year before Kellogg's death at 91. The government acquired the main building and used it as a medical facility for veterans of World War II and the Korean War.
Photo: William Gottlieb/Corbis
This article first appeared on Wired.com March 7, 2008.