00:00:04
Speaker 1: Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. As we get older, we tend to think about the things that could have been, lives we could have led, choices we could have made, careers and loves and kids that never were. We like to think that we made the choices we did, because ironically we never really had any choice to begin with, and had things been slightly different, that dead end office job might have been a movie studio, or a startup or a career as a bestselling author. Of course, we'll never know what could have been, because well, we never got the chance to live it. But Charlie knew. He knew because he'd been obsessed with the possibilities. But sadly others did not share that obsession. Charlie was a professor from London, England. He taught mathematics at Cambridge for almost ten years, but it wasn't his passion. His mind was often elsewhere, either on writing his next best seller or working on his brand new invention, the computer. See. Charlie was something of a pioneer in the computing world. He believed that all the office work being done by hand at the time could be accomplished more efficiently using a machine. Often tasks such as navigation, calculations, and processing information were done by hand, there was a lot of room for error, and Charlie knew that there had to be a better way. He just had to invent it first. Others had started working on their own computers already, but they'd all been rudimentary machines. They could only store a small amount of information or do a handful of calculations before needing to be reprogrammed, so Charlie got to work on his own version. His computer would be the first digital device to calculate the values of polynomial functions automatically, as it used discreete digits to perform the tabulations rather than smooth quantities, but his skills were tailored more toward how the computer would work. He wasn't an engineer, nor did he have the capital to fund his own project on his own, so Charlie reached out for help. He went to the British government, who sell value in what the mathematician was proposing. They were also tired of doing all their paperwork by hand, so they granted him the funding he needed to get his start up off the ground. He then brought in an engineer named Joe to handle the design of the device, the Steve Wozniak to his Steve jobs, so to speak. Unfortunately, the two men didn't see eye to eye on how their prototype was progressing. Joe had high standards and wanted the computer to use specific tools that Charlie could not pay for. After arguing over the growing costs and Charlie's refusal to prepay Joe for his work, the two men had a falling out and the British government pulled their funding. The age of the computer was already over before it had even started, but Charlie wasn't discouraged. He got to work on a new design. This more modern computer would be programmed using punch cards, similar to the IBM mainframes of the fifties and sixties, and to display the output from the device, Charlie planned on developing a printer for it as well its internal memory could have been capable of storing up to a thousand numbers each up to forty decimal digits long. Unlike its predecessor, this updated model was designed to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division plus square roots and number comparisons. His first prototype could only do addition and subtraction calculations, though he created three types of punch cards to handle the different operations, as well as a programming language light years ahead of anything else on the market. Unfortunately, despite the advancements made between Charlie's first and second iterations of his computer, he couldn't get it built. He tinkered for the years and asked for help from people like his son Henry to assist with some of the engineering, but without funding, he couldn't get it off the ground. Charlie died without ever seeing the computer built to completion. If only he had lived another hundred years or so. Because Charlie didn't design his computers in his garage in the nineteen seventies, he didn't drop out of college to start a billion dollar corporation either. Charles Babbage designed his difference Engine and Analytical Engine before there was a Microsoft, before there was an Apple computer, and even before IBM was ever a company. He designed them in the mid eighteen hundreds. As the saying goes, one person's trash is another person's treasure. When Matt Barchuk was invited to see a ninth en seventy five Corvette someone was planning on selling him, he instead stumbled upon the greatest find of his car collecting career fifty seven corvette. It's red and white shell was coated in dust, and the engine was sitting on a stand several feet away in an old barn. The wheels had been tossed haphazardly on shelves and even inside the car. To anyone else, it was nothing but a hunk of junk, but not to Matt. He bought the vehicle and all its pieces, took them home, and got to work restoring this piece of automotive history to its former glory, because all it takes is one person to see the value in something everyone else sees as garbage. Back in the early nineteen sixties, though, that one person happened to be the sales rep for a food distribution company. The salesman worked for Alex Foods, which delivered supplies to one very special Mexican restaurant in Anaheim, California, called Casa de Fritos. If that word Fritos sounds familiar, it's because the restaurant was owned by none other than the Frito Lay Corporation. But that wasn't what made this particular of the restaurants special. Casa de Fritos was built in Frontier Land inside Disneyland. Alex Foods was responsible for providing the tortillas the restaurant served in its dishes. One day, while the rep was in the kitchen, he noticed that the staff was throwing away a hefty supply of tortillas that had gone stale. They were hard and couldn't be sold to customers, But rather than have the restaurant waste food, he suggested they do something with them. His advice was to cut them up, fry them, and season them. They would be similar to another Mexican dish called to topos, which were nothing more than flattened corn pancakes that were fried, toasted, or baked. This new preparation would help the restaurant increase its profits while saving money on lost food product. The kitchen staff took the reps advice and started saving their stale tortillas, slicing them up, frying them, and sprinkling them with a little seasoning. The pieces were then bagged up and sold to customers coming into the restaurant. Things were going well when one day the vice president of Friedo Lay, Archie West, Dry, to buy to check on Casa de Fritos. He was thrilled. The restaurant was bustling and people were buying up all the bags of its new fried tortilla chips. West bought a bag for himself to see what the hubbub was about. One bite and he instantly got it. They were delicious. He went back to Friedo Lay and told them what he'd found. The company believed that they had a hit on their hands and gave West the green light to help turn these homemade chips into a real product. He contacted Alex Foods, the company whose rep had kicked all of this off in the first place, and asked them if they would like to be the sole producers of this brand new Friedo Lay product. The company couldn't say yes fast enough, but one vice president and a bunch of Disneyland patrons wasn't enough of a focus group to test whether the chips had a chance on a natural level, so Friedo Lay quietly launched them in the southwestern United States to start. While the launch wasn't that quiet even in one corner of the country, the demand was too great. Alex Foods was quickly out of its depth, and FRIEDA Lay had to step into manufacture the chips itself. By May of nineteen sixty six, the bags of fried stale tortillas were now available in grocery store shelves all across the US. A few years later, a new taco flavored version of the chips was released and they performed well, but the best was yet to come. In nineteen seventy two, Friedo Lay produced Nacho cheese flavored chips and sales skyrocketed. Nacho Cheese is still available today, as is a cool ranch flavor that was released in nineteen eighty six. Most people who buy these chips today don't realize the history behind them. They don't know that back in the early nineteen sixties, a restaurant in Disneyland decided to curb food waste by frying pieces of stale tortillas and selling them to customers, accidentally giving birth to one of the most popular and successful snack foods of all time Derrito's. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided to were of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. As we get older, we tend to think about the things that could have been, lives we could have led, choices we could have made, careers and loves and kids that never were. We like to think that we made the choices we did, because ironically we never really had any choice to begin with, and had things been slightly different, that dead end office job might have been a movie studio, or a startup or a career as a bestselling author. Of course, we'll never know what could have been, because well, we never got the chance to live it. But Charlie knew. He knew because he'd been obsessed with the possibilities. But sadly others did not share that obsession. Charlie was a professor from London, England. He taught mathematics at Cambridge for almost ten years, but it wasn't his passion. His mind was often elsewhere, either on writing his next best seller or working on his brand new invention, the computer. See. Charlie was something of a pioneer in the computing world. He believed that all the office work being done by hand at the time could be accomplished more efficiently using a machine. Often tasks such as navigation, calculations, and processing information were done by hand, there was a lot of room for error, and Charlie knew that there had to be a better way. He just had to invent it first. Others had started working on their own computers already, but they'd all been rudimentary machines. They could only store a small amount of information or do a handful of calculations before needing to be reprogrammed, so Charlie got to work on his own version. His computer would be the first digital device to calculate the values of polynomial functions automatically, as it used discreete digits to perform the tabulations rather than smooth quantities, but his skills were tailored more toward how the computer would work. He wasn't an engineer, nor did he have the capital to fund his own project on his own, so Charlie reached out for help. He went to the British government, who sell value in what the mathematician was proposing. They were also tired of doing all their paperwork by hand, so they granted him the funding he needed to get his start up off the ground. He then brought in an engineer named Joe to handle the design of the device, the Steve Wozniak to his Steve jobs, so to speak. Unfortunately, the two men didn't see eye to eye on how their prototype was progressing. Joe had high standards and wanted the computer to use specific tools that Charlie could not pay for. After arguing over the growing costs and Charlie's refusal to prepay Joe for his work, the two men had a falling out and the British government pulled their funding. The age of the computer was already over before it had even started, but Charlie wasn't discouraged. He got to work on a new design. This more modern computer would be programmed using punch cards, similar to the IBM mainframes of the fifties and sixties, and to display the output from the device, Charlie planned on developing a printer for it as well its internal memory could have been capable of storing up to a thousand numbers each up to forty decimal digits long. Unlike its predecessor, this updated model was designed to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division plus square roots and number comparisons. His first prototype could only do addition and subtraction calculations, though he created three types of punch cards to handle the different operations, as well as a programming language light years ahead of anything else on the market. Unfortunately, despite the advancements made between Charlie's first and second iterations of his computer, he couldn't get it built. He tinkered for the years and asked for help from people like his son Henry to assist with some of the engineering, but without funding, he couldn't get it off the ground. Charlie died without ever seeing the computer built to completion. If only he had lived another hundred years or so. Because Charlie didn't design his computers in his garage in the nineteen seventies, he didn't drop out of college to start a billion dollar corporation either. Charles Babbage designed his difference Engine and Analytical Engine before there was a Microsoft, before there was an Apple computer, and even before IBM was ever a company. He designed them in the mid eighteen hundreds. As the saying goes, one person's trash is another person's treasure. When Matt Barchuk was invited to see a ninth en seventy five Corvette someone was planning on selling him, he instead stumbled upon the greatest find of his car collecting career fifty seven corvette. It's red and white shell was coated in dust, and the engine was sitting on a stand several feet away in an old barn. The wheels had been tossed haphazardly on shelves and even inside the car. To anyone else, it was nothing but a hunk of junk, but not to Matt. He bought the vehicle and all its pieces, took them home, and got to work restoring this piece of automotive history to its former glory, because all it takes is one person to see the value in something everyone else sees as garbage. Back in the early nineteen sixties, though, that one person happened to be the sales rep for a food distribution company. The salesman worked for Alex Foods, which delivered supplies to one very special Mexican restaurant in Anaheim, California, called Casa de Fritos. If that word Fritos sounds familiar, it's because the restaurant was owned by none other than the Frito Lay Corporation. But that wasn't what made this particular of the restaurants special. Casa de Fritos was built in Frontier Land inside Disneyland. Alex Foods was responsible for providing the tortillas the restaurant served in its dishes. One day, while the rep was in the kitchen, he noticed that the staff was throwing away a hefty supply of tortillas that had gone stale. They were hard and couldn't be sold to customers, But rather than have the restaurant waste food, he suggested they do something with them. His advice was to cut them up, fry them, and season them. They would be similar to another Mexican dish called to topos, which were nothing more than flattened corn pancakes that were fried, toasted, or baked. This new preparation would help the restaurant increase its profits while saving money on lost food product. The kitchen staff took the reps advice and started saving their stale tortillas, slicing them up, frying them, and sprinkling them with a little seasoning. The pieces were then bagged up and sold to customers coming into the restaurant. Things were going well when one day the vice president of Friedo Lay, Archie West, Dry, to buy to check on Casa de Fritos. He was thrilled. The restaurant was bustling and people were buying up all the bags of its new fried tortilla chips. West bought a bag for himself to see what the hubbub was about. One bite and he instantly got it. They were delicious. He went back to Friedo Lay and told them what he'd found. The company believed that they had a hit on their hands and gave West the green light to help turn these homemade chips into a real product. He contacted Alex Foods, the company whose rep had kicked all of this off in the first place, and asked them if they would like to be the sole producers of this brand new Friedo Lay product. The company couldn't say yes fast enough, but one vice president and a bunch of Disneyland patrons wasn't enough of a focus group to test whether the chips had a chance on a natural level, so Friedo Lay quietly launched them in the southwestern United States to start. While the launch wasn't that quiet even in one corner of the country, the demand was too great. Alex Foods was quickly out of its depth, and FRIEDA Lay had to step into manufacture the chips itself. By May of nineteen sixty six, the bags of fried stale tortillas were now available in grocery store shelves all across the US. A few years later, a new taco flavored version of the chips was released and they performed well, but the best was yet to come. In nineteen seventy two, Friedo Lay produced Nacho cheese flavored chips and sales skyrocketed. Nacho Cheese is still available today, as is a cool ranch flavor that was released in nineteen eighty six. Most people who buy these chips today don't realize the history behind them. They don't know that back in the early nineteen sixties, a restaurant in Disneyland decided to curb food waste by frying pieces of stale tortillas and selling them to customers, accidentally giving birth to one of the most popular and successful snack foods of all time Derrito's. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided to were of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,
