TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This episode, “Popcorn,” traces the surprisingly ancient and complex history of popcorn, revealing that this seemingly simple snack has been enjoyed for over a thousand years before its modern resurgence.

It highlights key innovations and individuals like Friedrich Rükheim, who popularized Cracker Jack, and Charles Kritter, who revolutionized popcorn production with his steam-powered popper.

The narrative also emphasizes the impact of cultural shifts, such as the rise of talking movies and the invention of the microwave, in transforming popcorn from a casual treat to a pervasive cultural staple, particularly in movie theaters and at sporting events.

In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends realize the one thing they have been looking for has been right in front of them the entire time. Sometimes, the greatest parts of life aren’t the new things. They’re the old things you can finally see. Pop, pop, pop.

Origin of Popcorn

It’s hard to imagine ancient civilizations sitting down to share a bowl of popcorn. But archaeologists have found samples and fossils of just that. On one occasion, the popcorn was even dated to be over a thousand years old.

On the other hand, it’s quite common to find references to popcorn in the 1800s.

Many civil war diaries reference it, including buying popcorn balls from candy boys or street vendors. In 1841, the recipe of such even ended up in the Housekeepers Encyclopedia by E.F. Haskell.

And an advertisement for a sugar-coated popcorn snack was found in an 1857 archive of the Freeport Illinois Journal. Catherine Beecher, the inventor of kitchen cabinets, included a recipe for a molasses-coated popcorn in her recipe book. And even Ella Kellogg of the Kellogg’s Grain and Cereal Company spoke of popcorn as a healthy breakfast option.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about popcorn as a breakfast cereal in her novel Farmer Boy, which was set in the 1860s.

The bottom line is, popcorn hasn’t been new and exciting for over a thousand years, but the twentieth century would change that.

Frederick Rueckheim

Our story begins in 1869, when a 23-year-old Frederick Rueckheim emigrated to the US from Germany and began working on his uncle’s farm. As fun as that was, it didn’t take Friedrich Long to realize farm life was not for him.

So in October of 1871, when the great Chicago Fire was put out and there was a call for volunteers to come and help rebuild, Friedrich went.

One of his first jobs was helping a William Brinkman recover his popcorn business. He had a snack stand that had burnt down. Friedrich even gave William $200 to help him and was made a partner of the new business.

Their snack stand sat at 113 4th Avenue in a great location, but it was only two years before William had grown tired, so Friedrich bought him out of the business and invited his brother Louis from Germany to come partner with him. Together they started the F.W. Ruckheim and Brothers company.

From the Snackstand, they sold candy, chocolates, and a special mix of peanuts popcorn and molasses. Everyone loved their mix, which gave the brothers the idea. They should use the upcoming World’s Fair, who was coming to Chicago, to properly launch it.

At the World’s Fair, their snack was a hit, giving them all kinds of encouragement to keep growing. But it could have been a bigger hit.

Some thought it was a bit too messy on the fingers, which sent the brothers back to the drawing board. In addition, the competition at the fair was thick. Near their, booth was a new beer called “Pabst,” a new gum called “Juicy Fruit”, a pancake mix made by “Aunt Jemima”, and a confection called a “brownie”.

Festival goers were treated to an Eiffel Tower-sized ride called a Ferris wheel for the very first time, and there was another person, another purveyor of popcorn, who was getting a lot of attention.

Charles Cretor didn’t live far from Chicago either. He had owned a bakery and a confection shop of his own. His path to the world’s fair started a year earlier, when he purchased a peanut roaster for his shop. But after buying the roaster, he realized he didn’t really like the way it worked, so he redesigned it to function better, including outfitting it with a small steam-powered machine that could roast the peanuts in oil.

It could automatically add seasonings, and finally he added wheels so that they could take the cart anywhere. And most important of all, it could also pop popcorn.

So he took it to the World’s Fair, where the aroma of popping corn and hot oil drew in an audience. Everyone wanted to get popcorn and to his chagrin, two people even ordered a cart of their own.

After the fair, when Friedrich got back, they experimented with some ideas to make their mix less sticky. They found adding a bit of oil to the molasses really helped. And their second breakthrough came from their employee, Henry Eckstein, who created a waxed line bag that would keep the mix from sticking to the sides and keep it fresh, which opened up a world of shipping opportunities to the Rueckheim brothers.

Knowing how important the discovery really was, the brothers made Henry a partner. And in a process seemingly lost the time and space, they found a new name for their concoction. When people first took a bite of their peanuts popcorn and molasses, instead of saying “awesome, fantastic” or “that’s wonderful.” The lingo of the day was Crackerjack.

And at such, Crackerjack became the name.

Then six years later in 1908, Crackerjack got the luck of a lifetime. The name of their product ended up in a number one hit song. They year, a 29-year-old Tin Pan Alley musician, 1200 miles away in Manhattan, was riding the subway when he noticed a billboard for a baseball game.

Being a songwriter, the idea of going to a game gave him the idea for a song. And then 15 minutes later, he brought the lyrics to his composer friend, Albert Vontilsen.

The moment they were done, they knew they had hit song on their hands. And for seven weeks in 1908, take me out to the ball game, was a number one hit, with baseball stadiums everywhere playing it.

In Chicago, in 1908, not only was it the year of Crackerjack, but was also the “The Cups” one of the world’s cities. The rising Crackerjack sales, however, didn’t necessarily change what farmers were growing.

In fact, only 19,000 acres of farmland were even dedicated to growing popcorn corn in the United States.

That was about to change.

Popcorn At The Movies

Movie theaters had popped up everywhere, but movie houses hadn’t quite let food or drinks inside. The movie house owners felt they were an extension of the theater industry, in which people were accustomed to dressing up, walking on plush carpets sitting in nice seats and checking their coats at the door.

That year owners weren’t interested in cleaning up popcorn pieces off the floor or wiping greasy fingerprints off the chairs, or shushing people who were crunching loudly or rustling backs.

In 1927, Al-Jolsen’s “The Jazz Singer”, known as the first talking picture, would begin to shake up the norm. The movies which catered to a high-brow, literate audience were suddenly attractive to everyone.

Being literate was no longer a requirement for going to the movies.

And by 1930, 25 million people were going to the movies every week. And even though the Great Depression was underway, movies were still great cheap entertainment. But theater owners money was hard to come by. So owners started to look for alternatives.

Charles Cretor, in hopes of encouraging theater owners to allow popcorn inside theater, invented something else, a new paper box to serve popcorn instead of a bag, one that didn’t rustle.

But even with the noise of the talking movie and the reduced rustle of the box, the owners were only willing to rent space to vendors outside the building. Some even asking their patrons to check their popcorn along with their coats at the door.

In New York City, a Midwest transplant rode a chiding opinion piece in the New York Times. “Cotes, he lambasted New Yorkers for not having the wit to sell popcorn, even stating that if New Yorkers weren’t going to buy some, the tourists from other states certainly would.

Shortly thereafter, in 1938, Charles Cretor invented another machine, this time, a popcorn machine that could be kept inside, on the counter, and theaters started to adopt the practice immediately, cutting out the middleman of the outside vendor.

In 1940, the movie Gone with the Wind would be the next big impact in the story of popcorn.

Because it was a four-hour film, the movie came with an intermission, and at intermission, patrons fled back to the lobby to buy more drinks and snacks. The intermission almost single-handedly saved the movie business. It was so successful owners actually created intermissions in other movies, and sometimes even two.

To encourage sales, theaters began buying snipes. A snipe was an advertisement made specifically for the theater. Perhaps you’ve seen the kind that pushed you to go get snacks, or the ones that ask you to shut off your phone. Which brings us to the third hero of our story.

Dave and Max Fleischer

Brothers Dave and Max Fleischer grew up in Brooklyn. As teens, they had jobs in a variety of places. At one point Dave was an usher at the Palace Theater for a bit which led him to being exposed to Vaudeville, and Vaudeville is where he grew his love for comedy and art.

He even worked as a clown on Coney Island at one point.

But in 1913 he got a job with the film production house, Pathé Exchange. They were the largest manufacturer of film equipment for most of the 20th century.

Then in 1919, he and his brother Max started their own animation studio, called “Out of the Inkwell”. They would go on to produce some of the most iconic projects of the era, including Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, Gulliver’s Travels, and in 1930, they secured the rights to Superman, creating the most successful cartoon series.

Filmack, a company that made Snipes, contracted with Dave, to produce a snack trailer for them. Using a tune from Beethoven’s 1813 Battle Symphony, the tune which was also used for the song, “The Bear Went over the Mountain”, and for his jolly good fellow, he created a short called “Let’s All Go to the Lobby”.

It was so successful over 80% of theaters used it to drive patrons to the lobby to buy popcorn. It was so successful that in the year 2000, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry for it being culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.

Popcorn as the National Snack created demand outside the theater and baseball stadium as well. Part of that demand was fueled by companies like Crackerjack, who advertised in comic books and on TV.

Starting in 1949, the old snack shop that existed on street corners had turned into full-fledged popcorn stores. Garrets of Chicago and Topsy’s of Kansas City would create a new tradition. And the stores added another dimension, “Gift Tins”.

When stores ordered popcorn oil, it would arrive in 6.5 gallon tins, and the stores would soon be overrun by them. Topsys’s in Kansas City saw other companies using the tins to sell popcorn and actually hand painting designs on the outside. Topsys’s didn’t feel like they could keep up with demand if they had to hand paint them.

So they looked for a printer, one who could print directly on the can.

Etch A Sketch

They found a company in Ohio that could do it. The company specialized in metal art frames, and were glad to print the tins. Their most famous design is a drawing of downtown Kansas City at Christmas time, which even today is still the bestseller, 60 years later.

Ohio Arts was the name of the company that printed the tins, and they would actually go on to other things, and are best known for a toy they developed in 1960.

The toy actually sold 600,000 units that year, and was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. That’s right, the company that first printed popcorn tins was also the company that made the Etch a Sketch. 

The Popcorn Ball

Popcorn is a gift created another tradition in the 50s. That is the popcorn ball on Halloween as a trick-or-treat item. The popularity of this tradition has never been better illustrated than to look at the most remote city in America. Utqiagvik , the most northern city in Alaska, in 1958, Lilian Nagyak would make at least 500 popcorn balls every year to give out all the trick or treaters who passed by her door.

She did that for 71 years.

I bet you remember the popcorn lady in your town as well.

That takes us all the way back to 1917 in Brazil and the Inn. William and Julia were running one of the 205,126 family farms in Indiana. Their son Orv took a keen interest in the business. He even sold corn out of his car by the road. Orv stayed near home after graduating from high school, attending local Purdue University, where he graduated in 1928 with an agronomy degree.

Purdue was known as the place to learn everything you could possibly learn about corn.

After college, Orv returned home and worked on the family farm until 1940, when he was hired by Princeton Farms, the largest family farm in the state.

While he spent his time in school perfecting his popcorn corn knowledge, Princeton farms grew corn that you feed livestock, not popcorn. But soon, food rationing enacted by the government for World War II would change the demand for different types of corn.

Since wheat and sugar were part of the food rationing. Most of the sweets and confections were just not available, making popcorn the number one snack. And therefore, Orv changed Princeton Farms to a popcorn plantation. For the owner of Princeton Farms, the Holmans,switching from seed corn to popcorn corn was totally acceptable because the Holmans also owned a grocery store chain where they started to sell the raw popcorn seeds.

In 1946, or after thousands of hybrid tests, they sdeveloped a superior popcorn seed. The kernel could be harvested and dried on the cob, instead of being separated by the combine, which made it much more efficient.

And then, five years later, Orv decided to leave, take his knowledge, to start his own farm, in nearby Valparaiso, Indiana. The company he would grow there would become the largest hybrid popcorn seed corn and soybean producer in the United States.

By 1965, Orv’s team had made even more hybrid improvements to their popcorn. They improved the fluffiness, the weight, and even the pop rate. However, the popcorn was a bit more expensive to produce, which meant it didn’t get much traction in the marketplace.

Orv had only one option. He would have to skip the popcorn processors and go to market directly.

So in 1970, they released their own brand to consumers. Orv and his team chose to market the brand under his own name, Orville, Redenbacher.

By the mid-1970s, the brand had captured one-third of the Unpopped Popcorn Market in the United States, which once again brings us back to the impact World War II made up of.

The Microwave

In 1939, the British were worried. As German air raids had begun, they worried they needed better radar coverage. Physicists at the University of Birmingham began exploring a new direction in Magnetron design. 

The Magnetron was the force behind the radar.

They felt that if they could operate the Magnetron in the smaller wavelengths, they could build smaller, lighter equipment, which could even be installed on aircraft. Sir Henry Tisard led the British Technical and Scientific Mission, but he didn’t think Britain could handle the research and testing it would take during the war, and wanted to get help from the United States.

He knew, however, to get that done, he’d need to persuade Winston Churchill to reveal the technology to the Americans, and he’d need to convince the American Congress to cooperate with the British.

He was surprised to find out that everyone was in agreement, and even the U.S. scientists were eager to help.

And not only that, they were enamored with all the progress the British had already made with the Magnatron. It far exceeded what they had developed themselves. For the US to be the most helpful, they would need to contract with private companies.

And so they did with Bell Telephone Labs and Raytheon.

Percy Spencer was in charge of the Magnetron project at Raytheon. He was trying to improve it for the British. But one day when working near the equipment, he noticed that a chocolate bar and his pocket was melting from the machine’s rays.

He wanted to explore this further, and on the next day he brought in popcorn kernels and put him under the rays and they exploded.

On the third day he brought in raw eggs which cooked on the counter.

From that he learned that the waves from the magnetron could heat up food.

Understanding the value of the find, Raytheon patented their idea under the name Radar Range. In 1947, they actually started marketing this Radar Range, which weighed 750 pounds to restaurants, ocean liners and railroads.

It wasn’t until 1955 that the radar range would get a new name, the microwave.

And it wasn’t until 1967 that a Japanese firm began marketing the first microwave for consumers at $495. Similar to how sliced bread existed before the toaster.

Perry Spencer invented microwave popcorn before the microwave itself.

Even though microwaves were now in the marketplace, there still wasn’t a way to actually make popcorn. Most Americans were making popcorn using Orville Redenbacher’s raw seeds by putting a little oil in a big pot on the stove and shaking it around over heat.

Or they were buying products like Easy Pop or Jiffy Pop that also popped on stove.

It wasn’t until 1978 that the microwaveable popcorn bag was invented. And then 1981, before Pillsbury started selling the first microwaveable popcorn in the freezer aisle. And then in 1988, the greatest award a food could ever earn happened at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.

The newest microwaves being unveiled all featured a popcorn button on the main screen.

Coincidentally in 1988, VCR and VHS sales hit their absolute very peak, successfully having married America’s at-home moving watching public with the theater tradition of popcorn, which brings us back to Cracker Jacks.

In 1970, 41% of households ate Cracker Jacks, but over time, that number had been whittled down with competitors like Crunch and Munch, Fiddle Faddle, Poppycock, and Popcorn Indiana, finding all their own success.

But the one place no one has been able to make in-roads is baseball stadiums.

In 2004, the New York Yankees decided to switch from Cracker Jacks to Crunch-n-Mucnh. But the backlash from fans was swift and harsh.

And Cracker Jacks were back in the concession stands the next week.

Never underestimate the power of the jingle.