Catherine the Great bathed her horses in it, Emily Dickinson was addicted to it, the Indians of the Amazon Basin have used it for centuries as a sandwich spread. Yet the 11th-century Portuguese alchemist credited with inventing vanilla was actually seeking a rum-raisin elixir, and it was a French diplomat serving in Persia who first bottled it — just in time for the Russian army to buy up his entire stock for its thirst-ravaged troops in the Crimean War. These are but a small sampling of the anecdotes and curiosities packed into this book. Suffice it to say that the taste buds of the world would soon rally around a single flavour for the first time in human memory. The rest is history.

The House Cat that Changed the World
(University of Perth-Amboy Press; 365pp)

When Pharaoh Mingus II carried an Abyssinian kitten named Misty into his palace one day circa 2500BC, it marked the advent of the wild animal as household pet. An estimated 3.6 billion pets have since followed in a cat’s cradle of domestic sagas too complex to be detailed here.Misty himself was soon dead, poisoned by high priests jealous of his influence and irked by his habit of defecating in the temple, but his favourite toy, a mummified miniature crocodile, can be seen today in the Cairo Smaller Mammal Museum. The author traces Misty’s lineage over the millennia, concluding with a virtually airtight case for the feline star of Disney’s That Darn Cat! being a direct descendant. The rest is history.

The Ping-Pong Ball that Changed the World
(Tinker, Evers & Chance; 365pp)

Little did the gangly young astronomy student realise, when a ping-pong ball caromed off his bat and vanished under a settee in the rec room of his parents’ house in the South Dakota Badlands one winter’s eve in 1926, that what occurred in the next few seconds would rock astronomical science and cause most of a continent on the dark side of a planet nine billion light-years away to be named after him. The student, of course, was Oswald Blingus, and when his errant ball bumped into a dust kitten under the settee it suggested that separate bodies of diverse densities could cohere, leading to the idea of the existence of galaxies. Blingus’s theory was at first ridiculed, and the author movingly records the twists of astronomical politics at mid-century — with surprise cameos by the Duke of Windsor and Jack Dempsey — too arcane to be gone into here. The rest is history.

The Dishwater that Changed the World
(A Fran and Delbert MacAdoo Book; 365pp)

The British scientist-inventor Sir Waldo Motley was accidentally flushed down the World’s Largest Kitchen Drain at the Paris Domestic Arts Exposition of 1890, but not before he had accidentally spilled a solution of ketone, creosote and lime juice into a dishpan in his laboratory.

He returned a day later to find the crockery and glassware squeaky-clean — an accidental chemical chain reaction had created the world’s first effective dishwashing liquid. How Sir Waldo battled Big Soap, the German munitions industry, and numerous litigious quacks (including Thomas Edison) in his quest to better the homemaker’s life is entrancingly discursive, and those who think the story belongs to the musty past should note that Betty Friedan used the time saved in her household chores by this kitchen-sink miracle to begin the writings that would one day give birth to the feminist movement.

The rest is history.

The Pocket Lint that Changed the World
(St Vitus Books; 365pp)

The plague that ravaged Northern Europe in the last quarter of the 14th century was ultimately tracked to virulent spores breeding in the pocket lint of sailors from pestilential climes landing at the North Sea port of Hamburg. Every pocket in the Hanseatic League was thereupon ordered sewn closed by the controversial Edict of Bremen. It was the enterprising Lübeck leathercrafter Franz-Heinrich Wallet who devised the eponymously named replacement. The resulting foldable, sturdy, and capacious wallet also proved safer than its easily slashed cloth predecessor; this encouraged burghers to carry more money with them, which in turn led to the phenomenon of impulse spending and encouraged the development of the first crude, hand-cranked calculator to keep up with quick cash transactions — leading in a straight technological line to what we know today as the computer. Let’s just say that the rest is history.

© Bruce McCall; originally published in The New Yorker

All Meat Looks Like South America: the World of Bruce McCall is published by Crown (USA)

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