Food Origin Stories

The saddle-shaped chip that let Pringles stack — and win In 2008, the children of a retired Procter & Gamble chemist buried part of his ashes inside one of his own inventions: a Pringles can. He had spent two years perfecting the shape that let the chips stack without breaking — then was pulled off the project before it ever reached a shelf. How does an object outlive the argument over who actually made it? In this episode, we trace the fifty-year dispute over what a Pringle legally is, who invented it, and who profited from it, asking what happens to credit and identity when a single product passes through four inventors, two tax courts, and three corporate owners. Person: Fredric J. Baur Location: Cincinnati, Ohio Date: 1956 Case: the hyperbolic paraboloid potato chip and its stackable can Status: sold twice, taxed both ways, name still unconfirmed - Procter & Gamble assigned Fredric Baur, an organic chemist born in 1918, to fix broken and stale potato chips starting

The Dime That Proved Two Million People Bet on Privacy Somewhere in a crowdfunding ledger sits a single dime, part of a total that ends in exactly ten cents — proof that someone, somewhere, tracked a two-and-a-half-million-dollar campaign down to the last coin. The money bought a phone that did not yet exist, built around a promise that its hardware, not its policies, would keep its owner's life private. But hardware is one thing, and a company's conduct years later is another — so what happens when the people who trusted that promise start asking for their money back? In this episode, we trace Purism's Librem 5 phone from its record-breaking 2017 crowdfunding campaign through its delayed 2019 shipment to a 2023 refund controversy, asking whether a company can be trusted to remain the thing it claims to be once the specifications sheet stops being the whole story. Person: Louis Rossmann (repair advocate who documented the refund disputes) Location: San Francisco, California Date: August 24, 2017 Case: the crowdfunding campaign for the Librem 5 phone Status: phone shipped in November 2019, but the company's handling of 2023 refund disputes drew public criticism - The Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign closed with $2,677,609.10 raised, 78.5 percent over its $1.5 million goal - The campaign reached its $1.5 million goal within two weeks of launching on August 24, 2017 - The Librem 5's baseband processor connects via USB, isolated from the phone's main computing system, unlike most smartphones - PureOS received full endorsement from the Free Software Foundation in December 2017 under its GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines - The Librem Key, Purism's USB security token, weighs six grams, measures 48mm long, and contains a 40-kilobit-per-second true random number generator - The first Librem 5 units shipped in November 2019, twenty-five months after the campaign closed - The cellular modem's firmware remained proprietary, as Purism publicly acknowledged, because no free alternative existed - In 2023, Louis Rossmann published two videos documenting customer refund disputes with Purism, and declined a request from a former Purism associate to remove the first video