In need of a cocktail and a good laugh, tune in to our podcast, two guys from Hollywood. I'm Alan Nevins, a literary agent and manager. And I'm Joey Santos, economising celebrity chef. Join us as we host weekly conversations with our friends, clients and contemporaries to discuss the realities of working and living in Los Angeles from show runners, a show showstopper of Real Housewives, The Historia. We're serving up stories, knowledge and, of course, cocktail recipes you won't want to miss.

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It's safe to say 20-20 was one of the most difficult ears ever for so many. That's why I'm here to ask you, how can I help? My name is Dr. Gail Saltz.

I'm a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, host of the new weekly podcast. How can I Help with Dr. Gail Saltz, brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio join me every Friday where you can ask your most pressing questions and I will answer with specific advice and understanding.

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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. And I'm Holly Frim. After we did our episode on John Clèves films and his ideas of the Earth being hollow.

Somebody suggested that we do an episode on Andrew Cross and I wrote all this down, including the fact that he thought he invented life from crystals. And now I'm going to totally depart from the the document that I gave Holly for our outline to come in here because I just figured out who suggested this.

What was originally written in this outline was that I had gone looking in our e-mail and our Facebook comments and our our Twitter mentions being like, who suggested this? I wrote all this down and I did not write down their name literally sitting in this studio. I was like, maybe it was a comment on our website. It was a comment on our website from Kumara, I hope I have said your name correctly. I'm so sorry if I did not.

Who left the comment? How about a podcast on Andrew Cross who thought he created life in 1836 with his crystals and electricity? Because it's goofy. It is goofy.

This was a joy to work on. Yeah, it also just came together with remarkable ease, which is great because I was taking a long weekend and I wanted I needed to get all my stuff done.

No shade at all to over if we're having left this comment on our on our website. But I will note, we do not get notification of comments on the website at Myson history dot com. It is often weeks or longer before we ever see anything on there. And we also do not have the ability to turn the comments off because it's like a whole company wide thing to have the comments on there. So if you are going to leave a comment on our website, we're really not going to see it in a timely manner and we may never respond to it.

But at my last minute, literally sitting here in the studio, oh, maybe it was a comment on the Web site.

It was it was Cross' account of what really happened is a little bit more down to earth than thinking that he invented life or not invented life, but created life with crystals and electricity. But it's still a delightful story. So a lot of fun to work on. So thank you, Kamari. Again, I hope I have said your name right. I didn't check because I literally made the connection just now. Dot, dot, dot. Yeah. Thank you for for suggesting this.

So Andrew Cross was born on June 17, 1784 at Fine Court in Broomfield, Somerset, England, in the manor house at Fine Court was first built in the early seventeenth century and then it was added on to over the years. So by the time Cross was born, it had been his family's home for well over a hundred years. Andrew's mother was named Susannah and his father was Richard Cross High, sheriff of Somerset.

When Andrew was four, the family moved to France and they stayed there for the next four years. Andrew spoke both French and English by the time he got back home, but after that he really did not keep up with the French and he eventually lost it all. Although he studied Latin and Greek in school, he didn't really think he had much of an aptitude for languages.

However, he did invent a new language with his younger brother, Richard, and the two of them made up a world that was populated by beings they called either Hobel, Giese or Hobel. Yes, we don't know for sure which they made out of fir cones. And they imagined a whole society for the Hobel geese, complete with its own legal system and a system of government which is about as charming as you can get, in my opinion.

In his own words, Andrew was, quote, a very happy boy, careless and extravagantly fond of fun. And both boys were somewhat eccentric as they grew up. We're going to get into Andrew's eccentricities in more detail. But as for Richard, as one example, he was really, really into the metric system, so much so that his clocks were divided into ten hours instead of twelve. I have a number of questions about this, like if you're running your household on ten our clocks, do you just translate in your head to make sure you're on time for your engagements?

Are you always not on time?

We're going to have a talk about this in our Friday episode, Super, because your foolish co-host may have tried something similar as an adult. Oh, I'm so excited. After the cross family got back from France, Andrew was enrolled in a school in Dorchester that was run by a Reverend, Mr White. And then in 1793, when he was nine, he moved to a school in Bristol run by the Reverend Mr Samuel Sayer. In addition to his work as a teacher, Sarah wrote memoirs, historical and topographical of Bristol and its neighborhood from the earliest period down to the present time.

Andrew did not really enjoy his time at this school. He never felt like he had enough to eat, and he thought the food that they did have was terrible. He also didn't get along with Sarah or some of the other teachers. Plus, being extravagantly fond of fun included getting into mischief and playing jokes and pranks on people like when a classmate asked him for help translating some Latin. Andrew told him that what he wanted translated meant the stork is safest in the middle of the pond when it really meant the middle course is safest and say you're apparently did not appreciate this particular brand of silliness.

Some of the trouble that Andrew got into at school was also more serious than that. Andrew liked to make his own fireworks and that's what he was doing. One day while he was also studying his virgile, Sarah came and caught him and took what he was working on a way, in Andrew's words, quote, I watched where he put it. It was on the windowsill of a room which was always kept locked. The window, though not glazed, had close iron bars through which nothing could pass.

The case was hopeless. I could not recover my rocket mixture, but a happy thought struck me. I was resolved that no one else could enjoy the spoil, which I regarded as so valuable. I had a burning glass in my pocket and I thought of Archimedes and the Roman fleet. The sun was shining and I soon drew a focus on the gunpowder, which immediately blew up. It was well that the house was not set on fire. As for me, I was reckless of all consequences.

At one point, some of the boys at school decided to go on strike to try to get longer holiday breaks. But beyond just refusing to go to class, they were inspired by the British troops fighting in the French Revolutionary War. So they also planned to take over the school armed with muskets. This plan was discovered and thwarted, thankfully, before anybody carried it out. And although the ringleaders were expelled and other participants were flogged, Andrew somehow escaped notice.

Aside from all of that, though, Andrew's love of science and particularly of electricity really blossomed while he was at Mr Sayers school. This might have had roots back in his home life. His father was actually friends with Benjamin Franklin, but while he was at their school, Andrew saw an advertisement for a lecture series with the first instalment being about optics and the second about electricity. He asked for permission to go and that was granted and things really took off from there.

Soon he and some schoolmates were shocking people with a laden jar that they made from an apothecaries bottle. So Alladin jar is a vessel. This store static electricity. In this case, probably a stoppered vial filled Pertwee with water, with a wire through the stopper, which you charge by touching the wire to something staticky. Before long, Andrew was writing home to ask for money to buy various electrical gadgetry. To be clear, this labonge are shocking, would not have been dangerous, but it would have been annoying.

Andrew's father died in eighteen hundred and he was sixteen. And about that time he started to experience what he described as nervous attacks and they would recur regularly for the rest of his life. While he had described himself in childhood as happy and careless, he grew up to be kind of a generally anxious person. With these attacks coming on suddenly and lasting for as long as thirty minutes at a time. In 1882, Cross entered Nose College at Oxford, which he called, quote, a perfect hell on earth.

Wine seemed to be the focal point of social life at the college, and he hated wine. He also hated his classmates snobbery and classism. And later on he said, quote, I was less liberal at this time than at any other of my life. It took some years to rub off the prejudices of class, which I had acquired in Oxford.

Cross, earned his degree in law in 1895, and he also inherited fine court after his mother's death on July 3rd of that same year.

This was one of a long series of losses over a period of about five years. He lost both of his parents, a sister, an uncle, two close friends and one of his household staff who he described as, quote, a most faithful and attached servant. It's not really clear whether the grief over all of this led him to abandon law, but he did. He gave up law. After two or three years, instead, he established himself as a country gentleman at fine court, becoming absorbed in studying electricity, mineralogy and chemistry.

He also served as a magistrate where he developed a reputation for being quite liberal, and he wrote a lot of poetry.

Cross became friends with George John Singer, author of Elements of Electricity and Electrochemistry, like Cross Singer, was an amateur scientist whose family business involved making artificial feathers and flowers. But he was knowledgeable on the subject of electricity. He held public lectures and demonstrations that were attended by people like Michael Faraday. Crosson singer did experiments together until Singer's death from tuberculosis in 1817 at the age of only 31. George.

John Singer had built a laboratory and lecture hall at his own home, but Andrew Cross's efforts to devote his home to research went even further. We'll talk more about that after we pause for a sponsor break. Hey, all with that, it's just hilarious and I'm just making sure y'all know that I got a OK, it's called Carefully Reckless on the Black Effect Network.

I'm going to be telling you all my business and some of your other people's business, too. And ain't no limits to the things that talk about, you know, that if y'all know me from baby mama drama to healthy relationships, from child support to stimulus checks, look, will you take a step back and you realize that we all go through crazy stuff and we got stories to tell. Those situations do not define you, but they do make for real good conversation in the world with click bait and cancel calls.

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Take good care. In 1887, Andrew Cross became fascinated with crystal formations and Holwell Kavan, which is a limestone crevice in Broomfield, not far from where he lived. The entrance to this cavern has since been filled in and in Cross's words, quote, I felt convinced that an early period that the formation and constant growth of the crystalline matter which lined the roof of this cave, was caused by some peculiar upward attraction and reasoning. More on the subject. I felt assured that it was electric attraction.

Cross got a tumbler of water out of the stream that ran through the cavern and he ran a current through it on wires and eventually some crystals did start to form. This was the first of many experiments that he conducted in electro crystallisation, which is when metals are deposited onto electrodes, eventually forming crystals. He would eventually start to experiment with electro refining or extracting metals from their owners with electricity, which is also called electro winning. Electro winning, which, by the way, sounds like a great band name was first developed by Sir Humphrey Davy, who came up in our John Cleve Sims episode.

Everything connects in history.

Davey was one of the people who thought John Cleve Sims did not know what he was talking about. Because he didn't, as Cross experimented, though, more and more of his home became devoted to this work for the next few decades, he installed six or seven furnaces for purifying metals. The estate's glassware in China became laboratory vessels, and he purified the household silver for use in his experiments. He also strung up about a third of a mile of copper wire from poles and the tallest trees on the grounds.

And he connected all that to about 50 laden jars in the organ loft of the music room. This setup became particularly dramatic in foggy or stormy weather. Sir Richard Phillips visited Vine Corps and relayed a conversation with Cross quote, He told me that sometimes the current was so great as to charge and discharge the great battery 20 times in a minute with reports as loud as a cannon, which being continuous were so terrible to strangers that they always fled. Well, everyone expected the destruction of himself and premises.

If the weather wasn't cooperating, crews could also manually charge the leading jar's by turning a device with a crank. Here is how a visitor described fine court during all this quote. Here was an immense number of jars and gallon pots containing fluids on which electricity was operating for the production of crystals. But you were startled in the midst of your observations by the smart, crackling sound that attends the passage of the electrical spark. You hear also the rumblings of distant thunder.

The rain is already splashing and great drops against the glass and the sound of the passing sparks continues to startle your ear. Your host is in high. Glee for a battery of electricity is about to come within his reach, a thousandfold more powerful than all those the room strung together. You follow his hasty steps to the organ gallery and curiously approach the spot with the noise that has attracted your notice. You see at the window a huge brass conductor with a discharging rod near it, passing into the floor.

And from what knob to the other, sparks are leaping with increasing rapidity and noise. Rap, rap, rap. Bang, bang, bang. Nevertheless, your host does not fear he approaches as boldly as if the flowing stream of fire were a harmless spark.

Here comes the big, no surprise moment. Many of his neighbors did not particularly care for this. Cross was nicknamed The Wizard of Broomfield's, and at one point he was speaking at a meeting ahead of an election and local farmers were booing him. When an outsider asked what was wrong, someone replied, quote, Why don't you know him? That's Cross of Broomfield, the thunder and lightning. Ma'am, you can't go near his house at night without danger of your life.

Velma's have been there, have seen devils all surrounded by lightning dancing on the wires that he has put up around his grounds.

At the same time, though, there were local people who thought his experiments had curative properties in her account of his life and work across his second wife, Cornelia described the case of a local man who was paralyzed on one side of his body and also had a salivary gland issue, quote, after being electrified twice a week for six weeks, he was so much better that he could walk to find court and the complaint in the throat was entirely removed.

I'm making a grimacing face, another gem from Kornelia about their booming flashing property. Quote, We were never troubled with burglars they'd find caught.

We will get back to Kornelia in a bit since they got married later on in Andrew's life. His first wife was Marion Hamilton, daughter of Captain John Hamilton. They got married in 1889, relatively early into Cross' time. As a gentleman scientist. They would go on to have seven children together over the next ten years, although three of those children died when they were still children. Their oldest child, John, was born in 1810.

Cross seems to have been really deeply fond of his wife and children and very traumatized by those three deaths. At the same time, though, in terms of family, he'd been on his own, aside from a couple of younger siblings for four years before he got married. And he just wasn't used to having a regular home life. And along with all of his experiments, it made things a little bit chaotic. ADA Lovelace became friends with both Andrew and his son, John.

ADA and John actually had a romantic relationship that was also tangled up with her gambling.

She summed up the atmosphere at fine court this way, quote, The dinner hour was an accident in the days arrangements, even though there were living in a seventeenth century manor house, which suggests a lot of wealth, the Cross family lifestyle wasn't particularly extravagant compared to other people in a similar situation. They did have problems with cash flow, though, in Cross' words, quote, My family were learned an honorable man as long as I can look back, but they had the happy knack of turning a guinea into a shilling.

And I have inherited that faculty pretty strongly. Kornelia described him as, quote, injudicious in his expenditure.

Apart from his friendship with George John Singer, Andrew Cross was intellectually actually pretty isolated. One of his closest longtime friends was John Kenyon, who had been one of his classmates at Mr. Sayers school. And while Kenyon was interested in Cross' experiments, science was really not his calling. Their overlapping interest was poetry. Kenyon wrote poetry himself, and he was a distant cousin of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. At one point before her marriage, he brought Andrew Cross to visit her.

He also supplemented Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's income and left the money when he died in 1856. So Cross did talk about his work in public, but not really all that often and somewhat reluctantly. On December 28th of 1814, he gave an address at Ghanians Lecture Hall. And it is possible that Mary Shelley, who at the time was Mary Godwin, attended this lecture. She references it in her diary, but her notes about it are also kind of vague.

She writes about going from place to place, looking for Thomas Jefferson Hogg, but not finding him any of those places before saying, quote, Go to Garner Anne's lecture on electricity, the gases and the phantasmagoria return at half past nine. Shelley goes to sleep. So it's not 100 percent clear whether Ghanians is one of the places she was looking for Hogg and she was just noting the topic of the lecture that night or if she actually attended the lecture herself.

Either way, though, sometimes people point to this diary entry as evidence that Cross was an inspiration for Shelley's novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which was published four years later in 1836.

Cross reluctantly agreed to speak at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that was being held in Bristol. He had intended to go to the meeting simply as an observer, but he was persuaded to talk about his experiments with electro crystallisation. It turned out that people were fascinated. John Dalton, who we just covered on the show, was in attendance, and he told Cross he had never before listened to anything so interesting.

And all this attention made us fairly uncomfortable, though, in his words, quote, I slipped away out of it all and he went home before the meeting was over. It was not long before he was getting even more attention, though. And we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break. Never thought you'd make a great switchboard operator or seltzer man or professional royal mistress if full time jobs are your jam.

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Together, these faces form an intimate portrait of one of the 20th century's most influential figures. So who was David Bowie?

Tune in to. Off the record to find out, listen and follow on the radio Apple podcast wherever you listen to your favorite shows. After the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1836, a lot of the response to Andrew Cross's work was pretty positive.

But he did have some detractors. On January 31st of 1837, he wrote a letter to a newspaper called The Atlas in which he responded to what he described as an attack by a Dr. Richie. I could not find the text of this article, but Richie apparently criticized Cross for framing his work as discoveries when other people had discovered these things many years before. Richie also described Cross's work in a way that just wasn't very accurate. Cross's tone is kind of along the lines of you were there at the meeting, Dr.

Richie, and you could have just asked me if you had questions instead of writing this incorrect article mischaracterizing me and my experiments, which I do because I love them. In this response, Cross framed his work as observations, not discoveries. His letter ended, quote, P.S. I should have sent this answer long since, but have been prevented by severe illness. I must beg in future to decline, engaging in scientific warfare with anyone having neither inclination nor time for that kind of amusement.

But Dr. Ritchies article that he was responding to was just the tip of the iceberg. Not long after he spoke at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Andrew Cross became famous in a way that he really did not expect and also really did not want. He had been experimenting with a piece of porous volcanic rock, which he was using because of its porosity rather than because of its composition. He kept this rock electrified with a voltaic battery, and he had placed it in a fluid that was saturated with black flint and potassium carbonate.

In his words, quote, On the 14th day from the commencement of this experiment, I observed through a lens a few small, whitish excrescence or nipples projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone. On the 18th day. These projections enlarged and struck out seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the hemisphere on which they grew on the 26th day. These appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail.

Till this period, I had no notion that these appearances were other than an incipient mineral formation. On the twenty eighth day these little creatures moved their legs, I must now say that I was not a little astonished. After a few days, they detach themselves from the stone and moved about at pleasure. He went on to write, quote, In the course of a few weeks, about a hundred of them made their appearance on the stone. I examined them with a microscope and observed the smaller ones appeared to have only six legs, the larger ones eight crossed.

The most likely explanation for this startling occurrence was that airborne mites had deposited their eggs on his equipment, which was exposed to the air. But that didn't explain why the mites seemed able to survive in an environment that should have killed them later on. He also acknowledged that the early stage of these creatures formation was nearly indistinguishable from the early stages of crystal formation, so he might have just been mistaken. Beyond that, he said, quote, I have never ventured an opinion on the cause of their birth and for a very good reason, I was unable to form one.

He talked over what he had seen with some other scientists and he sent some samples to Richard Owen. Owen was a biologist, a comparative anatomist and a paleontologist. He's actually the person who coined the term Dinosauria. He also very vocally criticized Charles Darwin's work on evolution. Owen said that these were cheese mites, which are arachnids from the genus Askaris. Cross called them a Carrasco Vanegas. CRAs never intended to publicize this find anywhere, but at some point he either mentioned it to or was overheard by William Bragg of the Somerset County Gazette.

Bragge published an article on December 31st, 1836 titled Extraordinary Experiment. Although Braggs article did not make this claim soon, papers all over Britain and Ireland were printing sensationalized reports that Andrew Cross of Somerset had used electricity to create life.

So to be clear, Andrew Cross did make some far fetched claims during his lifetime, like he told a story about being bitten by a cat that died that day of hydrophobia, which is rabies. About three months later, Cross had a worrying combination of symptoms. He was thirsty, but his throat spasmed when he. He tried to drink water and he had a pain that started in his hand and worked its way up to his elbow and shoulder, convinced that he was going to die of hydrophobia.

He went shooting and intentionally exerted himself. And thanks to his physical exertion and mental focus, he was better in three days. He wrote, quote, I mentioned the circumstance to Dr. Kinglake and he said he certainly considered that I had had an attack of hydrophobia, which would possibly have proved fatal had I not struggled against it by a strong effort of mind. You cannot cure rabies with exercise and positive thinking, it would just never occur to you to be like, I think I might have rabies.

You know what I should do? Go shooting. That's going to help. I'm an anxious person. I can totally see myself being like, oh, no, this thing is happening to me. We we don't really know if Dr. King really did think that he had somehow staved off an attack of rabies or if if King was humoring him. That's right, dear. You killed yourself. But even though he had this whole story about the cat and the rabies.

He did not say that he had used electricity to create life. He steadfastly maintained that not only had he never made that claim, he had never said anything that a reasonable person could interpret that way. He really didn't know for sure why Mights had hatched in his experiment. I mean, he had that kind of best guess of like maybe some might put their eggs on there. But he he definitely did not think he had created them or given life to them with electricity.

For the next few years, though, cross faced ongoing accusations of blasphemy and atheism because of this misreporting of his work and the rumors that followed, people called him a Frankenstein and a disturber of the peace of families. Corneli across later wrote, quote, After disavowing all intention to raise any questions connected with either natural or revealed religion, he went on to observe that he was sorry to see that the faith of his neighbors could be overset by the claw of a mite.

Other people tried to replicate Cross' results, but only one William Henry weeks of sandwich had any success. And that happened in 1840 weeks had placed his experiment under a bell jar in Mercury to seal it off from the external air. And he said that, quote, Five perfect insects formed on November 25th, 1840 one after more than a year of the experiment running. So we had started the experiment in 1840 and then reported this one. He named these mites a criss cross the eye after Andrew crossed cross and weeks.

We're both threatened with violence. And they were not the only people caught up in this media storm. Another was Michael Faraday, who was falsely reported as having confirmed Cross' experiment in February of 1837. Not only had he not done this, he also had not tried to.

As all of this was happening, several members of Cross' family were seriously ill. His wife, Marianne, died in 1846 and his brother Richard died just four days later. Andrew was absolutely bereft and he went to London, where he spent most of the next four years as the house and grounds of fine court fell into disrepair. While he was in London, he met Cornelia Agusta Hewitt Berkley, who was a fan of his work, in her words, quote, When young, I had always been intensely interested in Mr Cross' experiments in electrical science.

I had cut out scraps from the newspapers that made mention of his discoveries so that it was with no common feelings that I looked upon the man whose power in wielding that mysterious agent electricity had so excited my imagination. She goes on to say that she was disappointed that at their first meeting he didn't talk about electricity. Perhaps he was hungry.

I love that Andrew and Cornelia got married in 1850. He was 66 and she was 23. They went back to find court where they had a son in 1852, followed by two more children bringing his total surviving children to ten. Cornelia helped Andrew with his experiments and observation. He tried to use electricity to purify seawater and restore spoiled foods to wholesomeness and make a hangover cure by electrifying wine and beer. When he published his work, he did so through the electrical society, which took a more populist, egalitarian approach than many of the more formal academic societies.

In 1851, the Crosses went to the Great Exhibition in London at Joseph Paxon's Crystal Palace, which we've covered previously on the show. They also went on a tour of England coming back to find court in 1855. On May twenty eighth, 1855, Andrew Cross had what he called a paralytic seizure. It was probably a stroke that paralysed part of his body. He died on July 6th in the same room where he had been born. On his deathbed, he changed his will to leave his property to his wife rather than his oldest son, John.

But she then gave the estate to John and his family. Andrew Cross is buried in the churchyard at the Church of Saint Mary and All Saints in Brimfield. Kornelia had an obelisk erected in his memory there. In 1857, Cornelius published Memorial's scientific and Literary of Andrew Cross, the electrician, which discussed her late husband's life and work, including many of his poems and correspondence and a complete account of the experiment with the MEIT'S. In 1892, she published Red Letter Days of My Life, which included her recollections about the scientists and writers and thinkers that she had come to know during their marriage.

Most of the manor house at Fine Court is no longer standing. It was largely destroyed in a fire in 1894. But the library and music. Room are still there, as well as a gardener's cottage and a church, some of the structures still standing on the property are used as office space, including for organizations like Somerset Wildlife Trust. And visitors can stay at the gardener's cottage. It is primarily a nature preserve with walking trails and a tea room with the tea room currently only take out due to the covid-19 pandemic.

We have made some references to Andrew Cross's poetry, and I thought we would end on one of his poems. This is called The Three Trenches. Three circling trenches round my heart, I throw to keep at bay each enter meddling, fail within the first, the world may enter free whatever their sect opinion or degree safe or the next. I greet a fair array, serenely smiling as a summer's day to pass the third, alas, how you can drive.

And of those dearest few, how few survive. That as Andrew Glass. This is one of those topics that if I had a do over and a time machine, I would have saved this for like a tour show because it's so fun. It's very, very fun.

Do you have fun?

Email it to you. Is it fun? It is fun. Is it fun? This is from Jennifer.

Jennifer says, hi, Holly and Tracy. I got so excited while I was listening to the recent scurvy episode. I went down a history rabbit hole a few months ago and didn't know how to write in about it. It's a long story, but I was watching a cooking show and the recipe called for blackcurrants. I was intrigued because they looked delicious and I had never heard of them before. It turns out in the early nineteen hundreds, the US banned the cultivation, sale and transportation of Currence.

They can carry a fungus that is destructive to the white pine. So currants were banned to safeguard the timber industry that basically eliminated currants from the American diet. Another interesting fact during the blockade's in World War Two, currants were one of the only vitamin C rich fruits that could be grown locally in Britain. Churchill encouraged people to cultivate blackcurrants, and it kept the population from getting scurvy. Currant flavored soda and candy are still popular in the UK today. I love the show.

It was my first podcast ever and it opened me up to the podcast World.

My love of history has grown so much because of you guys. Thanks for reading. Thank you for sending this email, Jennifer. I got it this morning and I was like, why have I had no confusion about what currents are, even though I don't know that I have ever actually seen them? And the answer quickly came into my mind that in Anne of Green Gables and it's supposed to give Diana Barry raspberry cordial, but instead she accidentally gives Diana Barry Morillas blackcurrant wine and then Diana gets very drunk.

And it is a big source of the tension in that part of the book. And so I think sometime in my childhood, I was like, what is what is blackcurrant wine? And I found out that they're like little they're like a little berry. I looked into it because I was like, wow, I did not know all of this about their being banned in the US, I just sort of assumed that they were something that didn't grow locally.

That's not true at all. Like they were growing a whole lot in New York and New England until this whole problem with the with the fungus, which is actually a rust. And the ban, like the federal ban, was rolled back before I was born. But there were still a lot of state level bans. It is still not a commonly grown crop in the U.S. at all, like more than 99 percent of the current crop in the world is grown in Europe.

So that was an interesting tidbit for me to start my morning off with. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for sending this email.

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