Travels in the Knowledge Web:

Cornflakes to Communism

Cornflakes – Corn is broken into grits, steam-pressure-cooked, further broken into small bits, which are tumbled, dried, flaked between rollers, dehydrated, toasted in rotating perforating drums and finally enriched with vitamins A, B, C and D, sugar, salt, iron, sugar, etc. The world’s breakfast since 1894, when they were invented by…. J H Kellogg – In 1876 Superintendent of the Sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan. Kellogg was a qualified doctors turned health-and-diet vegetarianism freak who always dressed in white and had a parrot. He later established schools of nursing, hygiene, hone economics and physical education. Kellogg had started out as a type-setter in the printing office of…. Mrs Ellen White – Who had visions and travelled around preaching the Adventist message (by 1885 she was doing it in Europe and met such reformist luminaries as Annie Besant). One of her early visions related to healthy living and in 1866 she opened a water-cure establishment in Battle Creek, inspired by the work of… Vincent Priessnitz – Famed German ‘water-doctor,’ whose spa at Grefenberg (now Czech Republic) included such curative joys as sleeping in wet sheets, cold water vertical douche, sweating blankets, brass bands and a brown-bread-and-veggie diet. Le tout Europe turned up for the cure, including, in 1842, a British society doctor… James Gully – Who went home and opened a Grafenberg copy in Malvern, Western England, to which the crème de la crème flocked. Crème included poets (Tennyson), academics (Macaulay), medics (Florence Nightingale), big thinkers (Darwin), and many others. Gully even got a visit from the great reformer and cynic, famous Victorian writer… Carlyle – King of the mid-nineteenth-century UK chattering classes, Carlyle was thick with others of the type: Browning, Thackeray, Ruskin et al. Carlyle’s obsession was the outdated nature of all social institutions and in huff-and-puff prose he urged reform at all levels. In 1873 the great man’s portrait was done by… Whistler American expat painter most famous for the picture of his mother (real title: ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black no. 1’), Whistler knew them all: Degas, Beaudelaire, Wilde, Millais, the Pre-Raphaelites, Corot, Swinburne. And most notable of all… William Morris – Socialist and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement that turned every English home into rustic, chintzy, pseudo-medieval ‘cottages’ in which the middle class could forget the industrial reality outside the door. In the 1870s he organized Socialist League sing-alongs in his home in Hammersmith, attended by such as… Eleanor Marx – Long time pal of Engels and wife Lizzie, she spent much time in the British Museum reading room, doing research for her father, and meeting such greats as GB Shaw. In America she was spied on by Pinkerton’s as a dangerous radical. Small wonder, these leftward leanings, given the identity of her father… Karl Marx – Prussian radical and exile who spent most of his life in London, at the British Library, preparing to write his great work: Das Kapital, about the inevitable failure of capitalism and the triumph of the proletariat. Darwin declined the invitation to be the dedicatee. Marx is one of history’s movers and shakers, helping as he did to spread the message of…
Communism – The ideology according to which the state would wither away and society would be based on the premise: ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his need.’