The Napoleon of Preserved Food

portrait of napoleon bonaparte

Rarely does ingenuity find just reward. The enterprising Nicolas Appert learned this unhappy fact when, in 1795, he hit upon the means by which to preserve meat, fish and vegetables in glass bottles. This découverte came only after a serious of professional failures. Appert began his career as a champagne salesman, and then tried his hand at confections before ending up in a grubby little atelier in the rue de la Folie-Méricourt, immersing in a piping hot bain-marie wide-mouthed glass bottles stuffed with everything from peas to pot roast. Finding that the bath rendered the jars airtight, Appert hit upon an idea that, for a few years at least, would bring him fame and welcome fortune.

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Marmalade and Eggs for Cycling Legs

 
illustration of bicyclist from Wheels of Chance

A “girdle around the earth” Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Sachtleben set out to describe the day after they graduated from Washington University. For three years they peddled their bicycles from “Normandy to Paris,” across “the lowlands of western France to Bordeaux,” straining over the Lesser Alps to Marseilles and “along the Riviera into Italy.” Even the seductive climes of the Mediterranean could not waylay them on their journey; after wintering in Athens, they stowed their bikes aboard a sailboat headed for Constantinople.

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Lobster à la Robinson

palm tree from swiss family robinson

Kinsmen shipwrecked in the East Indies become means by which to impart the virtues of proper husbandry, self-reliance and thorough knowledge of the natural world – such is the conceit of the pastor Johann David Wyss’s 1812 novel The Swiss Family Robinson. As much a child of the Enlightenment as a man of the cloth, Wyss presents his subjects’ exploits as a series of lessons in morality, natural history and the physical sciences. An ostrich tamed is transformed into transport, soil into earthen vessels. The heteroclite character of the island – elephants cavort with kangaroos, tapirs with giraffes; coconut palms grow side-by-side with fir trees – perplexes not the resourceful Swiss family; they draw from it nourishment, entertainment and comfort, as well as valuable insight.

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