The Life and Near Death of Nosferatu

 26 May 1897, a book was published by the name of Dracula by Irish author, Bram Stoker. Almost immediately, people started adapting the horror story into plays. Shortly after the novel was published, motion pictures started to catch on, and one of the first books to be adapted into film was Dracula.

In 1922, German silent film director F. W. Murnau made a film titled Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens ("Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror"). By then, Bram Stoker had been dead ten years, but his widow, Florence Stoker, was still alive, and hadn't given permission to make the film.

The screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, had changed the names and places of the story, and even some key plot points, but the story was unmistakeably based on Bram Stoker's novel. So Florence Stoker sued for copyright infringement, and won. The makers of Nosferatu were ordered to burn every negative and copy of the film, which they did.

However, piracy was a big thing back thing, just as it is now, and bootlegged copied of the film were hidden away. It's because of these bootleggers that the film remains to this day, and is perhaps one of the most terrifying films of all time. It is now in the public domain, so the entire film is on youTube. Enjoy.

Corn Flakes

The story of Corn Flakes dates back to the late 1800s. A group of Seventh-Day Adventists were creating new foods to tie in with their vegetarian diets the church made them do. Most of them experimented with a number of different grains, including wheat, oats, rice, barley, and corn. In 1864, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg used some of those experiments on some of his patients.

One day, he and his brother, John Keith Kellogg, left some wheat to cook while they ran some errands, and returned to find that the wheat had overcooked and gone stale. As they had a low budget, they decided that instead of discarding the mess, they would put go ahead and process it and see what happened. To their surprise, what came out was flakes, which they served to their patients. This on 8 August 1894, and a patent for "Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same" was filed on 31 May 1895, and issued on 14 April 1896.

The product became very popular among the patients, and shortly afterward, the brothers began experimenting with other grains. They soon formed their own company to market their product, they originally named their company Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which was later renamed Kellogg's.

The mascot of Kellogg's Corn Flakes is Cornelius "Corny" Rooster. In early adverts, his catchphrase would be, "Wake up, up, up to Kellogg's Cornflakes!", but later on he stopped talking and simply crowed.

One of the former patients of Dr. Kellogg was C. W. Post, who later went on to form a rival company for Kellogg's by selling the original Corn Flakes knockoff, Post Toasties.