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How Healthcare Changed – 13 – Penicillin: The Ten Years
A Scot came back from holiday in September 1928, found a dish he had not washed, and saw that a mould had killed the bacteria on it. He wrote it down. Then nothing happened for eleven years, because seeing was never the hard part. Article 13 follows penicillin from a… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Poured the Breakfast Bowl
Two rivals in one Michigan town taught America how to eat breakfast — and the patent that started it names the wrong brother. Battle Creek built the ready-to-eat cereal industry out of a sanitarium kitchen, ran a six-hour workday through the Depression, and made more than half the cold cereal… More⇢
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Women History Wrote Out – 09 – The Heading Nobody Read
The first injectable that got people off Molokaʻi. The chemistry that emptied wards. A method printed in capital letters in a medical journal under her own name. Alice Ball was twenty-three when she pulled the fatty acids out of chaulmoogra oil and turned an unusable folk remedy into something a… More⇢
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The Measured Institution – Part IV
Create a test to measure learning, make it consequential, and you get a system built to produce the number. In 1969 a school district on the Texas–Arkansas line paid a company eighty dollars for every grade level of reading gain; by the spring of 1970 the company’s own materials contained… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Bottled the American Table
Henry Heinz went bankrupt at thirty-one, owned nothing, and ran the new company for wages under his brother’s initials until a court set him free nine years later. What he built in those years put horseradish in clear glass so a stranger could see there was nothing hidden, and it… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 12 – Aspirin and the Birth of Big Pharma
Aspirin was the first drug the world knew by name. Bayer synthesized it in 1897, trademarked it in 1899, and then in 1915 did something no respectable drug house had done: it went around the physician and spoke to the patient directly, stamping its cross into every tablet. That decision… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Out-Invented Everyone
Dayton gave America the airplane, the cash register, the electric self-starter, and the industrial research laboratory — all inside twenty-five years, all from one mid-sized Ohio town. Then it watched nearly every one of them come to be owned somewhere else. This is the story of a city whose product… More⇢
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The Paper Nobody Came Back For
In July 1774 Thomas Jefferson sent a set of resolutions ahead to the Virginia Convention. The delegates read them, admired them, and set them aside as too bold. Then some of them paid to print it — Washington put in three shillings ninepence. Two years later Jefferson reused the argument… More⇢
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The Measured Institution – Part III
Everyone quotes the sentence. In 1934 Simon Kuznets wrote, on page 7 of a government report that sold for twenty cents, that the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income. Eight years later he carried the same instrument into a war and published… More⇢
Meet Your Host – Charles Cranston Jett
Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He developed the Field Studies methodology to teach “Critical Skills” and was endorsed by the Department of Labor in 1994. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts three podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog and Civic Sage platforms on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
