The New York Times, June 6, 1897, p.18: POPCORN. In popcorn, it seems, we are to find the solution to many grave problems. Popcorn will make the whole world wealthy. The discoverer of the how and the why of this does not yet know how important is her discovery. She writes for a religious weekly, and her aim in exploiting the hitherto undreamt-of potentialities of popcorn was merely to indicate a new, entertaining, and profitable way for little boys and girls to help the missions. Where she lives a bushel of shelled corn costs $2.40. She has read "a statement" in another journal, not particularly religious but confessedly agricultural, that when properly popped, a bushel of corn will be increase to 540 quarts. A trustworthy popper, good enough for plain folks, can be bought for, say, 13 cents. Fire in plenty and a place to pop will, of course, cost nothing; while the retail price of popcorn ranges from 5 to 10 cents a quart. The average price, therefore, is 7½ cents a quart, but let us call it 7 in order to be as moderate as possible and avoid arithmetical complications. Thus it will be seen that for the expenditure of $2.53, with no labor to speak of, (for there is no better fun than popping corn,) any nice little boy or girl can produce popcorn worth $37.80, a profit of $35.27. The little boys and girls who do this are advised to use their profits to educate and clothe bare and benighted heathen, and teach them the catechism and the use of soap. But the first thing they ought to do is to pay off the National debt, and settle fortunes upon all the poor folks who are dangerously angry because of their poverty. There will be plenty of money left for the heathen. For that matter we need not leave this great work of reorganizing society through the beneficent influence of popcorn to children. We can all go into the popcorn business. Of course there would be no excuse for making so much popcorn if there were not uses to which popcorn can be put. The modest discoverer is not silent on this point, but her revelations are somewhat vague. She says she knows how to "prepare it nicely" by stirring a little melted butter into it while warm, and then dusting it with salt; but she forgets to tell what she does with it, after she has thus nicely prepared it, though presumably it is used as some sort of weapon of offense. The butter an the salt cost money, too. Popcorn is said, however, to be an excellent substitute for rice, and rice, as we all know, is used in large quantities at all fashionable weddings in the Boroughs of Brooklyn, Richmond, and Queens, in which, for that matter, all weddings are fashionable. They used to say at a near-by Summer resort that you could always tell a boarder at a certain hotel by the whitewash on his coat. Similarly, you can always tell a Brooklyn bride by the rice imprisoned in the trimming of her traveling dress. Popcorn, we fancy, will neither stick nor sting so badly as rice. Popcorn ought also to be useful for stuffing the real hair mattresses used in seaside hotels. Thus we see that popcorn has its uses and the millennium is actually at hand. One thousand bushels of corn, at $2,400, popped in 1,000 poppers at $130, will make 540,000 quarts of popcorn which can be sold at a profit of $35,270. There is nothing like it. One only needs to find people to buy the popcorn at 7 cents a quart and there will be no more poverty. And you can see at a glance how easy that will be. We can all pop corn and buy it of each other.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 11:40:45 +0000
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