1. March 12, 1782: Benjamin Franklin, in France during the Revolutionary War to make mischief for the British, composes and prints up a page of an imaginary newspaper, the Boston Independent Chronicle. The newspaper carries a letter supposedly from Captain Gerrish of the New England Militia that describes in detail a package of more than 1,000 dried scalps captured from Seneca Indians paid by the British to terrorize men, women, and children among the American colonists. The package was to be shipped to England for the gratified amusement of King George. In a letter to a friend, Franklin says of his story: "The Form may perhaps not be genuine, but the Substance is truth."

Yes

2. August 21, 1835: The New York Sun begins a series of articles describing Royal Astronomer Sir John Herschel's discoveries of sentient beings living on the Moon through a giant telescope. The ladies of Springfield, Massachusetts subscribe to a fund "to send missionaries to the benighted luminary."

Yes

3. April 13, 1844: The New York Sun publishes Edgar Allan Poe's (spurious) account of a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by balloon. The demand for the paper is so great that crowds block the Sun office throughout the day waiting to buy copies, and Poe is unable to get a copy for himself.

Yes

4. September 1844: During James Polk's presidential campaign, the Whig-run Ithaca Chronicle publishes a letter, claiming to quote directly from a Baron von Roorback's Tour through the Western and Southern States in 1836, about a slave caravan. It includes a description of 40 slaves among the manacled purchased from Polk, whose initials had been branded into their shoulders. Thurlow Weed eagerly copies it into his Albany Evening Journal and it becomes a major issue in the campaign, until it is shown to be a hoax. The passage was created by doctoring a passage from Excursion Through the Slave States, written by George W. Featherstonhaugh and published in London in 1844.

Yes

5. October 4, 1862: Samuel Clemens, then a writer for the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise, publishes an article about the discovery of a sitting, petrified man in the mountains, of which "every limb and feature" was still perfect, except turned into stone. The story is widely believed and reprinted in other papers around the country.

Yes

6. March 2, 1864: Union cavalry officer Colonel Ulric Dahlgren leads a raid against Richmond, whose main purpose is to free prisoners of war being held by the Confederacy at Belle Isle. Dahlgren is shot and killed during the unsuccessful raid. Southern soldiers find documents on his body that outline other objectives of the raid, including orders for Dahlgren to burn and destroy the city and to kill Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, actions clearly outside the conventional rules of war. The Richmond Examiner publishes the text of the documents and says in an enraged editorial that the North has decided to begin conducting the war "under the Black Flag."

Yes

7. May 18, 1864: The New York World and the New York Journal of Commerce print what they believe to be an Associated Press story about a proclamation from President Lincoln ordering a huge new conscription of soldiers. This causes speculators to sell stocks and buy gold on fear that the Civil War will continue far longer than was expected. It is quickly revealed that Joseph Howard, the city editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, forged the story so that he could buy gold before the story came out and sell it at the end of the day.

Yes

8. April 1, 1874: New York Herald reporter Joseph Clarke and editor Thomas Connery panic New Yorkers by publishing an article they have concocted about a mass escape of animals from the Central Park Zoo. In the story, animals roamed the city looking for prey of the species homo sapiens, causing "terrible scenes of mutilation." Cartoonist Thomas Nast later references the hoax in a political cartoon he draws for Harper's Magazine, in which he depicts the Democrats as an ass and the Republicans as an elephant, creating the parties' political icons.

Yes

9. August 16, 1924: During Prohibition, New York Herald reporter Sanford Jarrell publishes a story about a "mysterious joy-boat of 15,000 tons which was lying about 15 miles off Fire Island, aboard which Long Island millionaires and pretty playthings of the idle rich were drinking intoxicating beverages and disporting themselves with the utmost abandon by night." The day after the article is published, the Coast Guard is assigned to hunt down the vessel. When the Herald editors discover the story is a hoax, they fire Jarrell.
Yes

10. November 20, 1967: U.S. News and World Report claims that it can confirm the authenticity of The Report from Iron Mountain, a book recently published by Dial Press. The book purported to be the text of a leaked report issued by a secret study group commissioned by the Johnson Administration. The group concluded that a lasting peace, if it were ever achieved, would not be in the best economic interests of society, and that the government should foster a war mentality by scaring people with exaggerated threats of terrestrial, and even extraterrestrial, foes and impending environmental disasters. It also recommended that the government heighten inter-ethnic tensions within the country and even re-institute slavery. Author Leonard Lewis confessed in 1972 that he wrote the book, but defended it as a useful stimulus to public debate on the Vietnam War. Lewis claimed that the 1971 leaked publication of the "Pentagon Papers," which were real, demonstrated that the government is capable of actions that are as outrageous as anything in his "satire."

Yes

1744 The first written record of ice cream in America (and the first use of the exact phrase "ice cream" rather than "iced cream" is made when a journal entry by William Black of Virginia notes that Maryland Colonial Governor Thomas Bladen notes servedice cream ("After which came a Dessert no less Curious; Among the Rarities of which it was Compos'd, was some fine Ice Cream which, with the Strawberries and Milk, eat most Deliciously…") to him and other dinner guests at the Governor's home in Annapolis:

not contested.

1774 Immigrant from London Philip Lenzi, a caterer, opens the nation's first ice cream parlor, on Dock Street in New York City. On May 12, 1777, Lenzi places the first advertisement for ice cream in America in The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, noting that he would make it available "almost every day.":

not contested.

1780s George and Martha Washington often serve ice cream to their guests. In one year alone, President Washington spends over $200 on ice cream, a huge amount at the time:

not contested.

1784 Thomas Jefferson records a French recipe for vanilla ice cream (custard based) in his recipe book. In 1802 at a White House state dinner, he serves small balls of vanilla ice cream encased in warm pastry:

not contested.

1806 Frederic Tudor begins cutting and shipping ice from Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to states south and around the world:

not contested.

1813 James and Dolley Madison serve strawberry ice cream at Madison's second inaugural ball. Mrs. Jeremiah ("Aunt Sallie") Shadd, a freed black slave, who has a catering business in Wilmington, Delaware, makes the ice cream from her own recipe. Also working at the White House as a chef is African-American cook and entrepreneur Augustus Jackson, who, after he leaves the White House and moves to Philadelphia, creates many new ice cream recipes and a sophisticated system of distributing it to retail merchants in large tin cans:

not contested.

1832 Massachusetts brass founder John Matthews invents the soda fountain:

contested. Some sources credit Pennsylvania physician Samuel Fahnstock with inventing it in 1819. And some credit Jacob Ebert of Cadiz, Ohio and George Dulty of Wheeling, Virginia with inventing it in 1833, and taking out a patent on it.

1843 Philadelphia housewife Nancy M. Johnson invents the hand-crank ice cream freezer, and receives a patent for it, the rights to which she sells for $200 to wholesaler William G. Young:

not contested.

1851 Quaker Jacob Fussell, using icehouses and a large version of Johnson's ice cream freezing machine, begins to produce ice cream from his Baltimore, Maryland factory (and then in Washington, DC, Boston, and New York), and selling it on the street from carts, helping to turn ice cream into a cheap, regular treat:

not contested.

1867 J. B. Sutherland of Detroit, Michigan patents the refrigerated railroad car:

not contested.

1874 The ice cream soda is created by soda concessionaire Robert M. Green for the semicentennial celebration of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He had been making soda drinks of sweet cream, syrup, ice, and carbonated water, a drink already well-known and called, fancifully, "ice cream soda." When he runs out of cream, he substitutes ice cream (Philadelphia-style vanilla ice cream, which means it was not custard based):

contested. Some sources say the ice cream soda was invented by two newsboys, John Robertson and Francis Tietz, at Kline's Confectionary Store in New York City in 1872, when they asked Mr. Kline to put a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a slice of pineapple into a glass of soda water.

1878 William Clewell, a confectioner in Reading, Pennsylvania, receives the first patent for an ice cream scoop. It is shaped like a candle snuffer:

not contested.

1881 The ice cream sundae is created, in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, by Ed C. Berners, who operates an ice cream shop at 1404 Fifteenth Street. A teen-aged customer, George Hallauer, asks Mr. Berner to put some chocolate sauce on his ice cream. Prior to this, chocolate sauce had been used only in ice cream sodas. Berners complies and charges Hallauer—and other customers afterwards—5 cents. He serves it only on Sunday:

contested. Some sources say the ice cream sundae was invented on Sunday afternoon, April 3, 1892, by Chester C. Platt, proprietor of the Platt & Colt Pharmacy in Ithaca, New York, when he improvised a bowl of vanilla ice cream, topped with cherry syrup and candied cherry, calling it a "Cherry Sunday," in honor of the day in which it is invented. Other sources say the phrase "ice cream sundae" was created in Evanston, Illinois, sometime in the late 1800s, when, in an effort to circumvent the religious ban against frivolously "sucking soda" on Sundays, Garwoods' Drugstore offered its customers what was essentially a concoction of everything in an ice cream soda, without the soda.

1894 Edson Clemant Baugham patents a spring-handle, one-handed ice cream scoop, which is manufactured by the Kingery Company of Cincinnati:

not contested.

1897 African-American inventor Alfred L. Cralle, while working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, patents the lever-operated, half-globed-shaped, hand ice cream scooper:

not contested.

1902 Mechanical refrigeration takes over from ice and salts in the ice cream industry:

not contested.

1904 The ice cream cone is introduced, at the St. Louis World's Fair, Louisiana Purchase Exposition. An ice cream vendor named Arnold Fornachou runs out of dishes and a Syrian vendor named Abe Doumar (or a Lebanese vendor named Ernest A. Hamwi) seizes the moment to roll a "zalabia"—a sugar waffle—into a cone and comes to his rescue:

contested. Some sources say the ice cream cone was invented by Italian immigrant Italo Marciony of New York, a pushcart ice cream vendor in New York, in 1896, who also, perhaps, invented the ice cream sandwich by putting a slice of ice cream between waffle squares cut from a sheet. Other sources say the ice cream cone has its origins in the mists of history, but was first described in Mrs. Marshall's Cookery Book, whose author, Agnes Marshall, published it in London in 1888. Still others discern a woman licking an ice cream cone in an 1807 picturing fashionable customers eating at the Frascati café in Paris, although this is uncertain because cone-shaped ice cream bowls were not unknown at the time.

1904 Soda jerk (and soon-to-be graduate of University of Pittsburgh's School of Pharmacy) David E. Strickler invents the banana split (and the elongated dish to serve it in) while working in a drug store in Latrobe, Pennsylvania:

contested. Some sources credit Ernest Hazard, owner of Hazard's Restaurant in Wilmington, Ohio, with inventing the banana split in 1907, and his cousin, Clifton Hazard, with inventing the name "banana split."

1905 Eleven-year-old Frank Epperson leaves his fruit-flavored drink (powdered flavor plus water) outside in cold weather, with a stirring stick in it, and "invents" the "Epsicle ice pop," which he patents eighteen years later, in 1924. His children rename it the "Popsicle.":

not contested.

1906 In C. C. (Clarence Clifton) Brown's Ice Cream Parlour at 7007 Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, the first hot fudge sundae is served:

not contested.

1910 President William Howard Taft begins keeping a Holstein cow named "Pauline Wayne" on the White House lawn, replacing one named "Mooley Wooly," who had provided milk (and from it, ice cream) for the First Family for a year and a half:

not contested.

1911 General Electric offers an electric refrigerator for home use:

not contested.

1919 Prohibition becomes law, causing some beer manufacturers to become ice cream manufacturers and some saloons to become ice cream parlors:

not contested.

1919 Onawa, Iowa inventor and high school teacher Christian Nelson, who moonlights as a soda jerk, invents the first chocolate-covered ice cream bar He calls it the "Temptation I-Scream Bar," and writes the advertising jingle, "I scream, you scream, we all scream for the I-Scream Bar." After going into partnership with confectioner Russell Stover, Nelson changes its name and patents it as the "Eskimo Pie.":

not contested.

1920 Youngstown, Ohio candy maker Harry Burt invents the first ice cream on a stick, the Good Humor Bar:

not contested.

1921 The Commissioner of Ellis Island provides that a scoop of vanilla ice cream be included in a "Welcome to America" meal for immigrants arriving through the facility:

not contested.

1922 Chicago Walgreens employee Ivar "Pop" Coulson takes a malted milk drink (milk, chocolate syrup, and malt), adds two scoops of vanilla ice cream, mixes it up, and creates the milk shake:

not contested.

1923 H. P. Hood of Boston introduces the paper cup filled at the factory with ice cream at the National Ice Cream Convention in Cleveland. He calls it the "Hoodsie," but it is renamed the "Dixie Cup" in 1924:

not contested.

1923 A & P supermarkets introduce ice cream cabinets in their 1,200 stores nationwide:

not contested.

1926 The Hershey's Company expands its product offerings to include Hershey's Syrup:

not contested.

1931 Ernest Wiegand, horticulturalist at Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) in Corvallis, develops the modern method of firming and preserving maraschino cherries:

not contested.

1940 J. F. "Grandpa" and H. A. "Alex" McCullough, proprietors of the Homemade Ice Cream Company in Green River, Illinois, begin to market "soft serve" ice cream under the name of "Dairy Queen.":

not contested.

1984 President Ronald Reagan designates July as National Ice Cream Month and the third Sunday of the month as National Ice Cream Day:

not contested.

1. Graham Crackers

Yes. Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) was the most renowned food reformer of the 19th century. He wrote The Philosophy of Sacred History Considered in Relation to Human Aliment and the Wines of Scripture. Graham was known by the nickname of "Doctor Sawdust" because of his promotion of the virtues of bread made with whole-wheat ("Graham") flour. His followers set up "Graham hotels," like small, provisional utopias, where guests following Graham's dietary regimen could board with like-minded progressive reformers.

Russell Thacher Trall (1812-1877) was a water-cure physician who opened the Hygieo-Therapeutic Institute in Manhattan in 1843. Trall was the creator of Graham crackers (made with Sylvester Graham's "Graham flour") sometime in the 1850s.

2. Quaker Oats

No. Business partners Henry D. Seymour and William Heston of Ravenna, Ohio, registered the Quaker Man as a trademark in 1877 (the first trademark registered for a breakfast cereal). They made Quaker Oats, steel-cut oats packaged in 2-pound paper boxes with cooking directions on the outside, an innovation for the time. The name "Quaker Oats" would seem to tie the product to the owners' religious views, but Seymour said he chose it simply because he found an encyclopedia article on Quakers and decided that the qualities described there—integrity, honesty, and purity—were ones he wanted to link to his company's product. Heston credited himself with the name, saying that while walking on the streets of Cincinnati, he had seen a picture of Quaker William Penn, whose clothes and character inspired him to choose the name. Nevertheless, either way, it couldn't have hurt to conjure the figure of a religious Nonconformist, waving a scroll inscribed "Pure," on the package of a breakfast cereal. Potential customers would have associated it with the other Progressive health food items, especially wholegrain breakfast foods, that were being urged by food reformers descended from Protestant Nonconformists and Inner Light advocates.

3. Granola

Yes. Dr. James Caleb Jackson (1811-1895) invented the first dry, whole grain breakfast cereal, which he called "Granula." He took over the "Our Home Hygienic Institute" at Dansville, New York. Jackson did not serve red meat, tea, coffee, alcohol, or tobacco at the spa and emphasized fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed grains.

Ellen Gould White (1827-1915), the Seventh-Day Adventist prophetess, had a vision in 1863 in which the relation of physical health to spiritual health, the body to the spirit, was revealed to her. She set up the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, as well as other sanitariums. She published the pamphlet, Health, or How to Live. Don't trust the appetite, she said, which has become perverted, or the dietary customs of society. She counseled eating grains, nuts, fruit, and whole-grain flour.

Many Seventh-Day Adventists, including Ellen G. White, were guests at Dr. Jackson's health resort. He argued that controlling the appetite and passions would make the person more spiritual. Granula was a mix of Graham flour and water baked in brick ovens, then broken up into bean-sized bits, and baked again and then broken up into smaller bits. They had to be soaked in order to be soft enough to eat. Jackson created the "Our Home Granula Company" and sold Granula by mail order.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) was a follower of Ellen White. He studied medicine in New York City, where he conceived of revolutionizing "the breakfast food idea" after growing weary of preparing his own daily breakfasts of seven graham crackers and an apple. When he opened his Adventist health sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, he found a way to make already-prepared breakfast food for his patients, inventing Granola, which was clearly indebted to Dr. Jackson's Granula.

4. Shredded Wheat

Yes. Henry Drushel Perky (1843-1906) was a dyspeptic who studied and practiced law in Nebraska and was a member of the Nebraska State Senate. He moved to Colorado for his health in 1880, where he was a lawyer for the Union Pacific Railroad, and then a partner in a steel railroad car manufacturing company. He came to believe that, "The evil in man cannot be legislated out of him, but it can be fed out of him," and opened a vegetarian restaurant in Denver. In 1892, he developed "little whole wheat mattresses," Shredded Wheat. He founded the Cereal Machine Company, eventually moving it to Niagara Falls. His mission was to provide food to the human body so that man would revert to his "natural condition."

5. Kellogg's Corn Flakes

Yes. In 1894, in order to "replace the half-cooked, pasty, dyspepsia-producing breakfast mush," John Harvey Kellogg and his younger brother Will Keith Kellogg (1860-1951) developed a method of flaking and toasting cooked wheat kernels, producing a breakfast food cereal they called "Granose." Will then turned to corn, inventing Corn Flakes.

In 1898, they founded the Sanitas Food Company, to sell health food via mail order. In 1906, Will established the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flakes Company. When J. H. sold to W. K. his interest in the corn flakes company, J. H. used the proceeds in 1911 to create the influential Race Betterment Foundation, in order to prepare the way for a super race of "new men," and to set up a "eugenic registry" that evaluated couples for breeding based on their genetic pedigrees in order to stop the propagation of "defectives."

6. Grape-Nuts

Yes. Charles William Post (1854-1914) went to Dr. Kellogg's sanitarium as a patient, but then became interested in making breakfast food himself. In 1895, he founded the Postum Cereal Company, with the sole product of Postum, a coffee replacement made from wheat and molasses, the idea for which he probably got from Dr. Kellogg's similar product. In 1897, he also developed Grape-Nuts, a breakfast cereal from wheat that had a nutty flavor and, as a sweetener, used malt dextrose, which was commonly called grape sugar. Post founded his own highly successful breakfast cereal company. Each package of Grape-Nuts came with a kind of religious tract, The Road to Wellville, on how to gain a healthy body and spirit.

7. Post Toasties

Yes. C. W. Post's cereal flakes, which he first marketed in 1908, were called "Elijah's Manna," but when people objected on religious grounds, he changed their name to Post Toasties.

8. Ralston Purina Wheat

Yes. William Henry Danforth (1870-1956), a St. Louis mill owner, founded the Robinson-Danforth Commission to feed the nation's farm animals in 1894, but a hurricane leveled his mill a year later, and he was forced to rebuild, after which he began making a breakfast cereal, Purina Wheat.

Danforth then contacted "Dr. Everett Ralston," whose real name was Albert Webster Edgerly (aka Edmund Shaftsbury or Shaftesbury) (1852-1926), a debarred lawyer, con man, cult leader, self-appointed health expert, and elocution teacher, who had founded perhaps the world's first multilevel marketing scheme. This was the Ralston Health Club, a Washington, D.C.-based, national membership health products club, with 800,000 members in 1898.The Club required its members to pay large amounts for a series of books that told the secret of how to live for 200 years by collecting and preserving in the body the occult force of "Glame" and learning to speak his invented "Adam-Man tongue." Danforth secured "Dr. Ralston's" endorsement of Purina Wheat, and added his name to Danforth's company—Ralston-Purina. Danforth's cereal became Ralston Health Club Breakfast Food, then Ralston Purina Wheat, then Instant Ralston.

9. Wheat Chex

Yes. Eventually Ralston-Purina introduced Wheat Chex and its sister cereals. Danforth advocated a proto-New Age, positive-mind-over-matter approach to life, which also combined elements of "Muscular Christianity" and the Social Gospel, summed up in his "four square" philosophy which inspired his company's checkerboard logo, and which was echoed in the form of the little squares of Wheat Chex. "I dare you to develop a magnetic personality," he wrote in his book, I Dare You!

10. Wheaties

No. Like Quaker Oats, Wheaties was not developed out of the religious conviction of its inventors. In 1921, a clinician at a Minneapolis health clinic accidentally spilled wheat bran gruel onto the top of the stove. When the heat dried bits of it, he thought it had become a candidate for a marketable breakfast cereal product. He took the idea to the Washburn Crosby Company, whose head miller, George Cormack, perfected the product, and it was first introduced in 1924. Although its originators had no direct religious motivations, the aura surrounding other breakfast cereal products would seem to have made possible the company's extraordinary claims about Wheaties' ability to endow the body with strength and links to an array of athletic superstars.