This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet.

I'm just going to take a few things here and tie each one up in a bow and then attach a small

parachute and throw them out there and let the wind carry them where it may.

First there were the machines. They are really what did the trick. Auto-snearing was a baker in Chicago

and he had invented this treat called the candy cake. It was a chocolate bar with a tiny pastry

in the center and it was good. So he decided to put a label on it and market it. He changed the

two seas in candy cake to Cays because why not and he founded the Curtis Candy Company.

Curtis was his mother's main name and it sounded way better to American ears than the German

Schnearing there at the start of World War I. And the candy cake did pretty well for the

Curtis Candy Company. Better than its polar bar or honeycomb chip or its Earth O nut dip.

Good enough for auto-snearing to expand his factory in the 1920s and automate much of its

production and bring himself closer to his greatest dream. The 5 cent candy bar.

The competitions cost a dime but the Curtis Candy Company couldn't make the candy cake on the

assembly line. The pastry inside was too delicate to be made by machines. So what if instead they

just threw in some peanuts? No one cares if a peanut breaks while bouncing along a conveyor belt.

Plus they were cheap. Then he whipped up some nougat and he eventually swapped out expensive sugar

for a syrup made from corn grown right there on his farm. And he had knelt it. The nickel candy bar.

It needed a name. And you can either believe he was so taken with the birth of Grover Cleveland's

daughter. An event that had taken place some 30 years before. The birth of a daughter who had

died some 17 years prior to Schnearing figuring out the whole peanut and nougat thing that he

decided to call his candy bar baby Ruth. Because Ruth Cleveland's name was just on everybody's lips then.

Everybody was just always going on and on about. Just had such joyful associations with the

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