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Henry Drushel Perky (December 7, 1843-June 29, 1906) was a lawyer, businessman, promoter and inventor. Perky is the inventor of shredded wheat.
He was born in Saltcreek township, Holmes County, Ohio, the fifth son of Daniel Jefferson Perky (c. 1808-1862) and Magdalena Drushel (c. 1812-1911), both of Pennsylvania. He married his wife Susanna Melissa Crow (born 1845) on August 3, 1865, in Mount Hope, Ohio.
Perky was a vegetarian. In the early 1890s, at a Nebraska hotel, Perky, suffering from diarrhea, encountered a man similarly afflicted, who was eating boiled wheat with cream. The idea simmered in Perky's mind, and in 1892, he took his idea of a product made of boiled wheat to his friend, William H. Ford, in Watertown, New York -a machinist by trade. Here they developed the machine for making what Perky called little whole wheat mattresses, known as shredded wheat. They presented the machine at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, probably while Perky was trying to attract buyers for his cylindrical steel rail passenger car.
His original intention was to sell the machines, not the biscuits. He returned to Denver and began distributing the biscuits from a horse-drawn wagon in an attempt to popularize the idea. There he founded the Cereal Machine Company. Perky received United States Patent Number 548,086, dated October 15, 1895.
The biscuits proved more popular than the machines, so Perky moved east and opened a bakery in Boston, Massachusetts, and then in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1895, retaining the name of the Cereal Machine Company, and adding the name Shredded Wheat Company.
Whether he developed his ideas on nutrition before the machine or after, Perky was a food faddist who believed the fundamental issue was how to nourish a man so that his condition will be natural. Although John Harvey Kellogg and Charles William Post are better known, Perky was a pioneer of the cookless breakfast food and he was the first to mass-produce and nationally distribute ready-to-eat cereal. By 1898, shredded wheat was being sold in North and South America and Europe.
In 1901, drawn by the idea of inexpensive electrical power for baking, and the natural draw of a popular tourist attraction, he hired Edward A. Deeds to build a new plant at Niagara Falls, New York. Deeds became a director of the National Food Company.
Perky invited a large number of notables to a special luncheon. Canadian author Pierre Berton describes the bill of fare: a Shredded Wheat drink, Shredded Wheat biscuit toast, roast turkey stuffed with Shredded Wheat, and Shredded Wheat ice cream. The factory itself was called the Palace of Light, and was white-tiled, air-conditioned, well-lit with floor to ceiling windows, and equipped with showers, lunchrooms (a free lunch for women -men had to pay 10¢), and auditoriums for the employees. It had a roof garden with a view of the falls. A representation of the factory appeared on the Shredded Wheat boxes for decades.
In 1908, the company again took the name of the Shredded Wheat Company, and another factory was built in Niagara Falls. A third plant was added in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in 1904, known as the Canadian Shredded Wheat Company.
By 1915 the Pacific Coast Shredded Wheat Company had been added in Oakland, California, and by 1925, a factory in Welwyn Garden City, England, had joined the family.
In December 1928, the company was sold to National Biscuit Company. The product name became Nabisco Shredded Wheat circa 1941. Production of Shredded Wheat was begun in Naperville, Illinois in 1970. All other plants remained in operation until 1954, when the original Palace of Light was shuttered.
More information: The Robinson Library
Breakfast is simple: multigrain toast with natural peanut butter,
oatmeal, yogurt, fruit, or healthy cereal.
Natalie Morales
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