“When It Rains, It Pours”: The Morton Salt Girl
historydaily.org
historydaily.org
A company named Cerebos was formed in 1894 to mass produce the salt. To market the novel product, they went with the image of a boy chasing a bird whilst trying to pour salt on it with the tagline "See how it runs", referring to the old wives tale that one can paralyse a bird by putting salt on its tail.
http://cosgb.blogspot.com/2010/09/cerebos-ltd.html
The brand survives to this day and remains popular in the commonwealth countries, although the original phosphate based formulation is no longer used due to both cost and potential health effects.
Australian in that context could include a very wide range of Greek, Italian, Croatian, and Lebanese, goodies to pad out a small goods shop with more traditional Australian fare.
As a note - if you're ever looking for a foreign product, you can write the US distributor (or the main headquarters if there doesn't seem to be one) asking if there are any retailers in your area; there often are but they can be small and hard to find (no web inventory, etc).
it's also widely available in France. Like I had trouble placing the name, but the description of the image reminded it right away
Another fun fact:
Morton (tehnically, Morton Norwich) made other chemicals as well, including rocket fuel. The fuels were marked up so highly, that - together with a company called Thiokol - they decided they could make and fly the whole rocket engine cheaper than NASA could.
Their first attempt at rocket building was the Challenger, which blew up less than two minutes after launch, and took with it 7 people, and the Morton-Thiokol partnership.
[1]: From 1892, called an "old saying": https://books.google.co.il/books?id=gwFCAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA733&dq...
That's...not really true. Thiokol and Morton Norwich merged in 1982; Morton-Thiokol did a lot, wasn't centered on a proposal to “make and fly the whole rocket engine cheaper than NASA could”, and, in fact, the rocket engine business they had after the merger was the same one Thiokol had before the merger, just with the new entity’s name. Thiokol had been a contractor on the shuttle program since the 1970s.
> Their first attempt at rocket building was the Challenger, which blew up less than two minutes after launch
No, it wasn't. Thiokol was the contractor for the SRB motor segments from well before the merger, and Thiokol and then Morton-Thiokol made the motor segments for the SRBs for all of the launches before the 1986 Challenger disaster (and all of them after, though some under different names, after Thiokol was purchased.)
> and the Morton-Thiokol partnership.
Morton-Thiokol wasn't a partnership, but it's true that most of the chemical business was spun out as Morton in 1989, with the propulsion business staying as Thiokol. This wasn't really an unwinding of the merger; Thiokol had a substantial chemic business before the merger. It was a novel split of the combined business that happened to use the branding from the old components because it was available.
> Their first attempt at rocket building was the Challenger
>> No, it wasn't. Thiokol was the contractor for the SRB motor segments from well before the merger
I don't see how that differs. The first rocket made by Morton after the --partnership-- merger was the Challenger.
My great uncle was the CEO of Morton, and from him I heard (as a child) that the decision to make the engine was a direct result of the huge markup they had on the fuel. But the details are obviously fuzzy [like, maybe he was really CTO...], and its good to have some more facts.
IMO, The whole "Morton makes rockets" is interesting, no matter how you spin it.
Sorry, but that's just too inaccurate. Challenger was the name of an orbiter (one of several), the whole system was called the Space Shuttle, and one part of the system were the SRBs (Solid Rocket Boosters), and Morton-Thiokol was responsible for the actual rocket motor part of the SRBs.
The companies merged in the summer of 1982, right? The first Shuttle launch after the merger was STS-5, when Columbia launched in November 1982. Doesn't that count as Morton-Thiokol's first attempt?
(FWIW, Tiokol's first attempts were in the 1940s. And of course MTI had many successful attempts before the Challenger explosion.)
Thus it turns the quote is completely unambiguous and factually accurate.
Instead, the proper interpretation of sam_goody's comment requires us knowing ... what, exactly? When the last Thiokol employee touched the the engine? When Morton Thiokol made the first design change? (https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch6.htm says there was a design change when 'new Randolph putty was eventually substituted for the old putty in the summer of 1983', but that started in 1982, before the merger.)
So, when exactly was that?
What decided the moment when we can say the SRB motor units were something was Morton Thiokol's first attempt at rocket building, and not Thiokol's?
There is no rocket motor on an SRB. It's a giant firework. The whole SRB was Morton-Thiokoi if I'm not mistaken
And when it lights up, the shuttle is flying. No ifs, and or buts (or holding bolts).
Yes, there is.
> The whole SRB was Morton-Thiokoi if I'm not mistaken
You are mistaken. The rest of the SRB besides the rocket motor was Pratt and Whitney.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Boo...
So, a solid-rocket motor is not exactly a motor (like a liquid-fuel one) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-propellant_rocket but if that's the term used I'm happy with it, especially given there's a nozzle with directional control.
I stand corrected on MT making the whole thing!
Challenger technically was a rocket, but Morton Thiokol didn't make it. They did make SRB motors (which were the cause of the disaster), but the merger was in 1982. The Challenger disaster was in 1986. There were a lot of shuttle flights in between, and there wasn't a four year stockpile of SRB motors (there was some stockpile, though, which was a problem with the disaster.) The first flight with M-T manufactured SRB motors wasn't the Challenger disaster. (It may have been one of many of the earlier flights of Challenger, though.)
Heck, the disaster wasn't even the first shuttle flight with M-T SRB motors after NASA and M-T had identified the design problem, and M-T engineers had come up with a redesign (the first flight after that was Challenger, but not the disaster.) But it was a flight while they were still using pre-redesign SRBs, which was part of the problem.
> My great uncle was the CEO of Morton, and from him I heard (as a child) that the decision to make the engine was a direct result of the huge markup they had on the fuel.
Thiokol was in propulsion before the merger, and was chosen as the contractor for the SRB motors before the merger. It's possible that among the reasons for the merger was something Morton brought which enhanced the economics of that, but the merger had nothing to do with the decision to make rocket engines for the shuttle (which had nothing to do with doing it “better than NASA“, NASA’s use of contractors was routine for spaceflight programs, not something Thiokol sold them on uniquely for the shuttle program.)
So thanks for doing the digging. I upvoted you, and everyone else who linked to earlier usages.
If Morton Salt is trying to take credit for coming up with the saying, shame on them, but somehow I doubt they are. So doubly shame on historydaily.org for pushing a false narrative.
It goes to show that you can't blindly trust whatever you read, even on a .org site.
A domain ending in .org tells you that the owner chose a .org. Nothing else.
Of course, even then slashdot.org existed so the distinction wasn't really effective; later it DID become a bit of a signal because the "big three" were more expensive than .biz and friends so the latter became known for scam/spam sites.
Now it's all completely random and doesn't matter at all.
It has never been the case that you needed to be any particular kind of organisation (or an organisation at all) to get a .org, but in the early days it did tend to be used more by non-profits and the like.
Why was it built in parts? Because it was built in Utah.
If anyone wants to learn the history of rocket fuel(s) (not rockets, just rocket fuels), see the book Ignition! by John Drury Clark:
Morton Salt was a great employer until it wasn't. A young president decided to fire all the employees over 55. He reasoned they were too expensive and it would make room for younger employees that cost less and it would increase earnings. Raising the stock price would increase his compensation.
The young president was gone in a year after the stock collapsed. The company has been sold four or five times since and has gone from the industry leader to an also ran. My Dad was a few years away from retirement but serendipity reigned and he got another job and did OK.
History loves to repeat itself.
The Congress passed an age discrimination law in 1967 but at the last minute it was significantly weakened by lobbyists. The law was updated in 1986 and that's when the gates opened to people suing and getting sizeable awards.
Maybe it popularised the modern wording, but the story in the article isn't going for that angle at all.
It's a shame. Stories like this are fascinating when they turn out to be true. Like how "bucket list" entered the American vernacular so quickly and thoroughly that there are many people who believe the movie was named after a preexisting common phrase.
You mean like, "kick the bucket"?
nowadays though we've got zuckerberg pretending like he invented the term 'metaverse'
I should have known better. Can’t trust even simple things these days.
https://books.google.com/books?id=V2AEAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA4-PA169&...
"These days," as opposed to that glorious time in the past when you could trust anything some random stranger said to you.
My grandmother was the idiom queen (by the time the dementia really took hold, she was communicating in trite phrases just like 'kids these days' communicate in memes) and this was one of her favourites.
The meaning of the saying is fairly straightforward - "pours" being more voluminous than "rains", it's like saying "it never trickles but it floods". Related of course to the London bus, where you wait for ages and then 3 show up at once.
Morton's seems to take the sentiment, but change the meaning - it rains AND it pours, because the "it" changes between those two verbs. A clever play on words to change the meaning of and old idiom - maybe similar to Tesco's "Every Little Helps" that's catchy because it's similar and yet different - but as you say, definitely not the origin of the trite saying about misfortune or luck.
From at least 1726:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Rev._Jonatha...
> "Misfortunes never come alone," is an old and trite saying, and "when it rains it pours" is another phrase like unto it
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22when%20it%20rains%20it%20...
Google's Ngram Viewer seems to trace the phrase to the 1850s, though others have turned up earlier references:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=when+it+rains+...
And dialing in more on the period 1800 -- 1950:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=when+it+rains+...
Note that OCR and other errors may produce spurious hits or date references, though the record here seems pretty clear.
Anecdotally, I tend to use salt without the anti caking additives because I have a salt wasting condition, so I'm on a doctor prescribed high salt diet. When I've suggested sea salt to others with my condition, they have just lost their minds that it clumps and looks funny.
Historically, that was the norm for salt. It seems like a weird thing to be so hung up on, given the seriousness of the condition.
And hey if it does clump just bang it hard on the table.
Not to mention the open container design salt shakers inherently share which would imply a rather limited lifetime of the kernels.
I'm fairly certain this has to be primary a mechanical mechanism, if it even works at all. I recall plenty of salt shakers at airbnbs or whatnot that were quite soggy regardless of the amount of rice inside the shaker.
(Yes: we have rice in our salt shaker. All the best people do.)
The other change is the style of the umbrella which in its first iteration had for today's taste a rather strange looking handle.
My other favourite is “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”
I remember our salt shakers clumping when I was a kid in the 1990s back in Brazil. We used to put rice grains in it to capture moisture.
If you buy a common 1kg salt bag I bet it still gets wet, no idea why the additives didn’t take hold.
Why is the container disproportionately huge? Or is she only six inches tall?
And finally, so the container leaks salt if at any angle but upright? Why does Morton refuse to put better lids on their products?
Salt girl, recycling logo, Public Broadcasting Service logo.
https://www.healthdata.org/results/gbd_summaries/2019/diet-h...
If you want to eat healthy, and decide to cook all your own food, be prepared to use more salt. You'll need it compared to that prepackaged food. Especially in the summer, when you sweat more.
Failure to do so may leave you craving salty snacks, or lacking in energy.
So food in 1911 needed salt for your good health!
My point is to watch one's salt intake. The relative mortality risk from 5g of sodium per day is 1.0 to 1.1 (most likely a 5% shorter lifespan).
Small groups have blood pressure that is sodium sensitive and people with kidney disease have trouble too.
But high salt diets aren’t in and of themselves a problem.
You are directly contradicting my link:
> In 2019, a diet high in sodium was responsible for 44·9 million (95% UI 13·0–94·7) DALYs and 1·89 million (0·477–4·19) deaths. It was the leading dietary risk factor for attributable DALYs.
https://www.healthdata.org/results/gbd_summaries/2019/diet-h...
Please provide data to back up your statements.
A comprehensive review of the literature found that:
"When reviewing the evidence for an upper level of 5.8 g/day, it becomes apparent that neither the supporting studies selected by the health institutions, nor randomized controlled trials and prospective observational studies disregarded by the health institutions, document that a salt intake below this 5.8 g, has beneficial health effects. Although there is an association between salt intake and blood pressure, both in randomized controlled trials and in observational studies, this association is weak, especially in non-obese individuals with normal blood pressure. Furthermore a salt intake below 5.8 g is associated with the activation of the renin-angiotensin-aldosteron system, an increase in plasma lipids and increased mortality."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003306201...
From the study: Fig. 3. shows normotensive studies plotted with blood pressure on the Y-axis.
So, if you have normal blood pressure, reducing salt won't reduce it further. Am I getting it right?
According to data here, 46 percent of US adults has B.P. at least 130 systolic or 80 diastolic, and 32 percent have >= 140 systolic or 90 diastolic.
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/high-blood-pressure-redefine...
The Sacks study in the paper you linked (ref 15) shown in Fig 1 shows a strong benefit for people with 130 systolic.
But most people's bodies deal with excess salt without problem or impact on blood pressure.
What makes a lot more sense is that we can get all the sodium we need from the food we eat, given a balanced and varied diet, like the omnivores that we are. In fact, this is the only thing that makes sense: that our bodies are tuned to our natural diet and that we can get enough nutrition from the food our bodies expect without the need for any additives.
So let's be honest here: the only reason that modern people salt their food is for the taste, and nothing else (not even preservation is an issue anymore, with modern refrigeration technology). Which is fine and dandy, but not when it becomes an obsession and it causes overconsumption that can cause health problems.
Salt used to be extremely expensive, and there have even been wars fought over the salt trade.
As cited elsewhere in this thread, birth defects, and health issues abound without idodine too, which is why iodised salt is a law in many countries.
Through most of history, you ate salt water fish and also shellfish, or became sickly, and died.
Please do a little research. This isn't a guess, it's fact.
Recorded history is 5000 years btw but we've been around for more than 200,000 years, and most people definitely did not live near the ocean for all that period.
Instead of telling me to "do a little research" you show me what "research" you did that supports your preposterous ideas.
Plenty of other mistakes over the years like this (fat is bad for you, dietary cholesterol is bad for you, etc.)
There are exceptions where these concerns are valid -- but they're exceptions.