Give Thanks for the Unsung Geniuses

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, November 28, 2024

 

A prehistoric man encounters a clay pot filled with liquid. He doesn’t know that it had contained fruit and had been sitting outside for some time. Looking at the earthen vessel, he utters the one syllable most responsible for increasing the human race’s knowledge base over millennia:

 

“Huh.”

 

As anyone with a modicum of curiosity would do, this man sipped some of the fermented liquid, immediately feeling its effects on his mood. Thus did he become the first Homo sapiens to sample alcohol, and the euphoria he felt led other humans to develop and perfect the fermenting process. (Presumably after drinking his fill, he began calling up ex-girlfriends, ordering ironic T-shirts online, and writing an insufferably self-absorbed novel.)

 

As November rolls around every year, Americans begin crafting lists of the things for which they are most thankful. Many of these things are tangible: family, job, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and the like.

 

But I am also thankful for the things that can never be known. So I salute the nameless, faceless individuals who will never be recognized for inventing or discovering the great things we now take for granted.

 

Take, for example, a dispatch written from Italy in 1860 by an English travel writer. The Londoner describes a “peculiar” food product eaten by the Neapolitans.

 

“It is not considered good, nor will those by whom it is made ever succeed in turning it out good,” the traveler wrote. Nevertheless, the “Neapolitan delicacy” was a “social leveller,” as the shops that sold it were the “only places where the members of the Neapolitan aristocracy — far haughtier than those in any other part of Italy — may be seen masticating their favourite delicacy side by side with their own coachmen, and valets, and barbers.”

 

This local delicacy, of course, was pizza. But we will never know who the first person to slap tomato sauce and cheese on a flatbread was. Nor will we know precisely which Italian immigrant brought it to our shores. “Surely this food of kings deserves its own hut!” this new American likely exclaimed.

 

Look around you: Much of what you see was created or discovered by some anonymous person who will never have a statue erected or a building named in their honor. The first person to decide that peanut butter and jelly might make a good sandwich is not getting their picture on the American dollar bill, as deserved as that honor is.

 

Consider all the things we now take for granted that had to be discovered by an earlier human. At some point, a caveman trying to remember things (likely his Amazon password) thought, “Maybe I should write this down.” So he took a rock and scratched a picture into the side of his cave, and began bragging to women that he had his own newsletter and they should check it out.

 

Or, as crazy people and those on paleo diets do, just sit and stare at a loaf of bread for a while. What a complicated process this bread-making is! Aren’t you glad someone in an earlier age figured out how to go from grinding up wheat to baking up a loaf? And what about the beef that would eventually go on the bread? At some point, some guy looked at a cow, and the rest is Arby’s.

 

For that matter, the human mating process isn’t particularly self-evident. Someone had to figure this all out. First, the male had to lure the female back to his cave (with the promise of seeing his newsletter), then some trial-and-error ensued, after which he immediately fell asleep and lost her phone number.

 

Obviously, not every unidentified first is worthy of honor. At some point, someone decided to convince women that “sex work” was a signal of feminist empowerment, making Matt Gaetz a modern-day Mary Wollstonecraft. Similarly, we will never know the name of the person who decided to ingest the first processed coca leaf, even if it temporarily gave us some awesome soft drinks and a few great Rolling Stones albums. More recently, as soon as the internet allowed photos to be attached to emails and texts, some guy had the thought, “The world deserves to see the contents of my drawers, starting with Alice in accounting.”

 

Today, we focus on firsts in terms of “identity,” not accomplishment. Democrat Andy Kim of New Jersey was fêted for being the first Korean American elected to the U.S. Senate. Hooray for representation, sure, but let me know when Kim does something as important as the man or woman who pulled the first potato out of the ground and said, “I bet I can think of 500 recipes for this dirt-encrusted tuber.”

 

This Thanksgiving, we can be thankful for those potatoes, mashed with gravy, and all the things seen and unseen, identifiable and mysterious, that enrich our lives. Thank you to the person who figured out that glass could bend images to the point where if you strapped lenses to a nerd’s face, he would be able to see the world more clearly. Thank you to the first folks to let a dog or cat into their home, inventing the concept of pets.

 

Let us, this holiday, pay tribute to the nameless smarties whose contribution to society has been unmeasurable. Especially the guy whose discovery of alcohol makes Thanksgiving with the family tolerable this and every year.