Annette Kellerman was a very famous and important woman in the Modern era. A native of Australia, Kellerman was born July the Sixth of 1887, of a very musical stock of parentage. Few, if any, might have imagined young Annette Kellerman, crippled by a curious Victorian ailment and unable to walk without steely leg braces, would be destined for such greatness. But in fact, a teenaged Kellerman would (figuratively) burst from these constraints, and many more as well, becoming the first of the greatest girl-swimmers.

Kellerman set world records for her swimming prowess and was the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1905. She would even dive from a height of sixty feet into a pool of crocodiles. Her swimming became a spectacle in fact, and her vaudevillian performances and groundbreaking work in synchronized swimming would be captured in the early Twentieth century on film, most notably in the now-lost A Daughter of the Gods. This film was not only the first film to feature a nude woman (Annette Kellerman, of course), but was also the first film the exceed one million dollars in production costs, and was shown accompanied by a full orchestra.

Some would agree that the title of that film could be used to describe Annette Kellerman, who was declared the “perfect woman” in a 1908 study. And who could argue that Kellerman pioneered our modern conception of femininity with her invention of modern women’s swimwear? Prior to this, women were required to swim in full-length gowns. But not Annette Kellerman, trail-blazing swimmer, health enthusiast and feminist. She had a vision of a world of health and beauty and elegance, where such constraints as full-length gowns had about as much of a place as a flaccid mole in a wack-a-mole game.

Annette Kellerman also wrote several books and, a longtime vegetarian, ran a health-food store in California, before her death on November the Sixth 1975.

In the field of breakfast, the rubric of the “breakfast cereal” has become such a point of saturation that its history is never given the slightest consideration. It’s merely taken for granted that in a spectacular spread of orange juice, milk, toast, butter, eggs, and so on, the center piece will be a bowl of cereal, a ceramic or plastic half-orb filled with processed grains submerged in milk, with a perfect silver arm protruding outwards, a sort of bridge between food and mouth. It’s assumed that this is all part of some timeless tradition, dating back perhaps to antiquity. And yet, prior to the American Civil War, this dish was unheard of.

The chronicles of the breakfast cereal begin with one Dr. James Caleb Jackson, a prolific New Yorker born in 1811, who had worked as a farmer, abolitionist, journalist, and hydrotherapy pioneer. In fact, prior to his first receiving hydrotherapy, Dr. Jackson suffered poor health himself, to the detriment of his many pursuits. Thus it was not until the midpoint of the nineteenth century that his vision would become nascent. Alongside his trailblazing work in hydrotherapy was a staunch advocacy of a new vegetarian diet, which arguably may have led to the establishment of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The robust cornerstone of this diet was in grains. But how to get these grains from the fields and into our bodies? The answer was one of the most visionary revelations of modern invention: Granula, a cereal composed of coarse nuggets of Reverand Graham’s flour, so stout it required overnight soaking, so rich in bran it was unlike anything else in creation. Granula, invented in 1863, was the first breakfast cereal, and the forefather of modern-day Grape Nuts.