Saturday, August 13, 2011

Dr. Wilston Bumpfer










Dr. Wilston Bumpfer was one of the least known and yet influential scientists of the mid-seventeenth century. While his achievements are few in number, the one for which he is most remembered is his invention of the green bean.
    Before 1737, those wishing to put something into a good casserole, were sorely lacking in options. With the invention of the onion ten years previous, and dairy products having been in existence for centuries, people were looking for some way to combine these divergent foods. Enter Dr. Wilston Bumpfer. One rainy autumn evening, while eating an onion and milk dish called Milchenfrig, the good doctor accidentally impaled his hand on his two pronged fork. As the servants scampered about looking for the bloodletting kit so they could bleed the impaled fork from his hand, he noticed that his napkin had fallen upon the table in a roughly long and tubular shape.
    Later he was to write that it was this folded and fallen piece of cotton soaking up his precious life essence   that caused him to think of a long thin vegetable that could act as a binder for the onions and dairy in his Milchenfrig. He spent the next five years cross breeding celery and pinto beans until he had created a long thin and yet shrunken piece of celery that had several beans inside. He called it a Celebean but his wife, the Duchess Bumpfer recognized the name would never catch on. She suggested green bean and it soon took off.
    So why do we all forget his contribution? Well, a young Benjamin Franklin stole it, after murdering the Bumpfer family, the bloodthirsty and conniving Franklin took his invention and claimed it for his own, thus thrusting himself square into the American Revolution and history.
 

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