Good morning, Whitewater
There are no public meetings scheduled for the City of Whitewater today. You have a clear path to the weekend…
It’s a sad day today, but a happy one in commemoration, also — Wired reports that on this day in 1999, “Aaron S. “Bunny” Lapin, the inventor of pressure-can whipped cream, dies at age 85.” Here’s the scoop story:
Lapin started out as a clothing salesman, but saw some opportunity during World War II food rationing, when heavy cream for whipping was hard to get. He mixed light cream and vegetable oil to concoct Sta-Whip as a suitable substitute.
He also devised a refillable aerating gun for commercial use by bakeries and restaurants. This he called the Fount-Wip, and he was on the road to gastronomic greatness.
But Lapin knew that everyday homemakers needed something a little easier to use than the clumsy, messy Fount-Wip….
He put good, old-fashioned, postwar real cream (no more need for the vegetable oil) into the new aerosol cans. Then he enlisted delivery milkmen (remember them?) to sell it in his hometown of St. Louis. He called the stuff Reddi-wip….
Time magazine in 1998 selected Reddi-wip in its cream-of-the crop roundup of the 20th century’s top 100 consumer items, right up there with color TV, the home dishwasher, the paper clip, the pop-top can and Spam (the food, of course).
Impressive American ingenuity — just one of the many, many reasons to love America.