The Curious Case of People Who Really, Really Wanted Credit for Inventing Things They Didn't

There's something uniquely American about the impulse to claim you invented something. Not like, a light bulb or the internet—something smaller. Something that matters mostly to you and the five people who show up to your retirement party. Something like a potato salad.

In 1926, a Pennsylvania woman named Ruth Graves Wakefield was experimenting with a chocolate bar in her butter cookie dough. The chocolate didn't melt evenly. Most people would shrug and move on. Ruth Graves Wakefield instead created the chocolate chip cookie and licensed the idea to Nestlé in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate. Reasonable. Clean. Over. Except it turns out at least three other people have spent the last ninety years sending increasingly aggressive letters to food historians insisting they were actually responsible. One woman even hired a lawyer in 1987 to argue her grandmother had done it first in a farmhouse in rural Ohio. The lawyer's opening argument was that no one in Pennsylvania would ever think to do this. The case was dismissed, but the letters kept coming.

Then there's the cheeseburger situation, which is somehow worse because it took place over decades with the same man. Louis Ballast owned a restaurant in Nebraska and spent forty-three years—from 1926 until his death in 1969—sending letters to newspapers, magazines, and anyone who wrote about hamburger history, insisting he had created the first cheeseburger by laying American cheese on a hamburger. Revolutionary. Groundbreaking. Certainly worthy of mentioning. His letters became so famous that historians eventually just started including him in footnotes as "the man who claimed to have invented the cheeseburger." He never got official recognition. He died thinking he was robbed. His local historical society now has a plaque.

The beautiful part about both stories is that they prove invention isn't the hard part—proving it is. In our era of Instagram receipts and TikTok timestamps, we think we've solved this problem. We haven't. Someone right now is writing a meticulously detailed Reddit post about how their uncle actually invented the avocado toast in 1987, and they have a Polaroid to prove it. They're going to be mad about this for thirty years. I respect that. I respect the commitment to being right about something nobody else cares about.

That's the real American dream: being so convinced of your importance that you wage a decades-long paper war with the entire culinary establishment.

This Week in Weird History: The man who spent 43 years sending letters about cheese never got the recognition, but the man who sold the rights got free chocolate forever—turns out the real victory is always the one nobody thought to fight for.