Milton Hershey (1857 – 1945) was an American chocolatier and philanthropist. He trained in the confectionery business, but having pioneered the manufacture of caramel, using fresh milk, he launched the Lancaster Caramel Company, which achieved bulk exports, and then sold it to start a new company supplying mass-produced milk chocolate, that had previously been a luxury. So began the mass production and consumption of "The Great American Chocolate Bar", first sold in 1900, and that became known as the "Hershey bar".
The milk chocolate in these bars uses fresh milk delivered directly from local farms. The process was developed by Milton Hershey and as a result, the Hershey flavor is widely recognized in the United States, but less so internationally, especially in areas where European chocolates are more widely available. The process is a company and trade secret, but experts speculate that the milk is partially lipolyzed, producing butyric acid, which stabilizes the milk from further fermentation. This flavor gives the product a particular sour, "tangy" taste that the US public has come to associate with the taste of chocolate, to the point that other manufacturers often add butyric acid to their milk chocolates.
Hershey saw chocolate-making machines for the first time at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This was a world's fair held to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. The centerpiece of the Fair, the large water pool, represented the long voyage Columbus took to the New World.
The fair included life-size reproductions of Christopher Columbus' three ships, the Niña (real name Santa Clara), the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. These were intended to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the Americas.
The ships, a joint project of the governments of Spain and the United States, were constructed in Spain and then sailed to America for the exposition. The ships were a very popular exhibit.
Other attractions included:
Built by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. This wheel was 264 feet (80 m) high and had 36 cars, each of which could accommodate 40 people.
The importance of the Columbian Exposition is highlighted by the use of rueda de Chicago ("Chicago wheel") in many Latin American countries in reference to the Ferris wheel. One attendee, George C. Tilyou, later credited the sights he saw on the Chicago midway for inspiring him to create America's first major amusement park, Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, New York.
Eadweard Muybridge gave a series of lectures on the Science of Animal Locomotion in the Zoopraxographical Hall, built specially for that purpose on Midway Plaisance.
He used his zoopraxiscope to show his moving pictures to a paying public.
The hall was the first commercial movie theatre.
The first moving walkway or travelator. It had two different divisions: one where passengers were seated, and one where riders could stand or walk. It ran in a loop down the length of a lakefront pier to a casino.
Electrification
The effort to power the Fair with electricity, which became a demonstration piece for Westinghouse Electric and the alternating current system they had been developing for many years, took place at the end of what has been called the War of the currents between DC and AC. Westinghouse initially did not put in a bid to power the Fair but agreed to be the contractor for a local Chicago company that put in a low bid of US$510,000 to supply an alternating current based system.
Edison General Electric, which at the time was merging with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric, put in a US$1,720,000 bid to power the Fair and its planned 93,000 incandescent lamps with direct current. After the Fair committee went over both proposals, Edison General Electric re-bid their costs at $554,000 but Westinghouse under bid them by 70 cents per lamp to get the contract.
Westinghouse could not use the Edison incandescent lamp since the patent belonged to General Electric and they had successfully sued to stop use of all patent infringing designs. Since Edison specified a sealed globe of glass in his design Westinghouse found a way to sidestep the Edison patent by quickly developing a lamp with a ground glass stopper in one end, based on a Sawyer-Man "stopper" lamp patent they already had. The lamps worked well but were short lived, requiring a small army of workmen to constantly replace them.
All the exhibits were from commercial enterprises. Participants included General Electric, Brush, Western Electric, and Westinghouse. The Westinghouse Company displayed several polyphase systems. The exhibits included a switchboard, polyphase generators, step-up transformers, transmission line, step-down transformers, commercial size induction motors and synchronous motors, and rotary direct current converters (including an operational railway motor). The working scaled system allowed the public a view of a system of polyphase power which could be transmitted over long distances, and be utilized, including the supply of direct current. Meters and other auxiliary devices were also present.
Part of the space occupied by the Westinghouse Company was devoted to demonstrations of electrical devices developed by Nikola Tesla including a two-phase induction motor, and generators to power the system. Tesla demonstrated a series of electrical effects, some which were in previous lectures performed in America and Europe.
These included his "Egg of Columbus", a metal egg that spun on a disk in a demonstraton of an electric motor’s rotating magnetic field, and a high-voltage, high-frequency alternating current demonstration where a near by coil lit a wireless gas-discharge lamp held in his hand.
Chicago bested New York City, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis for the honor of hosting the fair. The Exposition was an influential social and cultural event and had a profound effect on architecture, sanitation, the arts, Chicago's self-image, and American industrial optimism.
More than 27 million people attended the exposition during its six-month run. Its scale and grandeur far exceeded the other world's fairs, and it became a symbol of the emerging American Exceptionalism, an ideology holding the United States as unique among nations in positive or negative connotations, with respect to its ideas of democracy and personal freedom.
One visitor to the fair, early in July, was a Wellesley College English teacher named Katharine Lee Bates. The so-called "White City" later inspired the reference to "alabaster cities" in the fourth verse of her poem "America the Beautiful".
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
In 1976, while the United States celebrated its bicentennial, a soulful version popularized by Ray Charles peaked at number 98 on the US R&B chart.
Popularity of the song increased greatly following the September 11 attacks; at some sporting events it was sung in addition to the traditional singing of the national anthem. During the first taping of the Late Show with David Letterman following the attacks, CBS newsman Dan Rather cried briefly as he quoted the fourth verse.
The Great American Chocolate Bar was, through mass production to enable the affordable mass consumption of what was previously as a luxury product.
How it is made
How cocoa is sourced - A taste of slavery?
In 2001, the report "A Taste of Slavery: How Your Chocolate May be Tainted" won a George Polk Award.
In it were claims that traffickers promised paid work, housing, and education to children who were forced to labour and undergo severe abuse, that some children were held forcibly on farms and worked up to 100 hours per week, and that attempted escapees were beaten. It quoted a former slave: "The beatings were a part of my life" and "when you didn't hurry, you were beaten." Many Ivorian cocoa plantations use forced labor, and a ship was found near West Africa allegedly carrying child slaves.
The condition of cocoa labour is determined by commodity price fluctuations. Income from the cocoa industry for small cocoa farmers is not stable because when the market price of cocoa is low, the price paid to each link in the industry gets lower and cocoa farmers who produce raw products get very little in the chain. In order to keep the cost of cocoa low, cocoa farmers seek the cheapest labour in order to make a profit. In Africa, a cocoa labourer can only make less than 2 dollars per day, which is below the poverty line. Child labourers between the ages 12 to 15 in the cocoa industry work as much as an adult labourer, but they are paid less than adult laborers. Coffee farmers also prefer child labourers because "tamed children" are more respectful and easier controlled in comparison with adult labourers.
A survey conducted by U.S Department of Labor indicated that in 2005, 92 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 15 are involved in heavy load carrying work in the cocoa industry, which can cause open wounds. Child labourers also face physical punishment including withholding meals and beatings, when they cannot meet work expectations or try to escape.
In 2006, a study showed many children working on small farms in Côte d'Ivoire, often on family farms. Over 11,000 people working on small Ivorian cocoa farms were surveyed. A report funded by the U.S. Department of Labor concluded that "Industry and the Governments of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana have taken steps to investigate the problem and are implementing projects that address issues identified in the Protocol."
In 2008, in a report featuring responses from Cargill and Hershey's, Fortune magazine reported that "little progress has been made", and in June 2009, the OECD released a position paper on child labor on West African Cocoa Farms, and launched a website on its Regional Cocoa Initiative.
A major report released in 2015 by the Payson Center for International Development of Tulane University, funded by the United States Department of Labor, reported a 51% increase in the number of child workers (1.4 million) in the cocoa industry in 2013–14, compared to 2008–09.
Those living in "slave-like conditions" increased 10 percent in the same time period (to 1.1 million). The report estimated that over 1.4 million children ages 5 years old to 11 years old were working in agriculture in cocoa-growing areas, approximately 800,000 of them engaged in hazardous work, including working with agricultural chemicals, carrying heavy loads, and working with sharp tools.
A study of the issue, published in Fortune magazine in the U.S. in March 2016, concluded that approximately 2.1 million children in West Africa "still do the dangerous and physically taxing work of harvesting cocoa". The report suggested that it would be an uphill battle to improve the situation:
According to the 2015 edition of the Cocoa Barometer, a biennial report examining the economics of cocoa that's published by a consortium of nonprofits, the average farmer in Ghana in the 2013–14 growing season made just 84¢ per day, and farmers in Ivory Coast a mere 50¢. That puts them well below the World Bank's new $1.90 per day standard for extreme poverty, even if you factor in the 13% rise in the price of cocoa last year.Sona Ebai, the former secretary general of the Alliance of Cocoa Producing Countries said that eradicating child labor was an immense task and that the chocolate companies' newfound commitment to expanding the investments in cocoa communities are not quite sufficient. ... "Best-case scenario, we're only doing 10% of what's needed. Getting that other 90% won't be easy. ... I think child labor cannot be just the responsibility of industry to solve. I think it's the proverbial all-hands-on-deck: government, civil society, the private sector. And there, you really need leadership."
