The Invention of Cotton Candy, Part 1
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January 30, 2025
TLDR: This podcast episode explains the origins and connection between cotton candy and Dragon's beard candy, a culinary tradition from China.

In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, hosts Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick take listeners on a delightful journey exploring the history and science behind cotton candy, also known as candy floss or fairy floss. They delve into its origins, cultural significance, and the fascinating mix of technology and confectionery art that brings this sugary treat to life.
What Is Cotton Candy?
Cotton candy is a unique confectionary known for its light, airy texture and intense sweetness. Defined by its ephemeral quality, it is a fluff of sugar that evaporates almost immediately upon consumption. The podcast references Edward Hirsch's poem, which metaphorically describes cotton candy as "sugary air" and emphasizes its fleeting nature.
The Historical Ties to Other Confections
The discussion includes connections between cotton candy and various other cultural sweets:
- Dragon's Beard Candy: Known in China, this treat shares similarities with cotton candy, featuring finely spun sugar encasing a nutty filling.
- Spun Sugar: This classic culinary technique predates cotton candy and involves heating sugar to create delicate threads.
Evolution of Cotton Candy
The 1904 World's Fair
The invention of cotton candy as we know it today is credited to dentists William Morrison and confectioner John C. Wharton, who showcased their machine for spinning sugar at the 1904 World's Fair. This innovation marked a significant moment in confectionery history, transforming a simple idea into a popular carnivalesque treat.
- Technology Behind Cotton Candy Production: Cotton candy is made by melting sugar and spinning it at high speeds, a process that creates fine strands of sugar that coalesce into a fluffy mass.
Cultural Significance
Lamb and McCormick highlight why cotton candy is intrinsically linked to fairs and carnivals. They explore the nostalgia and sensory experiences attached to consuming cotton candy outside, reinforcing its cultural ties to childhood memories and public events.
The Science of Cotton Candy
Heating Sugar Syrup
The hosts discuss the science of sugar syrup and the importance of temperature control in the candy-making process. Understanding the sugar's state—whether thread, softball, or hard crack—affects the final product significantly:
- Thermal Stages: Specific temperatures determine the thickness and texture of the syrup, influencing how sugar behaves when spun into cotton candy.
Cotton Candy as Sugar Glass
Interestingly, cotton candy is described as a type of edible sugar glass, marking it as an amorphous solid—similar to fiberglass—which has fascinating implications for both its texture and how it must be handled.
Ephemerality and Enjoyment
Lamb and McCormick connect the ephemeral nature of cotton candy with the idea of enjoyment in the moment. This fleeting pleasure—akin to a child's excitement in fairytales—captures the essence of enjoying candy as much for its visual appeal as its taste.
Conclusion and What’s Next
As the podcast wraps up, they set the stage for further exploration in upcoming episodes. The next segment promises a deeper dive into the evolution of cotton candy in the 20th century and how these innovations led to the diverse variations we see today.
Key Takeaways
- Cotton Candy's Origins: Often traced back to a memorable showcase at the 1904 World's Fair.
- Cultural Dessert: Significant ties to global culinary traditions, especially in Japan and China.
- Scientific Complexity: The conversion of sugar syrup into cotton candy involves precise temperature management and understanding of sugar's physical properties.
- Endearing Rituals: Eating cotton candy is often tied to cultural rituals, childhood, and the sensory memories associated with fairs.
Listeners are left with an engaging understanding of cotton candy, blending history, science, and technology into a fascinating narrative that speaks to the sweet tooth in all of us.
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Cotton Candy by Edward Hirsch. We walked on the bridge over the Chicago River for what turned out to be the last time. And I ate cotton candy, that sugary air, that sweet blue light spun out of nothingness. It was just a moment, really, nothing more. But I remember marveling at the sturdy cables of the bridge that held us up and threading my fingers through the long and slender fingers of my grandfather.
an old man from the old world who long ago disappeared into the nether regions. And I remembered that eight-year-old boy who had tasted the sweetness of air, which still clings to my mouth and disappears when I breathe. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And that was, I said it in the opening, but again, that was the poem Cotton Candy by the American poet Edward Hirsch. And that's going to be relevant today because we're starting a couple of episodes on the subject of Cotton Candy and some of its historical predecessors. But I thought this would be a good poem to feature. First of all, just because I love it, it's very plainly stated, but very beautiful, very evocative. There's something
strong lurking in it about the interplay of strength and permanence on one hand with the imagery of the cables on the bridge and the kind of tenacity of memory, but then on the other hand about ephemerality, like the fleetingness of human life.
and the inherent nothing substance of cotton candy, which somehow feels after it's eaten like it never existed, like it was never a substance to begin with. And yet it persists as a taste that clings to the mouth, as Hirsch says, clings to the mouth and disappears when you breathe, kind of implying that
or some things that are ephemeral and they disappear when we live. But anyway, to move on to the subject, yes, we're going to be talking about cotton candy, AKA candy floss, AKA fairy floss. Now, Rob, I don't know if you think along the same lines as me here, but these alternate terms for cotton candy, which I have encountered before, always struck me as incredibly disgusting because like a lot of American English speakers, my age, I assume,
The only time I ever use the word floss is when referring to dental floss. And in fact, for most of my life, I just assumed that the dental application was the primary or even only meaning of the word floss is dental floss.
Yeah, I mean, that's obviously the primary way I use it. And the other usages of floss that I've encountered are always, you know, expressly or I feel like I got the impression that they were derived from dental floss. Like everything begins with dental floss and therefore the idea of there being like a parallel usage of it just didn't occur to me either.
Yeah, yeah. So historically, this is not the case. The English word floss, from what I can tell, has uncertain etymological roots. It might be related to the English word fleece, which goes back to wool from a sheep or similar animal. Or it might come from a French term, floss, meaning maybe wool or perhaps silk. But anyway, floss means fibers like silk, wool, hair, or thread.
So candy floss is candy hair, which also doesn't sound very good. Maybe it's just cultural familiarity, because you also don't eat cotton. But for some reason, to me, cotton candy is about as appetizing as the terms for this substance get. Yeah, plus at least cotton, it's organic in nature. And therefore, it's like cotton candy, well, that just sounds straight good for you, right? Yeah.
That's right. Yeah. It's health food. When, of course, if I'm assuming everyone out there has either had cotton candy or, or some derivative of cotton candy or even counted it.
You know that it is as the poem so wonderfully describes it, blue light spun out of nothingness. It's sugary air. It's just sweetness, like aggressive sweetness in this like strange, barely physical form. It just melts in your mouth immediately. And of course, I'm always reminded of that video that we discussed in past episodes about raccoons, where raccoon is given cotton candy.
and the raccoon lowers it into the water as they want to do. And then the raccoon is seemingly just horrified when it melts away and instantly vanishes. Just a diamond of sadness and disappointment in that little video. Yeah.
Another question to lodge here at the beginning. I think maybe we can partially answer this as we go along. But I was thinking, why is it that we associate cotton candy with fairs and carnivals? Why is it something you get at the amusement park or the county fair and other candies are not something? I mean, I guess you can get a
some sweet tarts at the county fair, but it's a particular kind of event associated candy, unlike many others.
Yeah, I mean, as we'll discuss, I mean, basically get into the fact that it does have 20th century origins that are very tightly bound to the world's fair. So it kind of, to a large extent, is born out of the world's fair. The technology to create it has long been very mobile, works well with like a food cart sort of a situation. But it does drag in all these other additional aspects. Like I think of Cotton Candy, which I have not had since I was a child,
for obvious reasons. It makes me think of stickiness out in public, away from a place to wash your hands. It makes me think of sweating and eating cotton candy at the same time. There's a certain grungeiness to the experience that is not altogether unattractive to the childhood brain, but it is closely associated with an outdoor, dizzy environment.
I mean, yeah, I guess a lot of parents would not be thrilled at the idea of like bringing home a tub of cotton candy for their child to eat at home. Yeah. But kids want, I mean, it's bright. It's amazing looking. It's novel. And I think all kids should have it, you know, at least a few times. I think I was asking my own child was like, like, yeah, what was your favorite cotton candy that you ever had? And they're like, well, I think I only had it once. And I think maybe it was more than once, but
Still, yeah, I probably have been kind of limiting on the cotton candy, like is one of those things as a parent when you're as if you can get cotton candy, you might be inclined to sort of steer them towards something else. Yeah. It's a great thing to bring as a treat to the children of someone else at their house. Hey, kids, play with this in the living room.
Yeah, because it's pure sugar, it's sticky, has no real nutritional value. It's pure novelty, and therefore it is the perfect thing to have it as there. And it's one of those foods where the appeal of it is pure sensory novelty. It's really not going to be like the best tasting candy you're going to ever have. It's like what's appealing about it is that it is unusual, that it looks interesting and that it feels interesting in the mouth.
Yeah, we'll get into much later in this discussion that there are some traditions of cotton candy and some technologies with cotton candy that are like pushing the boundaries of what's possible. And they've managed to make it look even more amazing, even more like some sort of a strange blue sugar flame brought forth from another realm.
But I haven't tried it. And I suspect that the taste can only be so complex because it is still is just like an assault of sweetness, I would imagine. Yeah. I feel like there's also concerning fairs. There's the not quite overt connection to be made between cotton candy and clown hair, you know? Clowns have, you know, bright colored hair that is often in big, like poofy arrays that may resemble cotton candy. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah.
And for me too, I'm also reminded of killer clowns from outer space, the horror movie from 1988, in which you have an array of wonderfully grotesque and colorful clowns. I think some of the best horror movie clowns ever. And there are some key sequences where we find out that they use cotton candy to spin cocoons around their human victims.
I'd forgotten about that. Yeah. That's good. And that wonderful usage. And I also find it interesting because obviously there's a comparison being made here between spun cotton candy and spun silk cocoons. And you actually find these connections made as well in some Chinese traditions with particular confections that are at least akin to cotton candy. Okay.
All right, so at this point, we really should turn to a very obvious question. Before we get into the history and invention of cotton candy properly, what is it? What is this strange blue sugar air that is summoned out of some sort of a technological vat when a man sticks a paper cone or a conical array into a pit?
Yes, very good question. And the science behind cotton candy turned out to be surprisingly fascinating, at least to me. It sent me on a number of unexpected tangents, so I hope you'll enjoy coming along with me.
I want to shout out one of the best sources I found on this, which was a series of chapters in a book called Candy Bytes, the Science of Suites. This was by authors Richard W. Hardell and Anna Kate Hardell. Richard Hardell is a professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin.
Now, to really understand what's going on here, before we get into the direct how and why of cotton candy, we should do a brief explainer on the science of heating sugar syrup, which is a mixture of sugar and water. The precise heating of sugar syrup is actually a big part of the candy making process. And the authors of this book talk about a fact that I thought was quite wild. They discuss how
before candy thermometers were in common use candy thermometer. If you've never seen it before, you know, it's just a type of thermometer with a certain temperature range. You pin it to the side of a pot or whatever vessel you're heating your sugar syrup in and it has sort of markers on it that will let you know different stages of the sugar syrup heating process. And I'll explain more about that in a minute. But apparently,
In the old school days, a lot of candy makers would test the temperature of their boiling syrup by feel, literally with their fingers. Please do not try this yourself. This could lead to horrible, horrible burns. The only thing worse than touching a boiling hot liquid is touching a hot liquid that sticks to your skin.
Apparently, and please don't get any ideas. I'm just going to describe the trick here, but you don't know how to do it, okay? You don't know how to do it, right? So don't try this at home. Apparently, the trick was the old candy maker would dip their fingers into cold water first and then quickly dip them in the hot sugar syrup and then back into the cold water. Again, please do not try this. Apparently, there's kind of an art to doing it right.
and even experienced candy makers would end up with serious injuries and scars. But the idea is that the feel of the boiling syrup along with the visual appearance would help them know what temperature the syrup had reached.
Yeah, this, this detail, I'd never run across this before, but this matches up with other things I was reading about in terms of confectionary traditions and different cultures. And you can just look around you and certainly in any major city. And you can see examples of this, like to be a candy maker is to engage in a specialized profession. Like not everyone can do it. Yeah, it's serious business. And you know, you have to be mentored into it. You have to learn the tricks and the art of the trade.
Now, the question is, why would it be so important to know exactly what temperature your boiling sugar syrup had reached? Why would you actually risk third-degree burns just to know what temperature exactly the syrup was? Well, it's because the chemical and physical properties of sugar syrup change greatly depending on exactly how hot it has gotten.
So the authors mention these benchmarks. I don't know if this is the exact terminology you'll see on most candy making thermometers, but they mention the following stages. Okay, there is the thread state, and these are, I'm not going to give the temperatures for everything, but it starts with the thread state at 230 degrees Fahrenheit or 110 Celsius.
And the final state I'm going to mention is that about 305 degrees Fahrenheit or 152 Celsius, the states are thread state. Then you get softball state, firmball state, then hardball, soft crack, and hard crack.
Aren't these enticing to your mind? Don't you want to know what all of these mean? Yeah, there's a lot of let a baseball terminology. It sounds like it has nothing to do with baseball. Nothing at all. Oh, it does sound like all of them could be like a hard crack is like the bad hitting. No, no, nothing to do with baseball. It'll all make sense in the end.
The thread state is when you're just lacing up your boots and then it all works. That's right. Should have the trash-shocking state. The interesting thing about sugar syrup, this makes it very different from plain water, is that as you continue to boil it, over time, its boiling point goes up. How is that possible? After all, we all know that when you boil a pot of water, it has a maximum temperature.
At one atmosphere of pressure, the hottest your boiling water can get is 212 Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius. You keep applying heat to the pot and it will never get any hotter as long as it can boil off. I mean, if you use a pressure cooker and you pressurize it, you prevent the steam from escaping, you can get it hotter. But if it is at regular pressure, the steam can escape, it will just keep boiling at the boiling point, never get any hotter until all the water has evaporated.
However, when you add a significant amount of sugar to the water, you actually increase the boiling point of the solution. The sugar molecules dissolved in the solution make the water molecules more resistant to evaporation. When you've got sugar in the water,
It's harder for those water molecules at the surface of the pot of water to make the phase transition into steam and boil off. It takes more energy to boil the solution, which means the boiling point goes up. Mix in sugar. It's got a higher boiling point. Here's the interesting thing.
the amount of energy it takes to evaporate water from the solution is proportional to the sugar content. So the more sugar is in the solution relative to the amount of water, the higher the boiling point. So as you heat the sugar syrup to its boiling point, water evaporates, it does boil off, and this increases the ratio of sugar to water in the syrup.
and thus increases the boiling point even further. And it will do this until eventually all of the water is evaporated or almost all of the water is gone, and at some point the sugar will just burn. Beyond increasing the boiling point, another consequence of increasing the sugar to water ratio of the syrup through heating is that the viscosity of the syrup increases. In other words, it becomes thicker.
And this increase in viscosity is what candy makers are talking about with phrases like softball hardball soft crack and so forth. So these terms mostly describe something about what a drop of the syrup at each temperature and viscosity state.
does when you scoop it out, you plop it into a bowl of cold water. So for example, at the soft ball state, you drop a bit of syrup into cold water and it forms little threads and you can gather these up and mold them into a soft mass with your fingers. But the syrup at the soft ball stage is not thick enough to hold its shape.
and it will slowly collapse and flow under the force of gravity alone. Imagine the texture of the soft caramel filling in a chocolate truffle.
And so from here, we go up the chain. You go to the firm ball state. This means you can make it into a ball, you can form it into a ball with your hands, but it will be easily deformed and molded with the fingers. It'll basically hold its shape against gravity. At the hard ball stage, the cooled syrup will firmly retain its shape. The authors use saltwater taffy as an example of this texture.
And after the ball stages, you've got the crack stages, soft crack and hard crack. And the authors describe this point as follows, quote, sugar syrup cooked to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and cooled quickly in cold water forms hard brittle threads that crack when you snap them, thus the hard crack state.
In fact, sugar cooked to this temperature and cooled quickly to room temperature turns into a sugar glass, an amorphous matrix of sugar molecules that has solid-like characteristics. Hard candy and brittle are cooked to 300 degrees Fahrenheit to form sugar glasses.
So really, when you come back to the idea of monitoring the temperature as the syrup boils, the temperature monitoring is an indirect way for the candy maker to measure the remaining water content of the syrup, since the boiling point goes up as the water content goes down.
now regarding this concept of sugar glass from the quote i read there's actually another chapter in the book on this idea which is both interesting uh... on its own and relevant to the subject of cotton candy because as counterintuitive as this sounds
Cotton candy, this fluffy melt-in-your-mouth mass, is a type of sugar glass. In fact, as the authors describe it, they say, really, cotton candy should be thought of as a type of fiberglass. It's a fiberglass that you can eat. That feels entirely accurate and as appetizing as it should be.
This actually leads to something that I didn't know about old special effects in the movies. Did you know that sugar plays a role in the history of breakaway glass on movie sets?
I have always heard this, but I've never closely examined it, you know, but I'd always heard, you know, accounts of like, oh, there's going through sugar glass there or accounts like, well, it was supposed to be sugar glass, but they ended up using real glass and somebody got injured, that sort of thing. Oh, okay. So you knew I didn't know this before or one of those many things maybe that if I knew I forgot.
I didn't know enough about it to ever, like, cite it because it's one of those things that didn't back in my mind and have to think, well, maybe I heard that wrong. Maybe they didn't use sugar. No, no, you didn't hear it wrong. It's not often the case today, but I'll explain. So when you see a movie stunt where somebody gets thrown through a plate glass window or, you know,
you know, generally glass breaks on a person. That is almost always a special prop called breakaway glass. It looks like regular glass when it's solid. It looks like regular glass made out of silica, but it is not. It's some kind of clear brittle material that shatters on impact, but it doesn't form the hard sharp edges that would cut you like regular window glass does.
These days, it's often made out of some kind of plastic resin, but in older movies, it was usually made out of sugar. And by the way, sugar glass is not just a term used in the breakaway glass thing. A lot of the candies people eat are essentially a form of sugar glass, modified sugar glass, lollipops, jolly ranchers, lifesavers, etc. You can kind of see the glassiness when you think of the texture of these things.
Well, now I just, I really want to look up some examples from, from old movies where someone is like 100% going through a window pane made out of sugar glass. Yeah, like you shatter through it and then you get up dust yourself off, pick up the pieces and eat them. Possibly. Children and animals form in to consume the precious sugar glass. Yeah. I think they use sugar glass to make the, to make the methamphetamine and on the breaking bad set. That's right. I do remember reading that.
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But to come back to the chemistry of it, so as we mentioned already, you make sugar glass by boiling syrup to the hard crack stage. This means taking it past 300 degrees Fahrenheit. At this point, the remaining mixture is only about 2% water.
The authors talk about how sugar actually comes in two primary physical arrangements, solid sugar, of course, in melted forms of sugar, but solid sugar is either going to be crystal in sugar like rock candy or sugar glass. And that would include both Jolly Ranchers and Breakaway Glass on movie sets and Cotton Candy.
Glasses are interesting from a physics and chemistry perspective because they combine properties of a solid and a liquid. So they seem solid enough when you look at them and touch them. But they actually behave in some ways like a liquid. So crystalline solids have these regular patterns into which the molecules are arranged. If you look at them at the molecular level, you will see these long repeating chains. It's a very structurally uniform.
glasses, which are called amorphous solids, do not show these regular patterns, at least not on the large scale. They might have small patterns in little local areas of molecules, but they're largely more jumbled up. The molecules are all kind of just mixed together and kind of frozen in a chaotic mess. So an interesting consequence of the different molecular arrangement of glass is that while
It might be perfectly solid on a normal human timeline. Glasses do tend to flow in a way that crystalline solids do not.
And here in the book, the authors, given illustration of this by making reference to something we've talked about in the show before, the University of Queensland pitch drop experiment. I was trying to remember when this came up. I know it won an Ig Nobel Prize, so it may have been in that context, or it may have been some other time we were discussing Rayology, which is the scientific study of how matter flows. The short version is this experiment, which began in the 1920s.
think is still ongoing or at least was ongoing until recently. I think it might still be going on. It consists of leaving a mass of tar pitch, which is so thick, it really seems like a solid. Sitting that down in a funnel and then subjecting it to atmospheric conditions and measuring how long it takes for part of it to drip out the bottom of the funnel, I think the finding was that each drop took roughly eight to 10 years. Oh, wow.
So this chunk of tar looks totally solid to us, but in regular atmospheric conditions, it is flowing. It's just flowing very slowly. And other glasses are like that, except flowing even more slowly. And here at the author's site, a now debunked belief. So what I'm about to say is a myth. Do not take this away as genuine knowledge.
But I now debunked belief about stained glass windows in some medieval cathedrals. This was based on the observation or the observation people thought they had made that some of these window panes appear to be thicker at the base than they are at the top. And to whatever extent that is true, the popular explanation is.
They're melting. These windows were made hundreds of years ago, and installed it. I don't know. You imagine a cathedral is built in the 1200s, and these windows are put in, and this has just been over hundreds of years. They're gradually flowing down due to the force of gravity.
And so the basis of them are getting thicker than the top. And now the authors note that this claim is disputed by experts. I went and looked this up, and it seems to me it's not just disputed it from what I can tell it is thoroughly disproven. For example, I found the following paper. This is called Viscous Flow of Medieval Cathedral Glass. And this is by Oscar Gulbaton, John C. Morrow.
Zauju Go and Ullis in Boratav, published in the American Journal of the American Ceramic Society 2018. Their abstract begins by describing the urban legend about the flowing windows and then notes that, quote, advances in glass transition theory and experimental characterization techniques, unquote, will allow this idea to be tested more directly than it ever has before. And then from here, I'm going to read from the abstract with some abridgments for simplicity, quote,
In this work we investigate the dynamics of a typical medieval glass composition used in Westminster Abbey. Depending on the thermal history of the glass, the room temperature viscosity is about 16 orders of magnitude lower than found in a previous study of soda lime silicate glass, which is a common type of glass used in making windows.
But the authors go on later, quote, despite this significantly lower value of the room temperature viscosity, the viscosity of the glass is much too high to observe measurable viscous flow on a human time scale. Using analytical expressions to describe the glass flow over a wall, we calculate a maximum flow of about one nanometer over a billion years.
Just for context, a nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter or 2% as wide as some viruses. A sheet of paper is roughly 100,000 nanometers thick. If they are flowing like that, it would not be enough for us to measure. This would not explain any measurable thickness difference at the bottom of the class.
You'd need some sort of like crazy time machine slash, I don't know, alien preservation of a cathedral to be in play. It's just impossible to imagine a scenario where this would be observable to the naked eye. Though glass does flow. I mean, those windows will be melting by the heat death of the universe. They're just not going to be flowing in a few hundred years.
But anyway, this observation relates to a very interesting scientific measure that the authors of this book mention. The hurdles mention what is called the Deborah number. This is a number used in rheology. Again, rheology is the study of how matter flows to describe the ratio of two figures. One is how quickly a fluid mass flows or how quickly it deforms under pressure.
versus how long you were able to observe it. And a cool fact is that the Deborah number gets its name from a passage in the Hebrew Bible. It's in the book of Judges, chapter 5, which is telling of a song by the prophet Deborah in which she's prophesying a great destruction to come. And she says, this is the King James Version, Lord, when thou wentest out of seer,
When thou marchest out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water, the mountains melted from before the Lord.
Sometimes that line about the mountains melting before the Lord is expressed as the mountains flowed before the Lord. I think this is a later interpretation. Some theologians explain this by saying that it's not just a simple expression of power, i.e. God can melt mountains, but an expression of God's dominion over time
meaning like he lives and sees forever. He is eternal. So to him, mountains which are completely solid throughout the lifetime of a human, not a noticeable change in a few decades. To God's point of view and seeing outside of time, they just flow like soft caramel, which would be somewhat scientifically accurate. I am not convinced that's what the author of this passage actually had in mind. It sounds to me more like a classical expression of power and might, but interesting nonetheless.
Oh, absolutely. I love it when there's an interpretation of ancient writings like this that are not actually pushing some sort of ancient alien technology agenda, but are like, you know, it's kind of nice that science matches up here in a way that, again, is not pushing an agenda in either direction.
Yeah, well, I'm not trying to slam the passage in any way. I mean, this is a great passage of the Bible. That interpretation might be implying a kind of scientific insight that the authors of the passage probably did not have, but at the very least, it is a very interesting coincidence. And if the author actually did have that insight, that's quite interesting too.
But, but to come back to sugar glass, of course, sugar glass is much keener on flowing than the soda lime silicate glass that would be used in a stained glass window in a cathedral. Sugar glass will flow more easily. And this leads to apparently funny considerations in older movie making.
So the authors talk about how if a prop window of sugar glass was made in the morning on an old movie set, the production would kind of need to hurry along and shoot the window smashing scene soon, because the window wouldn't last forever.
As you might guess if you've ever left jolly ranchers out in a hot car under the stress of heat and moisture conditions in the air, the sugar glass window would gradually soften and then eventually begin to melt and flow like the mountains before the Lord. Oh, wow. Yeah, I mean, we've all heard a red.
examples of really hot movie shoots, you know, be it a set or some sort of a location, throw melting sugar glass into that scenario. Yeah. Now, here's where we finally get back directly to cotton candy.
The heartels claim that cotton candy is probably descended from a previously existing confectionary product called spun sugar. Now, spun sugar is made by heating sugar syrup to the hard crack phase. Remember, that's the highest phase again. That's how you make sugar glass. You take it up to past 300 degrees Fahrenheit. And then you pour that syrup over something like a fork or a whisk, which allows it to drip and stretch out and form these long
thin strands as it cools and hardens. So sometimes people, I've seen this on like cooking shows before where people make shapes out of spun, spun sugar, you know, they'll like pour the threads over the back of a bowl or something like that and then peel it off. And then you'll have this interesting wiry dome of, of these sugar threads. To me, spun sugar has always kind of looked like a thin wire. It's kind of shiny. So it has that metallic look to it.
Yeah, yeah, and I have encountered this on some desserts as a grownup. And yeah, I mean, it's probably the best place to utilize this sugar technology for the adult palate, right? Because it's not acting on its own. It's just kind of like a little novelty on top of something that maybe has a more complex flavor.
I'm not knocking it, but I think the appeal of spun sugar is more for looking at than eating. I don't know how much fun it really is to eat these little wires of sugar syrup. But it's nice to know that you can. So here the authors talk a bit about the history of how cotton candy was invented, like where the first machines came from. I think we'll get more into that later in maybe in
later today or in part two of the series but to begin with just like what is it physically what is it cotton candy is sort of like spun sugar but taken to an almost spiritual extreme of wispiness. It's usually made with a special machine which includes a.
Rapidly rotating disk or tray called a spinner and then in the middle of that tray there is a heating element. So you pour the flavored sugar into the middle of the spinner with the heating element, it gets melted by the heating element and then in this in the liquid form as the thing spins it leaks out of tiny holes in the outside wall of its container spinning container.
And these tiny streams of melted sugar make contact with the cold, unheated air outside the spinner, then quickly solidify into sugar glass, but microscopic hair-like strands of sugar glass. Then the operator collects all of these fibers from a larger kind of container or tray, collects them into a cone or onto a stick, and here's your cotton candy.
Now, here's where we come back to the comparison to fiberglass. The Hartels in the book write, quote, fiberglass, first commercialized by the Owen Corning Fiberglass Corporation in 1938, is made by extruding molten silica glass through small holes to make thin strands or fibers of glass.
As the strands exit the extruder, they cool into the solid glassy state and are collected for further processing. The process is essentially the same as for making cotton candy, which is just great. Now, of course, there are major differences due to the chemical differences between silica-based glass and sugar glass, regular fiberglass made out of
you know, glass glass, silica glass is used as an insulation material in construction. It's quite resistant to heat and moisture. That is one of its main appeals. Cotton candy is exactly the opposite. Contact with heat or moisture will destroy the structure of cotton candy. So once it's made, it's got a short shelf life, or you've got to like seal it off against the atmosphere, basically, like
You need to eat it right away or put it inside watertight packaging. The watertight packaging is not just for protection against the raccoon washing full dunk scenario. Sugar is hygroscopic, meaning it will absorb water from the air around it.
Usually, there's some water content in the air. I guess your cotton candy might survive longer if you make it in the middle of the desert. To whatever degree it's humid outside, cotton candy will quickly go from being fluffy and delightful to collapsing down and becoming a sticky, semi-melted mess. Then, of course, if you actually splash water on it or it gets rained on, that's just the end of it.
Yeah, hard breaking. In fact, you can look up, I did before we started here, cotton candy, like slow death of cotton candy time lapse videos. And these are really good. And they always have hilarious music because you're just watching joy die. You're watching a lump of cotton candy over the course of three or four hours, just slump down and collapse.
But the music that's playing sounds like like orbital or something. It's very like feel good upbeat. I was surprised by that. I thought it would be more like, you know, 90s nails hurt or something, you know, Johnny Cash cover. Yeah, Johnny Cash cover and slow decay of cotton candy.
Or the Johnny Cash cover of Rusty Cage, because in a way, it's breaking out of the form you have put it in. I'm going to break my Rusty Cage of being an extruded hair-like filament of glass, and I'm just going to turn into what I've always wanted to be, a thick, sticky puddle.
Yeah, the one that I watched at the end after it had shrunken down, they then chopped it up or cut it up with scissors. I don't know why it's so fascinating. Yeah. Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I must have lost one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical but obsessively intrigued.
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So that's what's going on with the chemistry of cotton candy, much more interesting subject than I expected it to be. But there's also a lot of interesting stuff about cotton candy and how it interacts with sort of the history of confectionery and other related candies and treats made in the past.
That's right. Now, obviously, I think most of us are aware of this. Humans have always had a sweet tooth, ready to pounce upon such sweet treats that you might find in the natural environment as carrots, berries, or perhaps even if you're lucky and daring a taste of wild honey. I was wondering, is honey about as sweet as it gets in terms of natural products, just things you would find in nature unprocessed or unreduced?
Pretty much, yeah, I mean, because oftentimes when you hear examples of the sweet tooth of our ancient ancestors, they're talking about things like carrots as being extremely sweet. And that's something that in our modern sugar saturated world, we don't even think about carrots being sweet, but carrots are sweet. Take a little time to appreciate a candy carrot the next time you're rooting around in the fridge.
I recall when I was a kid, there were carrots, I think they were like baby carrots, which are not actually baby carrots, by the way, they're just different ways of cutting a carrot. Yeah, they're just ugly carrots and carrot leftovers that are trimmed down into these little nups. Yeah, it's the carrot principle of it's kind of like tater tots, you know, it's reducing waste. But yeah, carrots,
I remember some baby carrots when I was a kid that were sold under some brand name that was like sugar treats or something like that. It was just carrots, but I think it was a way of tricking kids at the stores. I think it was, oh, that's called sugar. Yum, yum. They did taste sweet or somehow. They just got to prime your mind. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons kids will actually eat them most of the time.
But we're not hating on carrots, but carrots are great for you. I love carrots. But there's a lot of evidence for humanity's deep-seated sweet tooth. The spider caves and what is now Spain feature depictions of human honey gathering. This is the, believe the oldest known depiction of bees and evidence of human conception of honey and or the harvesting of honey.
I've seen different dates for this, including 8,000 BCE and some more like 6,000 BCE, but suffice to say, it's very ancient evidence and the practice obviously predates the depiction. Humans were going out and harvesting honey, stealing honey from the insects that created it.
Now, as we've discussed in the show before, the ancient Egyptians made various uses of honey, medicinal, the magical, but they also appreciated it for its sweetness and proper sugar-based confections go back at least to 2000 BCE in India, according to Sanskrit texts, though I've also seen the date of refined sugar in India going back to 6000 BCE.
and the English words sugar and candy are both distantly related to their original Sanskrit terms. As such, there is, of course, a very deep-rooted, sweet culture in India.
And I don't have a lot of expertise in it, but I have been to Indian sweet shops before. As an adult, so I've almost, I've never been in the market for the sweets they have, I'm usually buying something like samosas or something.
But as such, there is, of course, a robust world of Indian sweets out there. It's a very deep, sweet culture. One that I sadly did not have access to as a child when I would have most appreciated all of this. I only had Indian food basically once I was at least in college, I think.
So when I go into Indian sweet shops, I'm impressed by all the colors and shapes, but I just don't have the appetite for it. I don't know. If there are any listeners out there who have definite recommendations about what I should try at the local Indian sweet shops, let me know. And I will go out and I will conduct the experiment. Now, when it comes to European traditions of sweets, sugar-based confections emerged during the Middle Ages as the luxury goods brought in initially via pothicaries in the Middle East.
But in other parts of the world, as we've been discussing, places where sugarcane grew naturally, talking about South Asia, Southeast Asia, and potentially New Guinea, or of course, lands adjacent to those lands, places where candy culture could either emerge or easily flow into. In those cases, we see more deeply rooted sugar cultures, deeply rooted sweet cultures, such as in India. Now fast forwarding to Cotton Candy, just to put all that in perspective,
Uh, we're going to get more into the origin story of cotton candy. But again, generally, they generally accepted invention story for cotton candy proper is that it, uh, that it is unleashed upon the world at the 1904 world's fair.
an invention by a pair of Tennesseans, dentist William Morrison, and a confectioner by the name of John C. Wharton, both Nashville based, I believe. Dint is creating cotton candy. Yes, that is a frequently spouted fact. It never stops being hilarious because, again, it is just essentially pure sugar.
There are, of course, some other contemporary rivals for the invention honors here, as is often the case with inventions from the 19th or 20th century, as we've discussed before in our invention episodes. But generally, people point to Morrison and Orleton there when it comes to the invention of proper cotton candy. There are also some additional arguments for 19th or even 15th century CE European origins for cotton candy or things adjacent to cotton candy.
One of the more fascinating arguments that I ran across was that cotton candy, or something similar to it, dates back to China's Han Dynasty, which would place it somewhere between 202 BCE and 9 CE, or between 25 and 220 CE, depending on where in the Han Dynasty you're following. So in this, we're talking about Long Shitang, or Dragon's Beard Candy, sometimes abbreviated
in Western circles as DBC. I've not personally had Dragon's Beard Candy. It's possible that I've had the chance and just didn't recognize my opportunity or just wasn't looking for something sweet. I think that's ultimately the tragedy of being exposed to different sweet cultures. As you grow older, you just have less of an appetite for it.
But it's still, it's very interesting looking. You can easily look up various YouTube videos of Dragon's Beard Candy. And I've also seen places where you can apparently buy it online, you know, where it's like shrink wrapped in or something. The same is true of some Middle Eastern examples that we'll refer to of similar treats such as Middle Eastern floss halva.
which sometimes has the flossy hair-like consistency that we're talking about. But I've also seen images of it that look like they're a bit more solid. But in that, it reminds me of these examples we were just talking about of what happens when you take cotton candy, allow it to sit, and then you cut it up. So maybe it's a case like that where you have different versions of what is ultimately going on to the tray in the confectionery store.
But Floss Hava also looks quite good. I would definitely accept some of this from Tilda Swint in a sleigh, if she was offering this Turkish delight. So I was reading a bit more about Dragon's Beard Candy. I found a really nice eater travel article by Tiffany Lee from 2024 titled Welcome the Year of the Dragon with Dragon's Beard Candy. If you can find it. By the way, Happy Lunar New Year, as we have now entered into the year of the wood snake.
Now refresh my memory, Rob. Wood snake means that like you get a year of a specific animal, like you're of the dragon, you're of the pig. This is year of the snake, but also the animal is under the influence of a certain planet. And so that would mean that that's the wood aspect. Is that right? Right. There are different elemental factors that come into play. So you know, it might be like iron snake, water snake, wood snake. This year is the wood snake. I like wood snake is very earthy. Yeah.
So the author here, Lee, herself born to immigrant parents from Hong Kong, describes childhood memories of buying the treat from a food stall in Toronto. And she describes the candy as follows. I thought this was a nice description.
Quote, the candies stretched sugar strands wrapped around a crunchy core of peanuts, coconut, and sesame seeds create a series of textual sensations on the tongue. Some strands dissolve into a soft mass while others shatter into foyotene flakes before the whole thing morphs into a chewy, crunchy jumble of nougat.
Foyotene, by the way, that is, I had to look this up and I was not familiar with it, as a crunchy French confection made from thin, sweetened crepes. I've never had this one either, but I, you know, I get the idea. Is the Foy part of Foyotene, does that share root with like, I don't know how to pronounce this meal Foy or whatever, the thousand layers thing? Ooh, that sounds likely. Is one of those layers crunchy? I guess it would have to be.
I think they're all crunchy, aren't they? I think a bunch of, it's like tons and tons of crunchy layers. I think it means like a thousand layers or a thousand sheets or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like in my L-L-L-E-F-E-U-I-L-L-E. Okay, so a thousand sheets that all have the same experience, I was thinking like each sheet would have a different consistency and then that would be impossible to pull off.
So anyway, we have a pretty complex confection here in Dragonbeard Candy with sugar floss wrapped around a nutty center. If it sounds less sweet because of the nuttiness, well, Leah assures us that it's plenty sweet. You'll most likely find it in places where traditional Chinese sweets are sold. I am not sure if I have a local source for it here in Atlanta, or I'm going to just have to look for it the next time I'm in a
a bigger city, listeners do send your recommendations if you have had this and know where it is sold. But based on Lee's article, it sounds like it hasn't completely caught on in the West, despite occasional spikes in popularity as a fad. Like I believe she mentions like in New York at one point, it became popular for a little bit, but then people became distracted by something else and it hasn't really become entrenched in the way that other imported suites have.
Okay. And as she discusses, it's pretty labor and skill intensive. So that's another hurdle for really taking over. According to Lee, it takes two years of mentorship to learn to make it. And it's one of those things like hand-pulled noodles where half the appeal is watching someone make it. And I guess that holds true of
of western cotton candy as well. Like you want to watch the cotton candy man stick that cone or tube into the little cauldron, stir it around, and emerge for that big puff of blue sugar.
There's a kind of pleasure in watching the cotton candy made that's similar to how people watch those videos of things being cleaned, like people watching videos of a dirty carpet being hosed out or of people dusting and stuff. There's something similar going on in the way the wisps are collected. Yes. It is like a spell is being cast.
of dragons beard candy and Lee writes, quote, classic recipes require chefs to heat granulated sugar and maltose together with extracting precision. Shape them into a molten puck and expand that puck into a lasso, then with deft fingers and the aid of rice flour. They stretch, pull, and fold the sugar onto itself into a figure eight until silky vermicelli-like strands appear before wrapping the threads around the filling.
And you have to get the required temperatures exactly right, which makes sense matching up with when we were talking about earlier with the temperature precision involved in any of these various stages of heating sugars and syrups. And you have to be prepared to make adjustments depending on ambient temperature as well, especially in the case of like open carts where someone might be making this candy. Oh, yeah. And then you really need to eat them the day off. Much like cotton candy, it's like you want it fresh.
If it sits around, it's not going to hold its form. I'm assuming the prepackaged source that you can buy on the internet. Obviously, it's not going to be the same experience, but maybe they're able to keep it from drying out with some airtight packaging. And I guess it's better than nothing if you don't have access to fresh.
I was having trouble picturing the full finished product so I looked it up and it looks like it's often made into kind of a dumpling form or like a hot pocket but with the pastry replaced with these white sugar threads and then the interior filling being the nut coconut mixture you mentioned earlier.
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Now getting back to the history of this sugary tree, Lee does cite a popular legend that Dragon's beard candy was an imperial treat dating back to the Han Dynasty with the emperor himself giving it its name since the white strands reminded him of Dragon's whiskers. You'll also find this mentioned on the Wikipedia entry for Dragon's beard candy that the citations there don't really go anywhere active as far as I could tell. Rumors, rumors abound.
So on one hand, I think the dragon's whiskers description is perfect to compare it to a Western movie. Think of the luck dragon from the never ending story, Falcor. It's like if you had a segment of Falcor and you like sliced into them and yeah, you would have like the nougat-like center with the nuts and the coconut and all and then the white fur on the outside.
shave a falcor, wrap it around, wrap the trimmings around some nuts. There you go. Yes. So in past episodes on inventions, we've discussed the questionable historical accuracy of anything that is attributed to an emperor, Chinese, or otherwise in terms of its invention. Sometimes the guy at the top gets to take all the credit.
And a lot of legends there. Yeah, a lot of legends. And while it's the naming here and not the invention itself that is attributed to a Han emperor, I think we might exercise similar caution. But the more interesting question here is really whether there is any indication that this dessert item or something much like it actually dates back to the year 220 CE or much earlier. Okay.
So I turned to a couple of other sources on this about the history of sweets and sugar in general. It's pointed out by Tim Richardson in sweets, a history of candy. Sugar cane was introduced into China early in the first millennium BCE, but that unlike with India, China didn't develop a sugar-based sweet culture and arguably never really did, at least not on the scale comparable to the robust tradition of sweets that you find on the Indian subcontinent.
maltose, which I mentioned earlier, remained the sweetener of choice in China. This is a jelly extracted from grains and sorghum reeds. Honey was also used. And they long remain dependent on imported sugar from India and Indochina for anything that actually called for sugar or some mix of sugar and these other sweeteners. And Richardson writes that this was likely due to technological difficulties with sugar refinement and or just lack of demand for it.
Okay. Which makes sense. It's like it's one thing to acquire the secrets of sugar refining, but then is there a need for it? Do people actually want it? Is it anything other than a novelty for the court? And if it is just a novelty for the court, then maybe you just keep importing it, right? Yeah. Yeah.
And so Richardson says it wasn't till 647 CE that the emperor at the time, and I believe this would be Tang Tai Zong, sent delegates to India to learn the secrets of sugar refinery. And from then on, there are various Chinese advancements in the sugar industry. In 1280, Richardson points out that Kublakan brought in Egyptian experts to share the secrets of white sugar, which, you know, if you're going to have a stately pleasure dome, you've got to have that white sugar. Yeah.
Just did he have cotton candy in the pleasure dome? I mean, it's the perfect place for it, right? I can imagine Kublacon with some sort of cotton candy in each hand. You know what happens when you get it wet? It goes down through the caverns, measureless to man. We'll see. Nice.
Another book I was looking at, Sweets and Candy, a Global History by Laura Mason, discusses Dragon's Beard Candy briefly within the larger context of pulled sugar sweets. That is, again, syrup boiled to a crack and, while malleable, worked into desired forms, and literally pulled by hands and or hooks to create ropes and threads.
She defines this process as ancient, but also not necessarily well recorded. She mentions that the pulling of these confections was probably, or perhaps originally thought to, quote, convey special qualities. And I believe these special qualities are linked to the rarity of sugar.
in some of the places where this would have been conducted, and also the seeming alchemy of working it into these shapes. Sometimes shapes that themselves might convey special meanings, such as rings and circles, but also, yeah, just coming back to the modern example of cotton candy. Watching its creation does feel like a kind of magic, and we can imagine, easily imagine our ancestors' parts around the world,
engaging in a similar fascination. Yeah. I mean, this takes us back to something we talked about at the beginning of the chemistry section, which is like the minute attention before modern thermometer is that would allow you to just easily judge exactly how hot your boiled syrup mixture is getting like the attention and know how required to get it to just the right temperature to have the properties you want. Yeah. She stresses that broadly with pulled sugar confections, colors can be added.
And I don't think I was fully aware of this, but this is where the basics of the candy cane come into play. Traditionally, candy cane is apparently more of a pulled sugar confection, but not necessarily in its modern mass manufactured version. And then there are various pulled candy traditions in pretty much every culture to sort of catch the pulled sugar bug as it traveled out of sugar rich lands into other realms.
She, of course, highlights pulled Turkish Keaton halva, also known as peace mania, noting the addition of butter and flour in that process. She stresses that Keaton halva is different from cotton candy, though, and that there's no true Western equivalent. As cotton candy, she writes, is coarse and gritty. I don't remember if that's accurate, but it sounds right. I do vaguely recall sort of the grittiness to it, but at least right before it melts.
while Keaton Halva is smooth or soft. But of course, pulled sugar in the West also connects into traditions of pulled taffy. The example many listeners may be familiar with, and generally you have some sort of machine with hooks for that. And Dragon's Beard Candy, she writes, is closer to Keaton Halva and related confections and accounts of Keaton Halva date back at least as far as the early 15th century CE.
As for the earliest possible origin of Dragon's Beard Candy, she does write that a Chinese confectionary tradition probably developed from around the 7th century CE when sugar began to replace honey and sweet cakes in Chinese culinary traditions. Sugar-based items, though, would have been only for the aristocracy, and it would remain that way for centuries.
So it would seem possible that some form of pulled sugar treat, even something close to what we know of as Dragonsbeard Candy today was brought before a Han Chinese emperor. It seems like it's possible, but it also seems possible that this treat might have developed later.
during at least the seventh century rather than the third century CE. I wish there were firmer sources on the Han Dynasty legend here, but at least couldn't find them in English. So if anyone out there has access to additional data on this legend, I would love to hear about it. Totally, yeah. Also, I mean, as we've been discussing here, like sugar and treats, they do seem to
to travel reasonably easy from one culture to another. So you'll often find different versions of cotton candy or, or, or, or dragon's beard candy or something like this in, in various other cultures, like there, there's, there's like a Korean version of
of pulled of a pulled sugar tree. There's a Persian variant of Halva that is called Pashma. There's an Indian variant that's called, I believe, Som Popti. So there are probably endless variations across time and space. But also speaking of time and space, I mean, I think about how when you get into these really delicate versions of spun sugar, they become increasingly sensitive to atmospheric conditions, which may limit their ability to
Certainly their ability to travel as finished products, you know, you would have trouble like making a confection like this and then having it survive a, I don't know, a trip to market or something like that. So much like they're made at the fair these days, it's something that in most conditions would probably need to be eaten immediately. But maybe in some conditions, I don't know, like a cold, dry place or something you could could survive longer.
It definitely seems the case where if word of this treat traveled to your emperor, you would have to quickly realize, well, I just can't tell the emperor about this. I have to bring someone with their supplies and their tools in order to make this for the emperor. Yeah. Yeah. You can't like make it ahead and bring it to you. You got to make it there. Yeah. And again, as the source has noted, there's a lot that's been lost to history. Sugary treats are not always
the things that are talked about in the surviving histories. All right, we're gonna go ahead and close this episode out, but we're gonna come back for at least a part two on cotton candy because there's more to discuss. I think we're probably gonna get into the 20th century origins of modern cotton candy a bit. And then there are also gonna be some offshoots, things that are maybe cotton candy in name only, but are still pretty fascinating from other disciplines of the science world. Can't wait.
All right, just a reminder to everyone out there that stuff to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays short form episodes on Wednesdays. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House cinema. If you're on the social medias, you can find us on most of those major platforms. If you're on Instagram, we're STBYM podcast.
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