The Ronco Food Dehydrator

This system for drying fruits and meats was first conceived of by Baron Johann Van Der Ronco, a Dutch inventor in the late 17th Century. Though the Baron would never build the device himself, he passed the idea down to his sons, Gutten and Strauss. The Van Der Ronco brothers struggled for years in attempting to build their father's vision, laboring in the basement of their cottage at Wondenstubftenkreig Pond. Their breakthrough came in 1742, when Gutten realized that Strauss had been dead for at least 3 years. Though the addition of another dead body to his storage cellar was nothing new, Gutten noticed that Strauss's body was perfectly preserved. He quickly formed a hypothesis, and to test it, took a bite of Strauss's thigh. It was delicious.

Gutten's realization had been that the dryness of the basement air was what made the corpse of his brother keep so well. Within that year, Gutten built and marketed the Van Der Ronco Corpse Dehydrator. In 1750, Gutten traveled to France to display his invention to King Louis XIV at the newly completed Versailles.

Though he became quite rich from his first invention, Gutten continued to improve on his design, most notably capitalizing on the high infant mortality of the time by coming out with a smaller model. The success of the Van Der Ronco Baby Dehydrator Plus, especially in Ireland, inspired Johnathan Swift's famous cookbook.

By the time the device made it across the Atlantic around 1830, corpse-eating was no longer in vogue. Despite some celebrity sponsorship from President Andrew Jackson, sales stagnated. It was only in 1865, when the end of the Civil War left much of the nation with more corpses than it knew what to do with, did the Gutten's invention, now owned by his heirs, make a comeback. Dropping the distastefully ethnic "Van Der" moniker, two new models, the Ronco Rebel Tastifier and the Ronco Union Yum, were smash sensations in the North and South, respectively.

The end of the First World War, dubbed The Great War because those dubbers lacked foresight, created new appreciation for life. Ronco changed with the times, and appeared on the market in roughly its current form in 1923. The Ronco Food Dehydrator was a staple of the era's swinging parties until 1929, when it became a staple of the era's shantytowns.

Today, Ronco's infomercials reach an estimated 300,000 households between the hours of 2 and 5 a.m. Though modern models are equipped with electronic enhancements, the spirit of Baron Johann Van Der Ronco's brainchild lives on.