John Harvey Kellogg had numerous methods to prevent masturbation. Most of them would be considered torture by today's standards. Some of Mr. Kellogs methods were tested, while others never made it into practice.
Like most people of that time, John saw masturbation as a sin. He also saw sex as a sin. He thought that anyone who engaged in sexual activity was damned to hell for eternity. Mr. Kellogg and his wife abstained from sex for their entire marriage because of Johns extreme beliefs. They did, however like children, so they chose to adopt.
Mr. Kellogg had also come up with numerous other methods to stop masturbation. For boys, he suggested piercing, and threading silver wire through the foreskin. He believed that this would cause extreme pain when the male subject obtained an erection. His belief was that once a boy felt the pain caused by an erection, he would never make the decision to become erect again.
The most common method of stopping female masturbation was just as strange as his method for boys. He would take a highly corrosive acid and apply it to the female clitoris. He believed that this would cause pain when the clitoris was touched and therefore stop girls from touching themselves. With time, it would totally ruin the vagina.
The methods that I just discussed would kill two birds with one stone. They would stop masturbation as well as sex. The cornflakes method, however, was a little less extreme.
Mr. Kellogg believed that foods high in flavor would cause desire for them. People would crave these foods, just as they crave sex. He believed that this desire was somehow linked to sexual desire. If he could do away with the desire for flavorful foods, then he could cure sexual desire.
Mr. Kellogg set out on a mission to create a food completely void of all flavor. He first tried a mixture of oats, and corn meal before finnaly settling on corn flakes. This was a success. The food was completely void of all flavor. He believed that he had finnaly found a cure for masturbation.
Over these first years of cornflakes, people had made numorous attempts to get him to add a little sugar to the recipe. He fought back hard, claiming that sugar would lead to masturbation. John was totally against cornflakes having any type of flavor.
A few years down the road, John partnered with his brother Will, to help him sell the cereal. Will had a much better business sense than John. He knew that people didn't want to eat something completely flavorless and costantly fought with John about this.
Eventually, Will and John had a falling out. Both blaming each other for the failure of cornflakes. Will then modified the recipe to contain sugar and sold it through his new company, which he called "The Kellogg Company". The brothers continued to argue over the subject for decades after the split. Thanks to the help of Will, we may all masturbate while eating our cornflakes.
