The French Made Potatoes Popular by Posting Guards Around Them and Letting People Steal Them

 In the 18th century France did not want to eat potatoes.

The potato had come to Europe from South America in the 1500s but it had a reputation problem. It was associated with famine food. Common people did not trust it. The French parliament actually banned the potato in 1748 on the grounds that it might cause leprosy.

Antoine-Augustin Parmentier believed the potato could feed France and potentially end famine. He had eaten potatoes while a prisoner of war in Prussia and understood their nutritional value. He spent years trying to convince his fellow countrymen to eat them.

Nobody was interested.

So he tried something different.

What He Did

Parmentier obtained a plot of land outside Paris and planted it with potatoes. Then he convinced King Louis XVI to post royal guards around the field during the day.

He made it very clear to the guards that they were not to prevent theft at night.

The thinking was simple. If royal guards are posted around something it must be valuable. If it is valuable people will want it. And if people can steal it at night they will feel they have gotten something exclusive.

The strategy worked perfectly.

People crept out at night to steal the royal potatoes. They planted them in their own gardens. They cooked them and ate them. They told their neighbors. Demand spread through the exact mechanism that official promotion had failed to produce.

Within years potato cultivation was spreading across France. Parmentier served potato dishes at dinner parties where the guests included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier. He reportedly sent potatoes to Thomas Jefferson who brought the idea of french fried potatoes back to America.

Parmentier is now the most famous name in French potato cuisine. Hachis Parmentier, a dish of ground meat topped with mashed potato, is named for him. His portrait shows him holding a potato flower.

Why This Story Matters Beyond the Cleverness

The Parmentier story is entertaining on its face. A clever man uses reverse psychology to make the French eat vegetables. That part is just fun.

But it is also a serious lesson about how human psychology actually works with new information and new ideas.

Official endorsement often produces skepticism. Prohibition produces desire. Exclusivity creates demand.

The same principle Parmentier used in a Paris potato field has been applied by marketers, governments, and social movements throughout history. Make something seem inaccessible and people will want access. Make something seem forbidden and the prohibition itself becomes the advertisement.

Parmentier understood human nature well enough to work with it rather than against it. The potato is now a staple of European cuisine partly because one man in the 18th century knew that people do not want what they are told to want. They want what they are told they cannot have.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

How to Use Free AI Tools Right Now to Start Preserving Your Family History

 We have talked in this series about why preserving your family history matters. We have talked about scanning old photographs, digitizing VHS tapes, recording your voice, and uploading everything to the Internet Archive.

Today I want to talk about something new that changes the game entirely.

Free AI tools available right now can help you preserve your family history faster, more thoroughly, and more accessibly than anything that existed even five years ago. And most of them cost nothing.

Here is exactly how to use them.

Transcribing Recorded Stories

One of the biggest barriers to preserving family history is that recordings are hard to search. A two hour audio recording of your grandmother telling stories is valuable. But if someone 50 years from now wants to find the part where she talks about a specific family member they cannot easily locate it.

Transcription solves that. When a recording is transcribed into text it becomes searchable, quotable, and far more accessible.

Free transcription tools make this simple. Upload an audio or video file to Otter.ai, which offers free transcription up to a certain number of minutes per month, or use Google's free transcription features built into Google Docs. Open a Google Doc, click Tools, then Voice Typing, and speak directly into your computer or phone microphone. The text appears in real time.

For existing recordings you can upload audio files to services like Happy Scribe or use YouTube's automatic captioning feature by uploading a private video and downloading the auto-generated transcript.

The result is a text document you can search, edit, and archive alongside the original recording.

Identifying People in Old Photographs

Old photographs where nobody can remember who the people are represent one of the most painful gaps in family history. Once the people who knew are gone the faces become mysteries.

Google Photos has a free facial grouping feature that clusters photographs of the same person across your photo library. If you upload your family's old photographs to Google Photos it will identify recurring faces and group them. You can then label those faces and the label carries across all photos containing that person.

This does not help identify a face you do not recognize at all. But it helps enormously in organizing photographs and finding all images of a specific person once you have identified them in at least one photo.

For historical photographs where you suspect there may be genealogical records connecting to the people pictured, tools like MyHeritage's AI photo enhancement can improve image quality and their DNA and record matching tools can sometimes help identify family connections.

Using AI to Help You Write Your Story

Many people who want to document their family history do not think of themselves as writers. They have the stories. They just do not know how to put them down in a way that feels right.

This is where AI writing assistants become genuinely useful.

Open Claude at claude.ai or use any other AI assistant. Tell it your story out loud or in notes. Ask it to help you turn those notes into a readable narrative. You stay in control of the facts and the voice. The AI helps with structure, flow, and expression.

You are not outsourcing your history to an AI. You are using a tool to help you express what you already know in a form that will be accessible and readable for future generations.

Where to Put Everything

Once you have transcripts, organized photographs, and written narratives the storage strategy is the same as always.

Multiple locations. Your computer and an external hard drive. A cloud service. Email copies to family members. And most importantly upload to the Internet Archive at archive.org where everything will be permanently preserved for free and accessible to anyone in the world including your descendants a century from now.

Label everything clearly. Names. Dates. Locations. Context. A well-labeled file outlasts its creator by generations. An unlabeled file becomes a mystery within years.

The tools have never been better. The time to use them is now.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

A Woman Secretly Ran the United States Government for Eighteen Months and Almost Nobody Knows It

 On October 2, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left him severely incapacitated.

He could not perform the duties of the presidency. He could barely function. For weeks he was hidden from virtually everyone outside his immediate household.

What happened next has no real precedent in American presidential history.

His wife Edith Wilson took over.

What Edith Wilson Did

Edith Wilson became the sole gatekeeper between the President and everyone else. Cabinet members who needed presidential decisions were required to submit written requests to her. She decided what reached her husband and what did not. She decided what was important enough to disturb him and what could wait or be handled without him.

She later said she was acting merely as a steward passing information back and forth. Historians have looked at the record and concluded that her role was considerably more active than that. She made decisions about what information the President received. She managed the communications that shaped his responses. She determined the agenda of the executive branch for the better part of a year and a half.

The 25th Amendment, which provides a clear process for transferring presidential power when a president becomes incapacitated, did not exist yet. It was not ratified until 1967. In 1919 there was no legal mechanism that anyone was willing to use to declare Wilson unable to serve and transfer power to the Vice President.

So the power stayed with Wilson officially while Edith managed it practically.

What the Cabinet and Congress Did Not Know

The extent of Wilson's incapacity was hidden from the cabinet, from Congress, and from the American public. Visitors who did manage to see the President were given carefully managed brief encounters. His deteriorated condition was concealed as much as possible.

Some cabinet members suspected the truth. Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico, who later became famous for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal, visited Wilson in December 1919 and reported that Wilson seemed sharp. Wilson's daughter later admitted the visit had been meticulously staged to create that impression.

The nation was effectively without a functioning president for the last eighteen months of Wilson's term. An unelected woman with no official title or constitutional authority managed the most powerful executive office in the world.

Edith Wilson outlived her husband by 37 years. She died in 1961 and was largely credited in obituaries as a devoted wife. The scope of what she actually did during those eighteen months was not fully examined by historians for decades.

She was the closest thing to an unelected president the United States has ever had. And almost nobody knows her name.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.