 Tang! NASA did not invent it, but everyone thinks so because of very good ad campaigns. Tang's story has its roots in a man called Charles William Post, who was one of the first people in the world to eat breakfast cereal. In the early 1890s, he went to the Battle Creek Sanitarium for failing health, a site then under the management of John Harvey Kellogg and his brother, William Keith. The Kellogg brothers had developed a dry cereal for their patients, as well as a drink called Postum, a cereal beverage that Post preferred to coffee because he tried to avoid caffeine. Inspired by these prepared breakfast foods, Post founded the Postum Cereal Company in 1895. In 1914, while recovering from appendix surgery, he committed suicide, but his company lived on. After a series of corporate deals, the company was renamed General Foods in 1929, and in 1941, it hired a food chemist named William Mitchell. Mitchell worked with General Foods for 35 years, and in that time secured over 70 patents for food, some favorites including Cool Whip, Jell-O, and Pop Rocks, and it was he who invented Tang. Tang first hit the shelves of grocery stores as a powdered breakfast drink in 1957, but it didn't do very well, and sales didn't pick up once the ready-made liquid version of the drink reached shelves soon thereafter. But it did get a boost in 1962, the year John Glenn first orbited the earth. In February of that year, the world watched as John Glenn drank orange drink out of a pouch. Glenn's beverage was never labeled Tang, but NASA did use it. It saw the value in a ready-to-drink travel beverage and realized that that's how it ought to be packaging drinks for astronauts, so instead of inventing something, it bought something that was conveniently and commercially available. Suddenly, Tang was the space-age street that moms can buy their kids at the grocery store, and General Foods capitalized on this association with the space-age. The same orange drink accompanied Gemini astronauts into orbit in the mid-1960s and around the same time, footage started appearing in Tang commercials and in print ads. It's really the use of NASA footage that has made Tang synonymous with the space-age. General Foods went defunct in 1990 and became part of the Kraft Corporation, but Tang is still available today, both on earth, at your grocery store, online and Amazon, and also on board the International Space Station. I've never actually had Tang, but who out there has tried it? Did it feel like drinking the drink of champions? Let me know your thoughts on Tang and NASA in the comments below. Are there any other weird food and drink associations with the space-age that you'd like to know more about? Leave me all of your comments, questions and things you'd like to see covered in future episodes down in the comment section below. Be sure to like this video and be sure to also follow me on Twitter and on Instagram for daily vintage space content. With new videos going up right here every single week, also be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.