There are moments in life when the rare brilliance of Man overwhelms you, and you are forced to wonder how some of the few outstanding accomplishments were achieved.

Last night, I was hit with that monstrous awe while looking down the barrel of a near-empty bag of Baked Lays potato chips. How did this quintessential, sublime snack pop into existence? From what culture did this wondrous crunchable spring? How many thousands of years of culinary evolution went into the chip we know today? How many generations and through whose hands did it pass?

I knew I owed it to the remaining potato chips to find out; I already told them they were going in my belly - I realized I should also tell them from whence they came. Yes, I owed it to them.

My search for the key to this mystery took me to the far reaches of the internet, and within seconds I had the shocking answer.

Were potato chips born in Ancient Rome? Bavaria? The lost city of Atlantis? Were they the culmination of years of theoretical thought by one man, dedicating his life's work to the ultimate snack? Or were they the fruit of labor of an ancient, advanced community? Were they final gift from aliens, after they built Stonehenge for us?

No. They were made in 1853 in New York by a cantankerous cook who was pissed at a customer.

George Crum, an American Indian, was the head chef at Moon's Lake House, a fancy resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. An item on the menu was French-fried potatoes, prepared by Crum in the standard, thick-cut French-style. One day, a customer kept complaining that he found the fries too "thick and soggy" and "not salty enough." Furious at the uppity diner, Crum came up with a plan of revenge and offered to replace the fries. He then set about cutting up potatoes super-thin, fried them to a half-burnt crisp, salted the hell out of them, and put the resulting plate of smoldering, crunchy, oily, salty fried potatoes in front of the customer.

The customer took one bite, smiled, and scarfed down the rest. He never got his name into the history books, but he had the amazing fortune to be the first person to ever taste a potato chip.

Crum couldn't believe it, but his Saratoga Chips (as he named them) became known in the area, and other restaurants in the region began serving them. By 1900, potato chips had made it into the grocery store, and potato chip factories dotted the landscape. But it wasn't until the Prohibition era, when a traveling salesman named Herman Lay began distributing the chips throughout the country, that these chips became nationally popular. Herman Lay, of course, went on in 1938 to establish the H.W. Lay Company, one of the greatest snack companies of all time.

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