On March 25, Sage Boggs shocked the twittersphere with his revelation that the brand name Triscuit was a portmanteau of “electricity” and “biscuit.” In a time when seemingly all anyone can talk about is the coronavirus pandemic, Boggs’s thread provided some much-needed levity and excitement. It elicited a statement from Triscuit’s official Twitter account: “We had to go all the way up the ladder but we CAN confirm.” The account even added a lightning bolt to its username and changed its bio to “elecTRIcity biSCUIT.”
But do we really know Boggs is right?
Let’s acknowledge the work that Boggs did to satisfy his curiosity: he came up with an initial theory, contacted the company, and sought out primary-source documents—all tactics that a historian would use to develop an argument. Triscuit’s confirmation of the theory satisfies many that Boggs’s theory is correct, and it also helps that the theory is the sort of surprising factoid people love to share at parties. But if a historian wants to make this sort of claim about individual people’s intentions over a century ago, then much clearer evidence is needed.
The electricity biscuit thesis is certainly plausible. It is supported by some of the early ads, as well as by the manufacturing process. The Natural Food Company invented a way to spin wheat into threads that could then be cooked and woven into biscuits—which we know as Shredded Wheat today—or cooked again in an electric oven to make Triscuits. In 1903, Triscuit ads proclaimed that Triscuits were the first commercial bread product to be “baked by electricity.” Some of the earliest designs even incorporated lightning bolts into the lettering of “Triscuit.”
So it’s indisputable that Triscuits were strongly and intentionally associated with the electric baking process. But did the Natural Food Company name their cracker “Triscuit” specifically to evoke the middle syllable of “electricity?” That’s a much harder question, and requires both a broader understanding of the culture of advertising in the early 20th century and also a deeper inquiry into how the “Triscuit” name operated at its inception.
Compared to the post-modern, irony-laden ads of the 21st century, advertising in 1903 was extremely naive. Ad copy was hopelessly earnest, and would not hesitate to spell out any puns or questionable pronunciations for the reader. For this reason, and also because “electri-” or “electro-” were more common and intuitive phonemes for evoking electricity, one would expect Triscuit ads to have made the etymological connection between electricity and Triscuit explicit. But no such clarification can be found, not even in The Niagara Falls Electrical Handbook, a 1904 guide with several pages dedicated to the Natural Food Company factory and the Triscuit-making process. The handbook describes the Triscuit oven as “The Electric Triscuit Oven,” which could conceivably support the electric biscuit thesis but could also not—if the Triscuit was understood to be an electric biscuit, wouldn’t “Electric Triscuit Oven” have sounded redundant?2