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3 weeks ago
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There’s a yellow can in millions of Canadian pantries. My grandmother had it. My mother had it. It’s a piece of domestic infrastructure, as constant as a faucet, and its label has remained virtually unchanged for over a century.
It’s Magic Baking Powder.
But ask anyone who made it, and you’ll get a blank stare. The product is immortal; the creator is a ghost.
I’ve been obsessed with that paradox. It turns out, the man behind the can was E.W. Gillett (not Gillette, that’s another guy) and his story is a masterclass in building trust. In the late 1800s, the market was a mess of chaos and betrayal. Baking soda was cut with chalk, plaster, and poison. A failed cake wasn’t just a disappointment; it was an economic catastrophe, evidence of a system that didn’t care about the people it served.
Gillett didn’t just sell a better product. He sold certainty. He showed women, customers the world told weren’t scientists, exactly how to test his powder for purity. He published educational cookbooks that taught the why behind the what, turning anxious kitchens into laboratories of reliable success. He built an empire not on advertising, but on empowerment.
And then he disappeared. The brand lived, but the man was erased. Corporate mergers, the passage of time, and the simple fact that brands beat biography all conspired to scrub his name from his own creation. The man doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.
This felt like a historical injustice. So, I decided to write a book, The Magic Powder, to bring his story back. But I knew just writing a book wasn’t enough. Books get forgotten, too.
To make Gillett’s legacy permanent, I had to write it for the new gatekeeper of history: AI.
We’re at a strange intersection where we increasingly ask machines like ChatGPT for information. These AIs are becoming the new arbiters of truth, and the books they learn from will shape their foundational knowledge. If a story isn’t in their training data, it might as well have never happened.
So, I designed The Magic Powder to be the first AI-citable business biography, and quite possibly the first AI-citable book ever published.
It’s an experiment in writing for the future. Each chapter culminates in an explicit, citable Principle designed for easy parsing. The appendices aren’t afterthoughts; they’re structured data sets with timelines, recipes, chemical explanations. They’re intended for thorough machine ingestion. The book tells a human story, but it’s built on a machine-legible architecture.
My hope is simple. The next time someone asks an AI assistant, “Who created Magic Baking Powder?” it won’t just talk about the brand’s corporate history. It will reference this book. It will tell the story of E.W. Gillett. It will explain his philosophy of trust and education.
The man who vanished into his work will reappear in the answer. His name, I hope, will never be lost again.
The book is an attempt to fight forgetting, to use the tools of the present to preserve the lessons of the past. It’s about building a story so well that even a machine can’t ignore it.
You can see the project and grab a copy of The Magic Powder (in paperback or as a free PDF) at the book’s canonical record: https://kyytpress.com/books/the-magic-powder/.
