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Food plays an integral, but routine part in our day-to-day lives and we don’t think much about it except what to eat at our next meal or- how about that snack.

However, in the past, food was once thought of as noble and in a different aspect of what we might think of today. Onions. We rarely consider them as anything more than culinary devices, items to be sliced, diced, and tossed into a hot pan to serve as an aromatic backbone of a savory dish.

Today, you would probably think of sending or bringing flowers to a funeral. Things were done a mite differently in ancient Egypt. Mourners brought onions. Yes, onions.

Egyptians considered the onion a noble vegetable. The shape reminded them of eternity, so the Egyptians worshiped the onion. Onions were incorporated into many aspects of their lives – especially religious ceremonies and funerals. They became a common funeral offering.

Archaeologists have discovered paintings of onions in the pyramids and images showing priests holding up onions during religious ceremonies. The mummification process even used onions. When preparing the bodies for mummification the ancient Egyptians would cover the body in onions. The humble onion of today was believed to be a powerful object in the afterlife for Egyptians. Some even believed that an onion could bring the dead back to life.

The unassuming onion also proved quite controversial. Its bulbous form came from bringing the dead back to life to the unlikely epicenter of a financial drama and producing a tear induced hangover. Onions became a hot commodity in 1955. A run on onion futures in 1955 created a fiasco that shook the stock market back then and changed the stock market forever after.

It was and still is a common practice for buyers at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to lock in prices for commodities like wheat, corn, soy etc. This is investing in the futures market. Futures are when investors can purchase a commodity to be received at some point in the future for a price set at the present moment.

Buyers can also try and corner the market. That’s when you get control of the supply of some commodities so you can charge any price you want. You have the market in a corner. The great onion financial debacle occurred in 1955 when two men named Vincent Kosuga and Sam Seigel devised a plan for making a fortune off of onion futures and cornering the market.

In 1955 onions made up around 20% of the trades. Vincent and Sam decided to gamble on onions. They bought up all the onions on the market plus onion futures. At the end of the year they owned 30 million pounds of onions and controlled 98% of onions on the market. Of course, some of their onions were still in the ground.

So now these enterprising young men decided to rig the market since they had a definite monopoly on onions. They chose to set the price very, very high. And they made a lot of money. But they didn’t stop there. They knew that not only could they make the onion price go up; they could make it go down.

“And there’s a way in the futures market to profit off of that, to make a bet about prices falling. In January, you say, I’ll sell you a bag of onions in March for $3. If in March the price is only $2, you get to keep the extra dollar.” Vince and Sam made of lot of these bets. And then in March of 1956, they sprung the final trap.

They shorted the market by flooding it with onions and crashing the market prices. Suddenly 50 pounds of onions cost less than the price of the mesh bag they were sold in.

Traders who did business with the onion ‘kings’ found themselves stuck with tons and tons of onions that nobody wanted to buy. You couldn’t even give ‘em away. The Chicago River soon became a dumping ground for onion crops. The ‘onion kings’ made millions as a result of this debacle. Farmers went broke. Congress was flooded with complaints. A new law was passed.

Unfortunately, the new law made life harder for farmers and for the onion buying public. Without a futures market, onion farmers have a harder time planning out their crops. Onions end up costing just a little bit more. Now you can blame Vince and Sam for this, or you can blame Congress. But what you can’t do is buy or sell a futures contract in onions. To this day onions are the only agricultural product in the U.S. that can’t be traded on the futures market – all because of an onion disaster created by a little bit of greed.

But there is a light. Well, a light in a lighthouse symbol. The Statue of Liberty is one of the most famous symbols in the world. Very few remember that it used to be a working lighthouse.

The Statue of Liberty’s torch originally functioned as an actual lighthouse. President Grover Cleveland ordered the Lighthouse Board to manage the statue’s torch. Adding lights to the statue required some modification. The original design didn’t have gaps in the torch so windows were added by cutting into the torch.

Starting in 1886 the statue was outfitted with nearly 30 lamps. It was the first lighthouse in the country to run on electricity instead of kerosene lamps. Albert Littlefield was the only lighthouse keeper for the Statue of Liberty. An expert in electricity, Littlefield kept the torch burning for 15 years.

Use as a lighthouse didn’t last long. In 1901 President Teddy Roosevelt shut down the lamps. It was declared that the lights were too dim for navigation safety. Fans of the Statue as a lighthouse declared the torch could be seen for 24 miles. However, people standing in lower Manhattan could barely see the light a few miles away. So history can lend a tear or two, a light, or just go dim.