Christmas cracker tradition of wearing festive hats is believed to date back to Roman times and the Saturnalia celebrations, which also involved decorative headgear. Christmas crackers are also associated with Knut's parties, held in Sweden at the end of the Christmas season. The "Oxford English Dictionary" records the use of "cracker bonbons" and the pulling of "crackers" from 1847. Tradition tells of how Tom Smith of London invented crackers in 1847. He created the crackers as a development of his bon-bon sweets, which he sold in a twist of paper (the origins of the traditional sweet-wrapper). As sales of bon-bons slumped, Smith
R. Tom Baker R. Tom Baker R. Tom Baker is an inorganic chemist known for the development and application of inorganic transition metal-based catalysis. R. Tom Baker was born in Tsawwassen, British Columbia, Canada. He attended University of British Columbia (UBC) as an undergraduate student and earned his B.Sc in Chemistry in 1975. He then conducted his graduate research work under of M. Frederick Hawthorne at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After he earned his Ph.D in Inorganic Chemistry in 1980, he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow with Philip S. Skell at Pennsylvania State University. From 1981 to 1996, Baker