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 a better renewable biofuel than ethanol. His group has also made substantial contributions to organofluorine chemistry, especially on metal-based fluorocarbenes, including synthesis of a variety of fluorocarbene transition metal complexes by directly introducing difluorocarbene ligands to transition metal centres such as cobalt and nickel, as well as investigating [2+2] cycloaddition reactions between metal fluorocarbenes and tetrafuoroethylene (TFE), which sheds light on a greener route to produce fluorocarbons from waste polytetrafluoroethylene materials. 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