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  Peel off lid.

  Pour boiling water.

  Steep for three minutes.

  Stir well and serve.

  Nothing was easier. Of course, the unenlightened could stumble sometimes, burning their tongues, or jabbing in a fork after only one minute of silent contemplation, which bent the prongs and sprayed the soup over the keyboard. But the patient disciple achieved fulfilment: mouthful upon mouthful of warming, strangely angular noodles, in flavours such as “Hearty Chicken” or “Shrimp Picante”.

  Most devotees of Cup Noodle did not investigate the mystery further. Giddily grateful as they were to be relieved of cooking, it might have been electrical wire they were eating, or sauteed rubber bands. But some, after many portions, could make an unthinking mantra of the list of ingredients: Wheat Flour, Palm Oil (Tocopherols), Tapioca Starch, Salt, Dehydrated Vegetables (Cabbage, Green Onion, Carrot), Disodium Guanylate, Disodium Inosinate. And at the highest level one follower succeeded in straightening the noodles out, discovering in his cup eight strands 2mm in diameter and measuring 40cm (16 inches), evidently extruded with perfect uniformity, and cut into perfect lengths.

  The cult was global. In 2005, 86 billion servings of instant noodles were eaten around the world. And all this began with a vision, as such things do. One cold night in 1957, walking home from his salt-making factory in Osaka, in Japan, Mr Ando saw white clouds of steam in the street, and a crowd of people gathering. They were waiting for noodles to be cooked to order in vats of boiling water, and were prepared to wait a long time. Why not make it easier? thought Mr Ando. And why not try to do it himself?

  His life until then had been a bit of a mess. He had sold dress fabrics, following in the footsteps of the grandparents who had brought him up. He had sold engine-parts, prefabricated houses, magic-lantern projectors, socks. He had presided over a credit association, which had gone bust, and tried to launch a scholarship scheme for poor students, which had landed him in jail for tax evasion. But now the “steadily rising” clouds (or possibly, as in the cartoon on the homepage of his Instant Noodle Museum in Osaka, one fluffy white cloud with a kettle dangling from it) had shown him the Way.

  The road was long. It took a year, working night and day in a shed in his back garden, to find the secret of bringing noodles back to life. Mr Ando cooked quantities, but had trouble getting the moisture out and keeping any flavouring in. He sprayed them with chicken soup from a watering can, and festooned the shed with them. The secret, picked up from his wife as she cooked vegetable tempura, was to flash-fry the cooked noodles in palm oil. This made them “magic”.

  In 1958 instant noodles went on the market, yellowish wormy bricks in cellophane bags, and were laughed at by fresh-noodle makers all over Japan. They were just a high-tech craze, costing six times as much as the fresh stuff; they would never catch on. By the end of the first year Mr Ando had sold 13m bags and had attracted a dozen competitors. He never looked back. In 1971 came noodles in heat-proof polystyrene cups, so that the hungry did not even need to get their bowls out of the cupboard. The Japanese voted instant noodles their most important 20th-century invention, Sony Walkmans notwithstanding. Mr Ando’s firm, Nissin, became a $3 billion global enterprise.

  But it was never just a company, and instant-noodlemaking never just an industry. The three sayings of Mr Ando became a philosophy of life:

  Peace will come when people have food. Eating wisely will enhance beauty and health. The creation of food will serve society.

  Mr Ando practised what he preached. He ate Chikin Ramen, his original flavour of noodles, almost every day until he died. Though sceptics pointed out that they were loaded with fat, salt and monosodium glutamate, he looked bonny and spry. Seabeds across Asia were littered with plastic noodle cups; but that was not his fault.

  His TV advertising, meanwhile, showed what instant noodles were really all about.

  When the world turned to eating them, barriers fell, children laughed and people loved each other. All liberating revolutions sprang from humanity’s desire to gulp down steaming Cup Noodles whenever there was a chance. In 2006 a Japanese astronaut, on board the space shuttle Discovery, supped Mr Ando’s noodles from a handy vacuum pack. He appeared on the TV ads weightless and smiling, his enlightenment complete.

  Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley

  Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley, grandes dames of New York, died on August 13th and 20th 2007 respectively, aged 105 and 87

  THE concept of richesse oblige has various dimensions. The bottom line is that those who have come into oodles of money should give some of it back; the second-to-bottom line is that they should cut a certain style while doing so. Both Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley, who died within a few days of each other, gave millions of dollars away. And their similarities ended there.

  Mrs Astor was as small, delicate and fine as a Meissen cup, her tailoring exquisite and her jewels unobtrusive. Mrs Helmsley, though not large, favoured loud trouser suits and chunky diamond clips, with her mouth made big and cruel by scarlet lipstick. Mrs Astor set great store by good manners, civility, kind remarks and the careful handling of umbrellas; Mrs Helmsley believed in loud words and elbows. Mrs Astor had dogs as well-behaved as herself, silky and

  smooth-haired to pose for photographers or to have their portraits included in her 19th-century collection on the staircase of Holly Hill, her weekend retreat. Mrs Helmsley had a Maltese bitch called Trouble, tied with pink ribbons and small enough to stuff in a purse, who sniffed at diners’ legs in her restaurants and nipped their heels until they bled.

  The Astor money, more than $120m by the time it was Brooke’s to disburse, was old, from New York land and the fur trade. The Helmsley money, $5 billion by the time Leona got her hands on it, was pretty new, from property speculation. Both fortunes came from late third marriages to cunning husbands. But whereas Mrs Astor, aside from writing features for House & Garden, merely let the markets increase her pile and relished spending the capital (something, she admitted, that John Jacob Astor would have thought as outrageous as dancing naked in the street), Mrs Helmsley worked like a dragon to build up and expand her husband Harry’s hotel empire. As a Manhattan hatter’s daughter with several competitive siblings, she was used to graft and struggle. Mrs Astor, a solitary and dreamy child who had come by money almost magically, treated it like fairy dust to the end of her days.

  Both, in their wildly different ways, were peremptory. Well into old age, Mrs Astor wore out the staffers of the Astor Foundation with her insistence on seeing every group and project that was asking her for money, and visiting them frequently to check that things were done as required. A run-down section of 130th Street in Harlem, Astor Row, had to have its porches and decorative brackets immaculately restored; a start-up furniture service for the poor had to include tea-cups and saucers. Meanwhile, at Helmsley hotels across Manhattan, underneath giant portraits of the “Queen” herself, quaking bellhops with huge armloads of laundry submitted to the scarlet, pecking fingernails and the icy tiara smile. “I won’t stand for skimpy towels; why should you?” cried Mrs Helmsley’s adverts in the New York Times.

  The arrogance of big money, Mrs Astor wrote once, “is one of the most unappealing of characteristics”. Mrs Helmsley, though fun to her friends, was arrogance personified: “Rhymes with rich”, was Newsweek’s caption for her portrait on its cover. “We don’t pay taxes,” she was said to have told a housekeeper once; “only the little people pay taxes.” Mrs Astor, a gentle soul, was upset when her first father-in-law, a colonel, yelled at his secretaries. Mrs Helmsley believed staff existed to be barked at, slapped and called fags if appropriate; two of them sued her for firing them because they were gay. On visits to underprivileged areas Mrs Astor,gloved and immaculate because this was what the ordinary person expected of the rich, would happily sip from a paper cup and praise the hot-dog mustard on her paper plate. At the sight of a paper-cup-carrier in any of her reception areas, Mrs Helmsley would get her doormen to throw the offe
nder out.

  Vulgar showiness was also seldom seen in the Astor household. True, the glasses, silver and finger bowls bore the Astor initials or the Astor crest, but it was not half as obvious as the “H” on Leona’s plastic soap-compacts. Mrs Astor could sport massed sapphires if one-upmanship seemed called for; but she owned only two country houses, not several, and her birthday was never marked, as Leona’s once was, by a display of red, white and blue lights on the Helmsley-owned Empire State Building. Vulgarity led to trouble; which was why Leona, accused of “naked greed” by the judge, spent 18 months in Camp Fed in 1992–94 for tax evasion, when it was fairly clear that her real crime was to be both abrasive and rich.

  New York gained hugely from both women. Mrs Astor gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller University, the Bronx Zoo and, her special favourite, the New York Public Library; Mrs Helmsley gave to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the Weill Cornell Medical College and, her spell in prison evidently softening her, to poor children and hurricane victims. Both ended sadly, left alone with their dogs and the ghosts of their husbands in dust-draped city apartments or empty summer homes. But in the memory of most New Yorkers one was a saint and the other a sinner. Richesse oblige.

  Oscar Auerbach

  Oscar Auerbach, a doctor who stubbed out cigarettes, died on January 15th 1997, aged 92

  When Oscar Auerbach established a link between smoking and cancer the everyday world of millions of people started to change. The companionable cigarette, the antidote to the pains of civilisation, the soldier’s solace, the lovers’ token, was now to be shunned. The cigarette that bears the lipstick’s traces no longer seemed so romantic, now that it offered the prospect of premature death. Those who continued to smoke came to feel persecuted, snatching a guilty puff in the street away from the frowns of their abstemious workmates.

  Dr Auerbach almost certainly had no idea of the impact his research was going to make. He was the single-minded scientist sometimes depicted in fiction, buried in his work, emerging from his laboratory only to lecture to students at New Jersey Medical School. He did not enter into the so-called “tobacco wars” waged between anti-smoking campaigners and the cigarette firms that fought hard to defend their markets. Indeed, the publicity given to some of his early findings greatly upset him. The New England Journal of Medicine declined to publish them because of its policy of using only previously unpublished results.

  The doctor’s findings were published later in other journals, but some tobacco companies pounced on their earlier technical rejection to claim that they were faulty. Sowing doubts about research into the effects of smoking has been a powerful tactic in the industry’s slow and artfully managed retreat. Even now, many years after Dr Auerbach’s work was made public, the tobacco people are far from conceding defeat. In the rich countries it is generally accepted that the tar and carbon monoxide in cigarettes do no good at all to the lungs (or the heart), and sales of cigarettes have fallen dramatically (although Americans alone still smoke more than a billion a day). In developing countries, in China for example, tobacco consumption is increasing. Deaths from diseases linked to smoking, at present estimated at 3m a year, are rising. On the other hand, an incalculable number of lives have been prolonged as a result of the publicity given to Dr Auerbach’s work. It is not a bad memorial.

  As often happens when a discovery’s time has come, the idea of a link between smoking and illness was mooted by a number of scientists. In Britain in 1951 Sir Richard Doll and Sir Austin Bradford Hill began a survey of smoking among some 34,000 male doctors which continued until the 1990s. In America there were similar large-scale studies. Dr Auerbach had studied diseases linked to social conditions since he had become a doctor in 1929 after studying in Vienna and New York. In the 1930s he was among those who sought the best treatment for tuberculosis. In the 1950s, while tuberculosis seemed to have yielded to drugs, cancer was unconquered. Dr Auerbach was a practical man. While, statistically, smoking seemed to be a culprit – the more you smoked the greater the chance of getting cancer – he set out to seek medical evidence of the link. In his research, much of it financed by the American Cancer Society, he looked at tissue changes wrought by cigarette

  smoking in the lungs of people with cancer. A colleague of his recalled that the doctor might look at 2,000 slides a day. He offered direct, visual proof that cigarette smoke altered cells and that the damage intensified with every puff. Correlation had moved to causation.

  In 1964 an increasingly health-conscious American government felt it had enough convincing evidence to take on the cigarette manufacturers. After a report by the surgeon-general on the dangers of smoking, cigarette packets were made to carry a health warning. At first this was the gentle advice, “Smoking may be harmful to your health”. Now it is the no-nonsense “Smoking kills”, in large type. In Britain and some other countries cigarette packets and advertisements have to carry similar labels.

  Many of the subsequent findings about smoking came from Dr Auerbach’s research: the possible danger of breathing in someone else’s smoke, the so-called passive smoking; and the good news that if you give up smoking a damaged lung may heal. He trained a pack of dogs to smoke. Of the 86 beagles in the pack, 12 developedcancer. After the New York Times published the story in 1970, every television network in America carried a report of the smoking beagles. The tobacco industry was caught off guard. This story publicised the danger of smoking as nothing else had. The industry rushed to defend itself. Dogs were not the same as humans, its spokesmen said. This was nothing but a “scientific hoax”.

  However, there was a public reaction against the use of dogs in the experiment. The sorrowful beagles puffing away touched many a heart. Snoopy, the dog in the “Peanuts” cartoon, was a beagle, for goodness sake. But if Oscar Auerbach has sometimes been remembered as “the beagle man” he hardly noticed. His life was ordered in the laboratory and the lecture room, not in the irrational world outside.

  Digby Baltzell

  Edward Digby Baltzell, a WASP among the WASPS, died on August 17th 1996, aged 80

  The acronym WASP, standing for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, was probably invented by Digby Baltzell. He disclaimed its authorship, but dictionaries insist on dating it from 1964, when a book by Mr Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America, was first published. His disclaimer may have been due less to modesty than irritation. Here was a distinguished academic, a fellow of Harvard and Princeton and goodness knows where else, but famous for his association with a single word. “You must meet the WASP man,” a well-meaning hostess would say at a party.

  The lifting of the word from a sociological tome and its liberation into popular use happened because, until then, there had been no instantly recognisable way of describing the ethnic ruling elite of America. “Gentry”, “aristocracy” were European terms. WASP, too, had a pleasantly pejorative sound for non-WASPs. Wasps were parasites, stealing from the hard-working bees.

  Mr Baltzell was in two minds, or possibly three, about WASPs. He was himself very much a WASP, and looked the part in his tweed jacket and striped shirt. He played tennis which, he complained, was a gentleman’s game before it became professional. The WASP culture, based on honour, hard work and respect for others, was a model that everyone could emulate. That said, not all WASPs deserved admiration. Mr Baltzell was not at all keen on those of Philadelphia, although he was born there. He felt they had a tradition of weak leadership inherited from their egalitarian Quaker founders. The Boston WASPs, whose Puritan forebears had contributed much to modern democracy, were far superior. But Mr Baltzell’s chief concern about the American elite was that it maintained barriers against minorities and was often racially prejudiced against talented outsiders. The authority of the white race, largely built up in England between the ages of Drake and Gladstone, was now being called into question around the world. America had become the world’s most racially heterogeneous nation. To maintain its power in “an opportunitarian
and mobile society” the elite had to be representative of the composition of society as a whole.

  An unexpected hero of Mr Baltzell was Al Capone, whom he called “one of the organising geniuses of his generation”. A poor boy from Brooklyn, Capone made millions by exploiting the market created by prohibition (a law passed by traditional Protestants largely to curb the drinking habits of the ethnic masses). He hated being called Scarface and instead took the name Anthony Brown. He showed his noblesse oblige by feeding thousands of poor Chicago citizens at his own expense. Those who worked for him had to be well dressed and speak respectfully. His son went to a private school and to Yale and married a well-connected girl. Capone, Mr Baltzell said, followed in the tradition of the American dream of the self-made man, and was not much different from the self-made Protestant “robber barons” of an earlier era.

  Capone, dismissed as a hoodlum in Hollywood films, could never have had his reputation salvaged even by a clever academic, but Mr Baltzell’s endorsement of other talented Americans gained attention. “People talk about what Episcopalians [Anglicans] have accomplished and their power,” Mr Baltzell said, “but what Jews have done in the United States since the second world war is now the great untold story.”

  Towards the end of his life Mr Baltzell was working on a book that would have recorded the collapse of an elite based on Protestant power, and its gradual replacement by a meritocracy. The end of WASP power? Formally, yes. But the reality is that WASP has come simply to mean affluent white. Back in the 1960s, when Mr Baltzell first predicted the eventual end of the Protestant grip, the election of John Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, as American president seemed to offer evidence of the demise of the WASPs. Like Kennedy, Ronald Reagan proudly pointed to his Irish (Celtic) background.