A Brief History Actually this is nothing of the kind, though I intended it to be. As it turns out, I don't know the history of Ovaltine, nor can I find a comprehensive one online. Michael Shoshani has kindly harrangued me with a number of details which I have included some of. The rest I just made up, in the hope that some other Ovaltine fanatic will get angry enough to send me another harranguing e-mail with all the malted milk-chocolatey details. Our story starts in 1904, in the peaceful, sleepy country of Switzerland, in fact, in it's capital, Bern. Thanks to the invention of the Swiss Bank, Switzerland had achieved a level of comfort and wealth by this year most other nations could only dream of. This led, as it has in other wealthy, comfortable societies, to a fascination, if not an obsession with health and long life. So, unsurprisingly, at about this time, a veritable plethora of health drinks came into existence, one being a fortified barley powdered egg malted-milk beverage product called Ovo-Maltine, invented by one George Wander. After this initial success, George's son Albert decided to take Ovo-Maltine international. Unable to find sufficient faceless proleterian workforce willing to manufacture his invention to his satisfaction in his own country, Wander was forced to look abroad, where he found just such a resource in those European peoples without the benefits of Swiss Banks. These included the Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Polish, and Czechs. It also included the hardworking and somewhat gullible Britons. And thus, an Ovo-Maltine manufactory was opened in Hertfordshire in 1909. Unfortunately the hard-working Britons couldn't spell, not even their ministry clerks, and so the name was accidentally changed to Ovaltine. Everything seemed to be going well, but then, with the coming of the GREAT WAR, the fascination with health was replaced by a fascination with living until tomorrow. Sales went south, and times were hard for Herr Wander. It was then he hit upon the brilliant strategem that has worked so well for so many products over the years (Laxatives, raisins, peanuts, insects, etc) namely...add Chocolate! Ovaltine then became a fortified barley powdered egg chocolate malted-milk beverage product. This, along with a picture of a wholesome English country maid with a basket of eggs, and British children ate it up! Especially the ones in the British Army. This stood the company in good stead with just about everyone (except those anarchistic chocolate-haters) until the dark days leading to World War II. In this dark time of evil secret societies, the good and wholesome children of Europe needed a good and honorable secret society to belong to, to ready them for combat against the totalitarian menace of national socialism. And thus, in 1935, the League of Ovaltineys was formed. By 1939, there were five million members, who probably went on to do some great deeds for peace and freedom or something or the sort. During the 50's, as with the rest of the world, nothing much seemed to change for Ovaltine, at least not on the surface. However, beneath its seemingly calm exterior lay a boiling cauldron of disillusionment, rebellion, and racial tension. Not really. Actually what lay beneath was a bunch of recipe changes designed to catch the attention of new consumers and shorten the bottom line. By the mid 70s, science had progressed to the point where it discovered Ovaltine wasn't actually that good for you, and so came into existence Ovaltine Lite, for the TRULY health-conscious (as opposed to the rest of us who are generally satsified with just faking it). Ovaltine was not immune to the flurry of corporate take-overs in the 80s, and is now under the Novartis umbrella, huddling from the acid rain along with Gerber Baby Foods and a dozen other ground-up nutri-foods. In more recent years, the word Ovaltine (along with just about every other made-up word) has been appropriated by computer geeks to mean something completely other than its original meaning. In this case, it's the epithet for an "Overhead Profiler for Single-Address-Space Parallel Programs" Recently Novartis has come up with a loudly trumpeted cure for Leukemia (yay), and announced plans to shut down the old Ovaltine plant in Herfordshire (sigh).

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