Fig Who?

Matt:

Who are Fig Newtons named after? Isaac? Huey? Juice? Wayne?

-- JW, San Diego

It's a what, not a who. In the late 1890s, a Philadelphia inventor devised a machine that could produce a dough wrapping. Apparently it taxed his brain so badly, he couldn't come up with a good idea for a filling. He went all the way to Massachusetts, to a jam company in Newton, to find the right stuff to stuff in his dough. (Fig jam was all the rage at the time.) If the company had been in a different town, we might now be eating Fig Bostons or Fig Miltons.