THE humble, mighty and universal cornflake is 100 years old tomorrow.

Nothing could be more utterly normal than the cornflake and no one could have been stranger then the man who invented it.

The quiet birth of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which would eventually become the Kellogg Company, the behemoth of breakfast cereal, was in February 19, 1906. But to trace the genesis of the cornflake it is necessary to go back several more years, to the sanatorium run by John Harvey Kellogg, a doctor in Battle Creek, Michigan, a radical vegetarian, Seventh Day Adventist, pioneering nutritionist and medical visionary: part genius, part bonkers.

Dr Kellogg’s clinical regime emphasised diet, exercise and sexual abstinence. But, above all, Dr Kellogg believed in enemas, lots of them. He had one every day and he invented a high-powered machine that could administer a 15-gallon enema in a matter of minutes.

Unsurprisingly, he had small, slightly bloodshot eyes.

Dr Kellogg also had a brother, William Keith Kellogg, who was less interested in enemas and much more interested in money.

Together, in 1897, they launched the Sanitas Food Company to produce whole-grain cereals. At that time, the rich in America breakfasted on meat, eggs and alcohol, and the poor ate boiled grains. John and William were convinced that there was a better and healthier way to start the day. They began experimenting with various sorts of high-fibre, grain-based health food and encouraged the sanatorium customers to try them, between enemas. Clearing the nation’ s bowels was becoming, for Dr Kellogg, something of personal crusade.

One fateful day, some soaked dough was accidentally left out overnight. In the morning it had assumed a strange consistency and, when baked, the mixture formed a strange, fissiparous sort of crisp that shattered when run through rollers and became instantly soggy in milk. The cornflake had been born. On March 7, 1897, they were served at the Kellogg health centre for the first time.

In some respects Dr Kellogg was ahead of his time: he spotted the evils of smoking early on and he was a talented and innovative surgeon. But some of his theories were more than odd.

In 1897 Dr John was not thinking about selling breakfast foods. He was thinking about sex. He didn’t approve of sex. Indeed, it appears he never consummated his marriage (although he adopted 42 children). But even worse than sex, in Dr John’s eyes, was masturbation: self-abuse, he fervently believed, caused acne, atrophied testicles and general physical and mental collapse.

He wrote: “A remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.” In addition to “curing” onanists and scouring the bowels of the rich and over-fed, Dr John offered hydrotherapy and electrotherapy. He briefly advocated “fletcherising”, a fad for chewing food for so long that it slithered down the throat.

William had realised that there was big money to be made in toasted corn. He was not alone. Captain Charles William Post, one of Kellogg’s patients, also spotted the commercial possibilities and started his own cereal business. The cornflake race was on. First there were Post Toasties, then Korn-Kinks, Checker Brand Corn Flakes, Corn-O-Plenty and Indian Corn Flakes. No fewer than 42 varieties appeared on the market. In 1898 Post’s Grape-Nuts became the first widely sold cold cereal, and Post became a cereal millionaire. William knew that the time had come to act.

He first tried selling cornflakes through the post. After this, possibly the worst business idea ever attempted, he came up with one of the best. In 1906, at the age of 46, William started the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, selling the original Kellogg’s Corn Flake. Dr John was appalled, in part because his brother had added sugar to the mixture, in defiance of all his most cherished medical theories.

There was an irrevocable split: the brothers never spoke to one another again.

William promoted his new flakes with an advertising blitz. “What? Have you no Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes! Then bring my hat and coat, I don’t want any of your substitutes,” went the somewhat indigestible advertising slogan. But it worked.

John Kellogg died in 1943 at the age of 91. Today Kellogg’s Corn Flakes are sold in 160 countries and about 128 billion bowls of them are eaten worldwide every year. His name is not associated with Kellogg’s patented stomach-jiggler, nor Kellogg’s electroshock baths, nor Kellogg’s seminal treatise on self-abuse (written while he was on honeymoon). His name will forever be synonymous with the ubiquitous flake: the complete breakfast cereal, invented, accidentally, by a complete flake.

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