Edmund Shaftesbury was, in his day, a top guru of “personal magnetism”…or was he? According to
Marc Abraham’s weekly Guardian column…
Edmund Shaftesbury was a pen name used by Dr Everett Ralston, the Ralston of Ralston-Purina, the food company that was ingested by Nestlé four years ago.
Ralston was itself a concoction, an acronym for “regime, activity, light, strength, temperation, oxygen, nature”.
The man was actually named Webster Edgerly.
In other improbable Marc Abrahams news: Hot off the presses, just in time for this year’s IgNobel Prize ceremony….The Ig Nobel Prizes 2: An All-New Collection of the World’s Unlikeliest Research (ISBN 0525949127).
So what about jazz great Charlie Mingus and not-amused icon Queen Victoria? Each of them, for a very different reason, owned Shaftesbury’s Personal Magnetism.