For thirty years, overdue mothers have made the pilgrimage to a modest Los Angeles café for one thing: a salad said to bring on labor. The restaurant makes no promises. The mothers keep coming anyway. We traced how a single coincidence became one of the most stubborn legends in modern motherhood.

Twenty minutes past the last outhouse, on a mountain that has waited several million years, four people with trekking poles begin to check their watches. What follows is the least-documented and most universally understood ritual in hiking — and it has a history stretching back to Victorian mountaineers in floor-length wool.

Everyone knows the story: overworked Victorian doctors, a clever new machine, and a scandalous cure for "hysteria." It appears in films, plays, and dozens of books. There is only one problem — the documented record tells a stranger tale. Here is who really built the first device, what it was actually for, and how a myth quietly became "history."