Sometimes when you’re looking for something, you find something else. In my case, I was looking for information on yellow peas, and Wikipedia handed me this:
Split peas were used for an unusual non-culinary purpose during the Second World War. Great efforts were made to optimise the manufacture of the British Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft, speeding and cheapening manufacture while maintaining or enhancing performance. Flush-headed rivets were used on a prototype for the smoothest possible surfaces, but this made it more difficult, expensive, and slower to produce than using the usual dome-headed rivets. Rather than the cumbersome alternative of comparing actual rivets, split peas were glued over all the flush rivets to simulate dome heads. This reduced the speed by 22 mph (35 km/h), which was unacceptable. Split peas were then progressively removed to determine which rivets really needed to be flush; the results were applied to production aeroplanes.
Don’t tell your kids about this until they’re firmly hooked on the green stuff.
