Ten Things You Didn’t Know (About the Jesuits)

1. They invented the trap door. Without the Jesuits, the Wicked Witch
   of the West wouldn’t have been able to disappear so suddenly
   in The Wizard of Oz. With a history in theater and the arts, Jesuits
   also perfected the “scrim,” the sheer curtain still used in theaters
   today.


2. They discovered quinine (called “Jesuit bark” in the 16th century)
   that is used today for anti-malarial drugs and also in tonic water.
   Without the Jesuits, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy your gin and
   tonic. *


3. Their founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the Spanish-soldier-
   turned-mystic may be the only saint with a notarized police
   record: for nighttime brawling with intent to cause bodily harm
   (needless to say, this came before his conversion).


4. Their dictionaries and lexicons of the native languages in North
   America in the 17th century were the first resources Europeans
   used to understand these ancient tongues, and they still
   provide modern scholars with the earliest transcriptions of the
   languages.


5. They located the source of the Blue Nile and charted large
   stretches of the Amazon and Mississippi Rivers.


6. They educated Descartes, Voltaire, Moliere, James Joyce, Peter Paul
   Rubens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fidel Castro, Alfred Hitchcock, and
   Bill Clinton—not to mention Bing Crosby, Vince Lombardi, Robert
   Altman, Chris Farley, Salma Hayek, and Denzel Washington.


7. They founded the city of Sao Paolo, Brazil.


8. There are 35 craters on the moon named for Jesuit scientists. And
   Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scientist, called “master
   of a hundred arts” and “the last man to know everything”, was
   a geologist, biologist, linguist, decipherer of hieroglyphics, and
   inventor of the megaphone.


9. They inspired the film On the Waterfront, based on the groundbreaking
   labor-relations work of Jesuit John Corridan, who worked in
   New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. His part was played by
   Karl Malden, who, last year, died 50 years to the day after Fr.
   Corridan.


10. They count 40 saints and dozens of blessed among their members,
    including the globe-trotting missionary St. Francis Xavier. Their
    famous “former” members include Garry Wills, John McLaughlin,
    and Jerry Brown.

Source: http://www.companymagazine.org/v274/jesuit-guide.pdf

P.S. *Quinine is also used to dilute Heroin.