In the German town of Jülich, Major General Baron von Hompesch came across a tall young carpenter laboring away in his workshop. Believing that any effort to persuade him to join the regiment would be useless, Hompesch requested that the carpenter construct a packing box measuring a height of six feet, six inches: the same height as the carpenter himself. The carpenter got to work and soon finished the box. But upon his return, Hompesch complained it was too small. Not wanting to lose the baron’s custom, and desperate to prove his proficiency, the carpenter climbed inside the box and lay down.

This was the moment the baron had been waiting for. He slammed down the lid and had his bury companions seal it shut. Smug with his cunning, and eagerly anticipating the prize that awaited him, he ordered for the box to be sent to the king. However, he’d forgotten one rather important detail: to cut out air holes. The carpenter suffocated to death in transit, earning the baron a brief stint in prison rather than the reward he’d been waiting for. Things turned out okay for him though—better than they had for the carpenter at least—and in the end Hompesch received a royal pardon.

Frederick I was a devout Calvinist; an adherent to a particularly Protestant branch of Christianity that closely embraced the concept of predestination. You might have thought that one of his core religious belief—that one’s lot in life was divinely chosen well before birth—might have dissuaded him from wanting to “play god” himself by dabbling in eugenics. But it didn’t. For his obsession with creating tall recruits for his grenadiers soon turned into a eugenics-driven breeding programme.

The Prussian king devised a plan whereby tall men in the regiment were to be paired off with particularly tall women, in the hope they produce enormous offspring. It might not have worked in his lifetime, but by the late eighteenth century, it meant the population of Potsdam had its fair share of tall folk. This wasn’t the only thing he did to provide for the next generation of Potsdam Grenadiers: the king also requested that newborn babies of tall parents be given a red scarf to mark them out as potential future recruits.

Despite Frederick’s fanatical interest in all things military, he was a phenomenally peaceful ruler. Except for his brief intervention in the Great Northern War, the Soldier King never actually started a war, concerning himself more with military reform than with conquest. Through the conscriptional canton system, he considerably increased the size of the Prussian army. He also introduced a number of tactical and technological advances (such as improving the rate of infantry fire) that made the Prussian army the formidable fighting force it would be under his successor, Frederick the Great.

But while Frederick’s foreign policy can be described as peaceful, when it came to running things within his own family the king was an absolute tyrant. Though a competent autocrat, Frederick I was a nightmare to be around. He had a notoriously short temper and was known to cane his servants and children for the slightest of reasons. Any mention of France would particularly grind his gears, sending him into a blind rage that sent shivers down the spine of anyone around.