Clarence Birdseye

February 9, 1886 (age 69)

Brooklyn, New York, United States

From 1910 to 1912 Birdseye was a field naturalist for the Biological Survey of the United States Department of Agriculture, work that led to his publication of a short monograph entitled Some Common Mammals of Western Montana in Relation to Agriculture and Spotted Fever (1912). A successful venture in marketing western furs during this period took him in 1912 to Labrador, where he was associated for a time with the medical missionary Sir Wilfred Grenfell. Birdseye traded in furs in Labrador for the next five years. His changed domestic circumstances drew Birdseye's attention to the problems of food preservation. The meat of rabbits, ducks, and caribou, if frozen quickly at a temperature -40° or -50° F. , retained its freshness indefinitely. Fish caught through holes in ice during subzero weather also were as firm and fresh when cooked weeks later, as if they had just been caught. Further crude experiments confirmed that quick-freezing preserves the natural characteristics of food by preventing the formation of the large ice crystals that gather in slowly frozen foodstuffs and rupture their cellular structure - thus destroying their texture, flavor, and natural juices and reducing their vitamin content. World War I interrupted Birdseye's search for a commercial application of his findings. After returning to the United States, he became purchasing agent for the United States Housing Corporation (1917 - 1919) and assistant to the president of the United States Fisheries Association (1920 - 1922). In 1923 he resumed his experiments with quick-freezing, establishing himself in the corner of an icehouse in New Jersey. His capital investment was $7 for an electric fan, buckets of brine, and cakes of ice. The first successful product was dressed fillets of haddock, frozen brick-hard in square containers made from old candy boxes. The scientific principle was already known; Birdseye's contribution was to devise a method of artificially freezing perishables by pressing them between belts (later between refrigerated metal plates) that allowed the heat exchange to be accomplished directly upon the foods. Birdseye's first freezer was not portable, but the second was, and thus vegetables could be prepared and quick-frozen at the source of supply. In 1924, to be near a reliable source of fresh fish, Birdseye established laboratories for research and development at Gloucester, Massachussets. With a small group of associates and despite precarious financing of his small operation (called General Foods Company and General Seafoods Corporation), Birdseye perfected his process, coined the word "quick-freeze, " and by 1928 was able to apply the technique to meat, poultry, fish, and shellfish in commercial quantities. The missing element, public acceptance, appeared after 1929. In that year the Postum Company, skilled in the distribution of consumer food products, together with the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation, acquired all patents and assets of Birdseye's company for a price in the range of $20 million to $23. 5 million. Subsequently, the Postum Company purchased the Goldman Sachs interest and adopted the name General Foods, substituting "Corporation" for "Company. " Within a few years quick-frozen foods had revolutionized food distribution, brought about sweeping changes in national eating habits, and effected fundamental improvements in American agriculture through stimulating the seed industry to refine varieties for quick-frozen products, introducing quality controls in field production, and stabilizing prices, which brought millions of acres into profitable use. Birdseye's name became a famous trademark. By 1976 hundreds of processors were producing quick-frozen foods with an annual value of nearly $17 billion. Although his process made Birdseye wealthy, he continued to work. His last project (1953 - 1955) took him to Peru on an assignment to develop a new method of making paper stock from bagasse (crushed sugarcane stalks). While there he suffered a heart attack that he attributed to the high altitude. He died in New York City. Birdseye was an inventor and cut-and-try experimenter in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. His early interest in the natural world never flagged. Near the end of his life he was coauthor with his wife of Growing Woodland Plants (1951).

Clarence Birdseye

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Businessman scientist

Background

Clarence Birdseye was born on December 9, 1886, in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of Clarence Frank Birdseye, lawyer and legal scholar, and Ada Underwood.

Education

While quite young, Clarence developed two lifelong interests-natural history and food. At the age of five, Birdseye gave his mother a mouse skin that he had dressed; and before he had reached his teens, his proficiency in taxidermy led him to insert an advertisement in a sporting magazine offering instruction in the art under the impressive rubric of the American School of Taxidermy. At Montclair, New Jersey, where he attended high school, his other enduring interest, food preparation, came to light when he enrolled in the cooking class. Following a family tradition, Birdseye entered Amherst College with the class of 1910; his attendance was irregular, however, owing to financial difficulties, and he did not graduate. Among his imaginative schemes for meeting college expenses were the sale of frogs to the Bronx Zoo for snake food and the live-trapping of 135 specimens of the comparatively rare black rat for a Columbia University professor's breeding experiments.

Career

From 1910 to 1912 Birdseye was a field naturalist for the Biological Survey of the United States Department of Agriculture, work that led to his publication of a short monograph entitled Some Common Mammals of Western Montana in Relation to Agriculture and Spotted Fever (1912). A successful venture in marketing western furs during this period took him in 1912 to Labrador, where he was associated for a time with the medical missionary Sir Wilfred Grenfell. Birdseye traded in furs in Labrador for the next five years. His changed domestic circumstances drew Birdseye's attention to the problems of food preservation. The meat of rabbits, ducks, and caribou, if frozen quickly at a temperature -40° or -50° F. , retained its freshness indefinitely. Fish caught through holes in ice during subzero weather also were as firm and fresh when cooked weeks later, as if they had just been caught. Further crude experiments confirmed that quick-freezing preserves the natural characteristics of food by preventing the formation of the large ice crystals that gather in slowly frozen foodstuffs and rupture their cellular structure - thus destroying their texture, flavor, and natural juices and reducing their vitamin content.

World War I interrupted Birdseye's search for a commercial application of his findings. After returning to the United States, he became purchasing agent for the United States Housing Corporation (1917 - 1919) and assistant to the president of the United States Fisheries Association (1920 - 1922). In 1923 he resumed his experiments with quick-freezing, establishing himself in the corner of an icehouse in New Jersey. His capital investment was $7 for an electric fan, buckets of brine, and cakes of ice. The first successful product was dressed fillets of haddock, frozen brick-hard in square containers made from old candy boxes. The scientific principle was already known; Birdseye's contribution was to devise a method of artificially freezing perishables by pressing them between belts (later between refrigerated metal plates) that allowed the heat exchange to be accomplished directly upon the foods. Birdseye's first freezer was not portable, but the second was, and thus vegetables could be prepared and quick-frozen at the source of supply.

In 1924, to be near a reliable source of fresh fish, Birdseye established laboratories for research and development at Gloucester, Massachussets. With a small group of associates and despite precarious financing of his small operation (called General Foods Company and General Seafoods Corporation), Birdseye perfected his process, coined the word "quick-freeze, " and by 1928 was able to apply the technique to meat, poultry, fish, and shellfish in commercial quantities. The missing element, public acceptance, appeared after 1929. In that year the Postum Company, skilled in the distribution of consumer food products, together with the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation, acquired all patents and assets of Birdseye's company for a price in the range of $20 million to $23. 5 million. Subsequently, the Postum Company purchased the Goldman Sachs interest and adopted the name General Foods, substituting "Corporation" for "Company. " Within a few years quick-frozen foods had revolutionized food distribution, brought about sweeping changes in national eating habits, and effected fundamental improvements in American agriculture through stimulating the seed industry to refine varieties for quick-frozen products, introducing quality controls in field production, and stabilizing prices, which brought millions of acres into profitable use. Birdseye's name became a famous trademark. By 1976 hundreds of processors were producing quick-frozen foods with an annual value of nearly $17 billion.

Although his process made Birdseye wealthy, he continued to work. His last project (1953 - 1955) took him to Peru on an assignment to develop a new method of making paper stock from bagasse (crushed sugarcane stalks). While there he suffered a heart attack that he attributed to the high altitude. He died in New York City.

Birdseye was an inventor and cut-and-try experimenter in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. His early interest in the natural world never flagged. Near the end of his life he was coauthor with his wife of Growing Woodland Plants (1951).

Achievements

Clarence Birdseye was a scientist and inventor whose process for quick-freezing foods in convenient packages made his name a household word and created a multibillion-dollar industry. He was also a capable businessman who held some 300 American and foreign patents. Birdseye also invented a machine capable of quick-freezing loose vegetables individually, a process for preserving foods by quick drying that he called the "anhydrous method, " a reflector and an infrared heat lamp and a recoilless harpoon gun. Birdseye was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.

Works

Growing Woodland Plants Growing Woodland Plants

book
- Growing Woodland Plants
  ( The authors explain the interrelationships of trees, wi...)

Personality

Although untrained in any formal sense, Birdseye was an original thinker and investigator, gifted with keen powers of observation and an enormous curiosity.

Connections

Birdseye married Eleanor Gannett on August 21, 1915; they had four children.

Father:: Clarence Frank Birdseye
Mother:: Ada (Underwood) Birdseye
Spouse:: Eleanor (Gannett) Birdseye

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