Clarence Birdseye

• Born: December 9, 1886
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: October 7, 1956
• Place of death: New York, New York

American industrialist and naturalist

Birdseye is best remembered for his contributions to food preservation and processing. Although his name is usually associated with the freezing of food, he also perfected means of dehydrating food and preserving it in other ways.

Primary fields: Food processing; packaging

Primary invention: Quick freezing

Early Life

From childhood, Clarence Frank Birdseye II was fascinated by nature. At age five, he preserved the skin of a mouse, proudly presenting it to his mother as a gift. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Clarence and Ada Underwood Birdseye, Clarence had two consuming passions: natural history and food.

Before Birdseye was a teenager, his family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. Here, part of Birdseye’s destiny unfolded when he enrolled in a cooking class at the local high school. He had already become such a proficient taxidermist that he ran advertisements in a sporting magazine announcing his availability for teaching the art of animal preservation, showing early signs of the business astuteness that was to mark his later life. He named his company the American School of Taxidermy.

Following high school, Birdseye enrolled in Amherst College as a biology major. Financial pressure forced him to work in order to earn money to finance his education. He worked and continued as a full-time student for two years, partly by raising and selling to the Bronx Zoo frogs that would be used to feed many of the zoo’s snakes. He trapped and sold over one hundred specimens of black rats to a Columbia University professor for use in breeding experiments the professor was conducting. These enterprises earned him the nickname of “Bugs” among his friends and classmates.

Despite his efforts to sustain himself and continue his schooling, Birdseye finally realized that his attendance was irregular because of the pressure to earn money and that his college career was being severely compromised by his need to support himself and struggle to pay his tuition. On completing his sophomore year, he withdrew from Amherst.

After working in New York City for a while, Birdseye was hired by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1910 as a field naturalist, a position that led to the publication of his monograph, Some Common Mammals of Western Montana in Relation to Agriculture and Spotted Fever, which appeared in 1912. In his job as a field naturalist, Birdseye traveled through much of the American Southwest. He began a fur-trading business that he quickly turned into a moneymaking enterprise.

The success of this venture caused him to go to Labrador in 1912 with the medical missionary Sir Wilfred Grenfell to engage more fully in the fur trade. He remained in Labrador for the next five years, but his time there ended with the entry of the United States into World War I in 1917.

Life’s Work

During a holiday in the United States in 1915, Birdseye married Eleanor Gannett. He returned to Labrador alone because his wife was pregnant, but after the birth of the child, Eleanor and the infant went to Labrador with Birdseye. The couple would have three more children. Now with family responsibilities, Birdseye needed to provide for his family in Labrador’s harsh and inhospitable climate. In particular, he had to be sure that they had enough to eat.

The beginning of Birdseye’s experiments in freezing food came about when he observed that the Labrador natives, when they pulled fish from the water and laid it on the ice, ended up with solidly frozen fish that, if kept frozen, could be thawed and cooked weeks or even months later. Fish preserved in this way tasted as good as they would have on the day they were caught as long as they were solidly frozen until they were cooked.

Birdseye also observed that fish caught in the height of the winter, when temperatures approached –50 Fahrenheit, tasted better when they were finally cooked than similar fish that had been caught in the autumn and frozen more slowly when temperatures, although still well below freezing, were higher. He concluded that the secret to keeping frozen food as fresh as possible depended upon what he termed “quick freeze.”

Experimenting with various methods of freezing food, Birdseye was able to preserve not only fish, seafood, and meat but also vegetables that grew profusely in Labrador’s sunlit summer and that could be frozen when the temperatures sank. He was able to feed his family well with the food he froze.

Although he may not have understood fully the theoretical aspects of what he was doing, Birdseye’s method of quick freezing preserved the freshness of food because it did not allow large ice crystals to form in it. Had these crystals formed, they would have altered drastically the cellular structure of the food being preserved, thereby reducing its flavor and texture as well as its vitamin content.

Birdseye spent two years, 1917 to 1919, as a purchasing agent for the United States Housing Corporation. He then became assistant to the president of the United States Fisheries Association, serving from 1920 until 1922. His interest in freezing food grew. In 1923, he set up shop in the periphery of an ice house in New Jersey and, with capital of seven dollars, continued his experiments. These experiments led him to the discovery that fish packed in boxes could be frozen rock-solid and preserved effectively.

He found that perishables could be quick-frozen by pressing them between belts that permitted a heat exchange between the belts—later replaced by refrigerated metal plates—and the food to be frozen. The only problem was that once the food was frozen, it had to be preserved in freezers, so the notion of selling frozen food in typical markets seemed impossible.

Not to be daunted, Birdseye, who by now had established the General Seafood Corporation with the aid of some affluent partners, demonstrated his exceptional acumen as a businessman. He persuaded executives at the American Radiator Corporation to manufacture display units that would preserve frozen foods at temperatures low enough to keep them solidly frozen. He then prevailed on this company to lease these display units to grocery stores for eight dollars per month.

Once this accord was reached, the mass sale of frozen foods was just a matter of time. The first sale of frozen foods on a retail basis occurred on March 6, 1930, in Springfield, Massachusetts. During the next fifteen years, frozen food ceased to be a novelty and became a necessity for many people who now could buy the ingredients for entire meals in frozen form and prepare them for use in a short time, a definite boon to the working women much in evidence during World War II.

In 1944, Birdseye expanded his business by leasing insulated railway cars that could transport his goods anywhere in the nation. The following year, airlines began to stock frozen dinners to serve to passengers, and by 1954, the so-called TV dinner appeared in stores.

On August 12, 1930, Birdseye received a patent for his “double-plate” method of freezing food, one of over three hundred patents he was granted during his life. This method involved placing food in cartons that were then frozen between two flat, refrigerated surfaces under pressure.

In 1929, the Postum Company, skilled at marketing food products, and the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation bought Birdseye out for just under $25 million, an almost unimaginable amount at that time. Ever ambitious, the newly minted millionaire continued to work on food preservation and developed a method of dehydration known as the anhydrous method. He also invented and patented an infrared heat lamp and a recoilless harpoon gun.

In 1953, at age sixty-seven, Birdseye embarked on a two-year venture in Peru, where he worked on developing a process using the waste product of sugarcane, bagasse, to make paper stock. Peru’s high altitude affected him adversely and possibly contributed to the heart problems that took his life on October 7, 1956.

Impact

It is difficult to conceive of a modern food event with the far-reaching consequences of the frozen food industry, which as early as 1976 had turned into an enterprise that brought over $17 billion into the U.S. economy annually. Almost every home in the United States has a refrigerator with a frozen food compartment with a constant temperature around zero. Many homes have deep freezes as well for storing large quantities of food for long periods of time.

The Food and Drug Administration has acknowledged that quick freezing preserves the vitamin and mineral content of foods. It is possible to ship frozen foods anywhere to feed people who might otherwise have diets deficient in the beneficial elements found in fresh food. In the contemporary United States, where both parents in typical families work, frozen food has become a necessity because of its variety and ease in preparation.

In 2005, the National Inventors Hall of Fame posthumously elected Birdseye to membership for the impact his work has had on American society. This prestigious organization recognizes people whose work has altered society and enhanced the lives of Americans.

Bibliography

Brown, Travis. Historical First Patents: The First United States Patents for Many Everyday Things. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994. A brief but highly readable assessment of Birdseye’s contributions to food processing in the section titled “Frozen Food.”

Carlisle, Rodney. Inventions and Discoveries. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. Carlisle packs many specifics into the two pages he allots to Birdseye.

Harper, Charise Mericle. Imaginative Inventions. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001. The brief section on Birdseye is useful and readable.

Rondeau, Amanda. Vegetables Are Vital. Edina, Minn.: Abdo, 2003. An appreciative assessment of the impact that Birdseye’s inventions relating to food preservation have had on society generally.