Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

by Mark Kurlansky

  “He always wanted to improve something,” said Lila Monell.

  When he was born in Brooklyn not quite seventy years earlier, there had been little to suggest what an adventure his life would be. But when he heard people comment on what an improbable adventure his life was, he would shrug and say, “I was just very curious.”

  Clarence Frank Birdseye II was born in Brooklyn on December 9, 1886. Both the year and the place are significant. In 1886, Brooklyn was a separate city from Manhattan and, in fact, was the third-largest city in America and one of the fastest growing. Between 1880 and 1890 the population grew by more than a third to 806,343 people.

  One of the forces that made this dramatic growth possible in Brooklyn and neighboring Manhattan was refrigeration. Because of this new technology a large population could live in an area that produced no food but rather brought it in and stored it. Natural ice, collected in large blocks from the frozen lakes of New England and upstate New York, was stored in sawdust-insulated icehouses built along the Hudson that shipped all year long. New York City used more than one million tons of natural ice every year for food and drink. While the pleasure of iced drinks in the summer had been a luxury of the wealthy ever since Roman times, in New York at the time of Birdseye’s birth it had become commonplace. Almost half of all New Yorkers, Manhattanites and Brooklynites, kept food in their homes in iceboxes—insulated boxes chilled by blocks of natural ice. A few even had artificially chilled refrigerators, dangerous, clumsy electric machines with unpredictable motors and leaking fluids.

  No place else in the world was using this much ice. Birdseye was born into a world of refrigeration and would find it lacking when he left the New York City area. It was one of those things that New Yorkers took for granted.

  People are mostly formed over their first dozen years; Birdseye, having been born in 1886, was a nineteenth-century man, even though he lived most of his life in the twentieth century. This, of course, was not unusual. For the first half of the twentieth century, people shaped in the nineteenth century dominated most fields. John Kennedy, elected in 1960, was the first twentieth-century U.S. president. Historians have often commented on how historical centuries do not fit neatly between year 1 and year 99, and quite a few have thought the historical nineteenth century to be an unusually long one, lingering well into the twentieth, whereas the twentieth century to some appears to have been a short one, transitioning even before the year 2000 into a new age that would be associated with the twenty-first century.

  Clearly, Birdseye was shaped by the nineteenth century. Even as an inventor, he used nineteenth-century industrial technology for nineteenth-century goals, as opposed to someone like his fellow Gloucester inventor John Hays Hammond, who harnessed radio impulses into such devices as remote control and was very much a twentieth-century inventor. Birdseye’s inventions, from freezers to lightbulbs, were all mechanical and never electronic. Yet his impact on how people lived in the twentieth century was enormous.

  The nineteenth century, the time of the Industrial Revolution, was an age of inventions, and inventors were iconic heroes. Ten years before Birdseye’s birth, Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone. The following year Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. The year after that, 1878, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, a British inventor, patented the first incandescent lightbulb and lit his house with it. The year before Birdseye was born, a German engineer named Karl Benz patented the first automobile that was practical to use, a three-wheeled vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine and fueled by periodically filling a tank with gasoline. The same year another German, Gottlieb Daimler, built the first gas-powered motorcycle. In 1886, the year of Birdseye’s birth, Daimler built the first four-wheeled automobile.

  Among the important inventors at the time of his birth, George Eastman was to have a profound effect on Birdseye. In 1884 he patented roll film, and in 1888 he produced a lightweight camera using that roll film, the Kodak camera. He and his company, the Eastman Kodak Company, the first major supplier of photographic equipment, gave birth to amateur photography, a passion of the young Clarence Birdseye. His was the first generation to grow up with amateur photography, and he was a pioneer—from his snapshots in the early twentieth century to home movies in the 1920s to color film in the 1930s.

  Inventions of all kinds, ingenious mechanical solutions to practical problems, were popping up seemingly every day. In 1884, the synthetic cloth industry began when a French chemist, Louis-Marie-Hilaire Bernigaud, comte de Chardonnet, patented a process to make artificial silk, which decades later became known as rayon. In 1884, Lewis Waterman, a Brooklyn insurance agent, frustrated with the inefficient pens of the day, invented the capillary feeding fountain pen, the first practical alternative to a pen dipped in an inkwell. James Ritty, an Ohio barkeeper, became the first manufacturer of his new invention, cash registers, the same year. In 1885, Hiram Maxim, an American inventor, demonstrated the first machine gun to the British army. In 1886, in addition to Daimler’s automobile, Coca-Cola and the first washing machine were invented. Barbed wire, which divided up the open range and changed the character of the American West, and wearable contact lenses were both patented the following year. In 1888, Marvin Stone, an Ohio-born inventor, came out with the first paper drinking straw. In 1889, Joshua Pusey, a cigar-smoking Pennsylvania attorney, invented the matchbook. In 1891, when Birdseye was four years old, Jesse Reno, the son of the Civil War officer after whom the Nevada city was named, invented the escalator. Typical of his generation of inventors, he was part inventor and part entrepreneur. Reno created a sensation in Birdseye’s native Brooklyn when he showcased the escalator for two weeks as a ride at the Coney Island amusement park. It was then featured on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, still in itself a sensation since its 1883 opening as the longest suspension bridge in the world, for the first time connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan.

  New York City was being reshaped. The Statue of Liberty was installed in the harbor and dedicated the year of Birdseye’s birth. Eight years later the city began digging tunnels for subways.

  These were exciting times in New York and in America. In the nineteenth century there was a notable difference between the culture of American inventors and that of Europeans. European inventors reveled in the theoretical, sometimes even shunning patents lest they give the impression of harboring lowbrow commercial interests, whereas Americans thought inventions were pointless without practical and commercial applications. There were of course exceptions. Daimler, who was an engineer and not a scientist, did start producing automobiles, and Chardonnet, who was a scientist and a colleague of Louis Pasteur’s, did start a synthetic textile mill. But many Europeans were content in the world of the theoretical, whereas Americans had a Puritan belief that anyone who invented something had a moral obligation to put it to useful service. The press would criticize inventors who failed to do this.

  Dr. John Gorrie ran a naval hospital in Apalachicola, Florida, that treated victims of yellow fever and malaria. He invented a primitive form of air-conditioning in the 1840s that produced artificial ice by expanding compressed air. Modern air-conditioning was not developed until sixty years later at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gorrie cooled his hospital and his home with the device, but he was so attacked by religious conservatives for interfering with God’s design that he published the ideas behind his invention under a pseudonym. Not realizing who the writer was, the editor of the publication, the Commercial Advertiser, criticized the author for having failed to put his ideas into service.

  Robert Fulton, the father of the steamboat, was a prototypical American inventor. The steamboat had had a long development, which had nothing to do with Fulton. It was a European idea, as was the steam engine. A Frenchman, Denis Papin, built a steam piston in 1690 and a steamboat in 1704 but failed to attract any interest in the boat. The Scottish engineer James Watt built a greatly improved steam engine at the time of the American Revolution. But although the French, the
Germans, the British, and then the Americans built various steam-powered vessels, there was no commercially successful steamboat until Robert Fulton. The great inventor Robert Fulton did not exactly “invent” anything. But he put the right kind of engine in the right kind of vessel and established a commercial run on the right route. Earlier steamboat lines were on less profitable routes or ones with good alternative land transportation. Fulton established his line on the East River in Manhattan running up the Hudson to Albany. It was the first commercially successful steamboat line in part because there was no good land route for hauling freight between these two commercially important centers. Fulton is often erroneously remembered today as the inventor of steamboats—in much the same way that Birdseye is erroneously remembered as the inventor of fast freezing—but the real reason we still know the name Fulton is that he launched an industry by showing that money could be made from steamboats and that it was a commercially important idea. In America an important idea is an idea that makes money.

  Europeans did not always like the American attitude. Albert Einstein, essentially a nineteenth-century European scientist and pure theoretician who found himself in twentieth-century America, wrote of this pragmatic side of American thinking, “There is visible in this process of relatively fruitless but heroic endeavors a systematic trend of development, namely, an increasing skepticism concerning every attempt by means of pure thought to learn something about the ‘objective world,’ about the world of ‘things’ in contrast to the world of mere ‘concepts and ideas.’ ”

  Birdseye grew up in a world in which mere concepts and ideas were not enough. An American inventor solved a problem, formed a company, and, he hoped, earned a fortune. Alexander Graham Bell, a Scot turned Canadian who then came to America, was most known at the time of Birdseye’s birth as not only the inventor of the telephone but the founder of the first telephone company, Bell Telephone, in 1877. By the time Birdseye was born, the Bell Telephone Company had placed phones in 150,000 homes and offices.

  Ten years before Birdseye was born, Thomas Edison came to the public’s attention for selling his telegraph idea to Western Union for a surprising $10,000. Then, in 1880, he created another industry, Edison Lamp Works, which manufactured fifty thousand lightbulbs annually. When Edison developed an idea, which he did with astounding regularity, he built a company, and he usually made money.

  Inventors were founders of industries, not intellectuals.

  The other great influence of the nineteenth century that would never leave Birdseye was America’s westward romance. Nine years before Birdseye’s birth the Nez Percé fought the U.S. cavalry in northern Montana in the last great battle of the Indian wars.

  During Birdseye’s childhood, according to several historians, the most famous person in the world was Buffalo Bill Cody. He had earned his nickname after having been hired by the Kansas Pacific Railroad to keep the rail workers supplied with buffalo meat. According to legend, in eight months between 1867 and 1868 he killed 4,280 buffalo. This kind of killing was another nineteenth-century American reality that strongly influenced Birdseye, who loved to hunt. Historians have labeled the second half of the nineteenth century the age of extermination. The American bison herd, the largest land animal herd ever recorded, was by the late nineteenth century reduced to only a few hundred. Passenger pigeons, which were thought to number 5 billion when Europeans started coming to North America and may have represented as much as 40 percent of the continent’s bird population, were exterminated for cheap food. The last one died in a Cincinnati zoo in the early twentieth century.

  In the nineteenth century 400,000 skunks, 500,000 raccoon, and 2 million muskrat were killed in a typical year. Beavers, seals, and sea otters were all victims of the fur trade. Gradually influenced by such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir, Americans started to grow concerned about the slaughter, and government began regulating hunting. At several points in his youth Birdseye came into conflict with the new hunting regulations.

  Born in the Iowa Territory in 1846, William Cody was famous for being a colorful character. He used to boast that he had been a Civil War veteran, a trapper, a bullwhacker, a “Fifty-Niner” in the Colorado gold rush, a Pony Express rider in 1860, a wagon master, and a stagecoach driver. Most of it was true, and oddly it was not that different from the way Clarence Birdseye, who also wanted to be a colorful character, would years later describe himself. In 1951, Birdseye wrote, “The public customarily thinks of me as an inventor … but inventing is only one of my lines. I am also a bank director, a president of companies, a fisherman, an author, an engineer, a cook, a naturalist, and a dock-waloper.” Some of these claims are plainly true. Fisherman, author, and cook are exaggerations, and it is not even clear what he is referring to when he claims to have been a “dock-waloper.”

  Cody was the late-nineteenth-century prototype of a “colorful character,” and he traveled the world with his show of taming the West. Included in his cast was Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, who had inspired the most famous Indian victory over the U.S. Army in 1876 at the Little Bighorn River in the Montana Territory, and numerous other formerly hostile Indians whom he paid well to act out their defeat. When Birdseye was a child in Brooklyn, Buffalo Bill was living nearby, in Staten Island.

  What is the relevance of the Wild West, the age of extermination, and Buffalo Bill Cody to a processed-food inventor from Brooklyn? Very early in Birdseye’s life, the connection became evident.

  As an adult, Clarence Birdseye loved to tell stories, and one of his favorite tales was about the origin of the name Birdseye. According to him, it was originally two words—Bird’s Eye. In his telling, the young page to an English queen saw a large hawk swoop down toward Her Majesty. At this point, Birdseye would explain, “this page boy ancestor of mine, according to the records, took out his trusty bow and arrow and shot that bird right in the eye. The queen was so tickled she gave him the name right on the spot.” And he added, she also gave him the family motto, which is “Stay right on the target.”

  He never produced these records he referred to nor the name of the queen or even explained exactly in which century the incident was supposed to have taken place. The hunting skill, making the improbable shot, was so typical of Birdseye’s kind of story that there is reason for suspicion. But it did seem an odd name, and all his life people had trouble believing that Birdseye was really his name. Another one of his favorite stories was how he found himself in San Francisco and short on money. Wanting to cash a check, he called the local branch of the Birds Eye Division of General Foods, a company named after him. He explained his problem and gave his name, and the man on the other end of the line told him if he stopped kidding and gave his real name, he would connect him with someone. Even today, while the brand name Birds Eye is well known, many people are surprised to learn that there really was someone named Birdseye.

  According to the official family history, the American Birdseye story begins with a Puritan from Berkshire, England, named John Birdseye who settled in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1636. This is probably off by a year because Puritans from England settled New Haven in 1637, although 1636 could be right if, as other records suggest, he settled in Wethersfield. A son, also named John Birdseye, was among the founders of Milford, Connecticut. A grandson, the Reverend Nathan Birdseye, lived on a country estate in Stratford until his death in 1818 at the age of 103. Though he lost both his sight and his hearing in old age, he continued preaching almost up to his death and was known as a charming storyteller. He had twelve children and claimed 206 living relatives at the time of his death, ensuring the presence of a considerable number of Birdseyes in America ever since. Nathan’s eldest son, Captain Joseph Birdseye, was an officer fighting the British in the American Revolution. Victory Birdseye, born in 1782, became a prominent lawyer in upstate New York, beginning a family tradition in law. He was a state representative, a state senator, and a U.S. congressman. His son Lucien became a prominent Wall Street
attorney and settled in Brooklyn. When he died in 1896, the New York Times called him “one of the best known lawyers in this city and Brooklyn.”

  Lucien’s son Clarence Frank Birdseye, born in 1854, went to an elite Brooklyn school, graduated from Amherst in 1874 and Columbia Law School in 1877, and, like his father and grandfather, became a prominent attorney. He authored numerous books, often on education, such as The Reorganization of Our Colleges and Individual Training in Our Colleges, as well as a number of legal textbooks, including his 1896 book of New York State code and statutory law, which became a standard legal reference book. He also wrote American Democracy Versus Prussian Marxism, which is largely a diatribe against socialism in which he also reveals a deep dislike for all things Prussian. He wrote the book after World War I, when Prussianphobia was in vogue. Birdseye’s thesis was that Marx was born in Prussia, went to university in Prussia, and collaborated with Engels, a fellow Prussian, and all his thinking was rooted in “Prussian ruthlessness.”

  Clarence married Ada Jane Underwood, who was born in Brooklyn in 1855. The Underwoods moved to Tolland, Connecticut, where Clarence and Ada were married in 1878. Sixteen years later, Clarence’s older brother Henry Ebenezer, a Wall Street financier, married Ada’s younger sister Annie. That marriage, in 1894, also took place in Tolland.

  If the urge toward industrial invention has a genetic basis, the younger Clarence inherited it not from the legalistic Birdseyes but from his mother’s side. Ada’s father, Henry Underwood, was a belt manufacturer. The machines of the Industrial Revolution ran on belts that connected motors to working parts through pulleys. Henry Underwood reasoned that the belts would stop slipping if they had more surfaces on the pulleys. So rather than a flat or rounded belt, he built a trapezoidal one to run in pulleys with angular grooves. It did not have the impact of electric lightbulbs or even frozen food, but it improved many machines and merited mention in Scientific American in its roundup of new inventions in April 1860, when Underwood patented his idea. Underwood was the first American manufacturer of leather belts and later improved on them with cotton-leather belts. In the 1890s, Underwood belts and those inspired by his inventions were critical in the growth of industrial machine technology and, ironically, were a small but essential part of the development of refrigeration machines.