Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

by Mark Kurlansky

  In March 1626, he was riding in a coach through the High-gate area of north London with the physician of King Charles I, and through his window he gazed at the winter snow still on the ground as though the earth were sprinkled in white salt. Though remembered as the great champion of the scientific method, Bacon labored in theory but rarely carried out actual experiments himself. But on this occasion, while speculating with the physician on whether snow could preserve meat the same way that salt did, he suddenly had an urge to try something. Stop the coach!

  The two got out and went to a poor woman’s house, where they bought a chicken, which the woman killed and cleaned for them. The two scientists went outside, knelt on the ground, stuffed the bird with snow, then encased it in more snow—the same process that Birdseye and his Labrador neighbors used to call snow packing. The cold affected not only the chicken but also Bacon, who became extremely ill. When he was taken to a nearby house, his condition grew worse. He wrote that the experiment in chilling the chicken “succeeded.” Only hours after writing the note, Bacon died of pneumonia. Because of this sad incident, it is often claimed that the first frozen food was produced in 1626.

  The year after Bacon’s death Robert Boyle was born in Ireland to the very wealthy Earl of Cork, who judged him too sickly for school and had him taught by tutors at home. Here is a poster child for homeschooling. Boyle became the first chemist in the modern sense of the word—a researcher who conducted experiments that he meticulously recorded to prove hypotheses about the composition of the physical world. He represented a huge step forward in understanding the concept of elements.

  Boyle was interested in understanding everything he could about the phenomenon of coldness. A thorny issue of the day was the question of where cold came from. For a long time many Europeans believed it came from an uncharted island north of the British Isles known as Thule. Aristotle had written that cold came from something called primum frigidum. But what was this source? Aristotle said it was water, which Boyle refuted by showing that material that contained no water, such as metals, could be chilled. He also pointed out that the surface of water, the part exposed to the air, was the first to freeze. If water were the source, would not freezing start at the center of the body of water? He also disproved theories that earth, air, and saltpeter were the source of cold. However, he did conduct experiments on how saltpeter and numerous other salts intensified cold. He also challenged Descartes’s widely held belief that cold was simply the absence of a drifting substance called heat.

  Boyle also investigated the nature of ice, showing that it was water in an expanded form. He conducted numerous experiments to demonstrate that the mass of ice was greater than the volume of water from which it was made.

  • • •

  America was to become the place where refrigeration and commercial freezing and therefore frozen food were developed. This is striking because Europeans were in the forefront of preserving foods through smoking, salting, and canning. A French chef, Nicolas Appert, invented canning in the Napoleonic era by discovering that food that was heated and sealed in a jar would not rot. The French and later other Europeans had great enthusiasm for canned or jarred foods and even today feature them prominently in deluxe food shops. This may be why they were slow to embrace frozen food, which is still often scorned as “American.” But the American embrace of cold as a way to preserve food has also meant that Americans led the way in the manufacturing of refrigerators and freezers.

  The first refrigerator was a European invention, but this offers a classic example of the difference between European and American inventors. In 1748, William Cullen, professor of medicine at the University of Glasgow, built a refrigerator based on the known fact that evaporating liquids cause a lowering of temperature. Cullen made a container lose not only its fluid but its air as well, becoming a complete vacuum, with the result that the water in a tank that surrounded the refrigerator froze. He wrote a paper on his work and had it published in a local Scottish journal, but he never attempted to promote the idea.

  It took another half century before an American built a refrigerator, but his approach was very different. The device was built by a Maryland engineer, Thomas Moore, who like Birdseye was less interested in scientific theory than in solving the problem of getting fresh food to market. In 1803, he built a metal box for butter, surrounded by ice in a cedar container tightly insulated with rabbit fur. With this box he was able to carry fresh butter from his farm to the Georgetown market, twenty miles away.

  Everyone wanted his hard butter rather than the unrefrigerated coagulated grease of other producers and gladly paid his very high prices. Clearly, Moore wanted to start an industry. He patented his box and published a pamphlet about “the newly invented machine called a refrigerator.” He invented the word. The industry didn’t follow, however, and Moore earned little money from his invention.

  The American dominance in freezing and refrigerating started with the fact that America democratized ice. In the eighteenth century most European countries stored ice in icehouses, traded it commercially, and used it chiefly to chill drinks. But it was a luxury used sparingly by aristocrats. In Russia and France ice was controlled by a royal monopoly.

  Originally, America started out the same way. The average colonial American had no access to summer ice, but icehouses were a feature of the large Virginia slave plantations. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all had icehouses for enjoying chilled drinks any time of year. In the North, however, harvesting ice was a low-status and low-wage job; in Philadelphia prison convicts were used. Yet wealthy southerners paid high prices for ice.

  Further hampering the ice market was the religious belief that ice out of season was tampering with God’s design. There was a similar religious conviction about greenhouses. What must Puritans have thought of Thomas Jefferson, who had both?

  But after the revolution, icehouses became popularized, largely by a man named Frederic Tudor. Tudor was in some ways a Birdseye figure. He was the son of a distinguished lawyer who had clerked for John Adams. The father sent three of his sons to Harvard but not Frederic. In this instance the family had not run out of money, though they would some years later. At the time young Tudor was faced with college, he just thought it was a waste of time.

  He started working in a shipping office and, at age seventeen, invented an improved bilge pump. A few years later he started a business shipping ice to the Caribbean, particularly Martinique and Cuba. He shipped it carefully insulated in hay but noticed that Caribbeans, understanding nothing about the nature of ice, let it melt as they walked through the street with it in the midday sun or even dissolved it as they attempted to store it in water. In the 1820s Tudor hired Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, another man who had shunned education. Jarvis revolutionized the ice business, first with a saw-toothed ice cutter that made the blocks more regular and produced them more cheaply, and then with the use of sawdust for insulation. Wyeth produced a series of inventions that by the 1830s made Tudor’s facility the premier icehouse in America. Tudor’s ice, much of it cut from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond, was shipped all over the world.

  Tudor became a multimillionaire, and his ice became a common international commodity. By the Civil War, Tudor and his competitors were shipping New England ice to fifty ports, in ships leaving Boston every day. New uses of ice were being contemplated. Couldn’t it be used to ship meat? The United States had a surplus of meat, and there was great demand for meat in Europe. By the 1830s ice had already transformed the diet of urban Americans. Fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and milk became increasingly popular. Farmers in upstate New York shipped their milk and other products on ice by train to New York City markets. Fresh fish was brought in on ice from New England.

  Americans rapidly became the world’s greatest ice consumers, largely because Tudor’s and Wyeth’s innovations had greatly reduced the cost of ice. Twelve and a half cents could buy a hundred pounds. Southerners became passionate about
iced cocktails, the mint julep being one of the most famous. The Port of New Orleans became a major destination for ice, and New Orleans became known for its cocktails. By 1850, New Orleans was buying fifty thousand tons of ice every year, and even though the ice could sell as cheaply as $15 a ton, due to the volume this was important commerce. But nowhere was more ice consumed than in New York City, which used twice as much as New Orleans. Even today in Europe the liberal use of ice in drinks is thought of as an American taste.

  By the Civil War ice in America was used not only for drinks but also to store food and keep it fresh. Gradually icebox manufacturers came to understand that the flaw in the Moore model was that there was no circulating air, which helps to cool the ice. This, in fact, is why, as Boyle noted, ice forms first on the surface. After 1845 iceboxes had circulating air and were far more effective.

  European scientists continued to develop important ideas, but rarely did they contemplate their commercial application. In 1834, Charles Saint-Ange Thilorier, a chemist in the School of Pharmacy in Paris, was able to apply enough pressure to carbon dioxide to convert it to a solid, carbonic acid. This was an arduous and dangerous undertaking that others had failed at, and Thilorier’s assistant had lost both legs in an explosion caused by one of their experiments. But he never attempted to commercialize his discovery, although many years later the same carbonic acid, now called dry ice, became an essential part of refrigeration. It is clear that Thilorier understood the potential of his discovery. He mixed dry ice with snow and ether and produced a temperature of –110 degrees Celsius, or –166 degrees Fahrenheit, which at the time was by far the coldest temperature ever produced artificially. He simply was not interested in practical applications.

  Greater progress was made in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1859, a Frenchman, Ferdinand Carré, produced a machine that made artificial ice by the use of rapidly expanding ammonia, known as a gas-vapor system. Though it took some time for this technology to be accepted by industry, eventually it would mean that ice could be made anywhere. It no longer had to be cut and stored in the North at wintertime. But despite this invention, the ice trade prospered for the rest of the century. Maine became the leading ice-producing state, in its best year, 1890, shipping 3,092,400 tons out of the state.

  The United States was not very interested in artificial ice, because American winters—the cold that had once shocked European explorers and settlers—provided ample natural ice. But suddenly at the height of ice production, in 1890, an extremely mild winter—a boon for Maine ice producers but a disaster for those in Massachusetts, New York, and the Midwest—forced Americans to turn to artificially produced ice, which they have used ever since.

  Some historians fix the date of the first frozen food as 1875, but there may have been earlier attempts as far back as the Civil War. The first U.S. patent for a frozen-fish process was awarded to Enoch Piper of Camden, Maine, in 1862. He froze salmon by placing it on racks under pans of ice and salt, which lowered the air temperature. After the fish was frozen hard, which took about twenty-four hours, he dipped them in water to give a glassy sheen. More patents followed, and small frozen-fish operations started around coastal New England. Fish was the usual object of frozen-food experimenting, because it was the product that had the greatest losses from spoilage. But it was also the most difficult food to freeze. People could accept a berry that on thawing had gotten a bit soft and juicy, but it is very hard to sell soft and juicy fish.

  In 1875, large-scale operations began freezing food in a room insulated with sawdust, the old Wyeth idea, using ice and salt, which is an even older idea. Birdseye used to see this type of operation still in use for frozen bait in Battle Harbour, Labrador, and described the operation in a letter to his parents: “In the upper room cracked natural ice and coarse solar [evaporated sea] salt were mixed and filled into rectangular metallic tubes which passed downwardly through the freezing and storage chamber on the ground floor. Surplus brine was exhausted onto the ground from the lower ends of the tubes.” In 1876, American frozen meat was first shipped to England, and by 1881 it was being shipped as far as Australia.

  Frozen-food production spread from New England to the Great Lakes region to the Pacific Northwest. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, British Columbia was shipping a million pounds of frozen fish to Europe every year, mostly salmon but also halibut and sturgeon. By 1902 H. A. Baker Sr. was freezing berries in barrels in Puyallup, Washington, and selling them.

  But this frozen food had an unenthusiastic public, attracted mostly by low prices, while food critics gave it poor ratings, especially the fish, as did nutritionists. This was an age when prime fish such as salmon and halibut were being landed in enormous quantities and sold at low prices. But only the fish that had not sold while fresh was sold to the freezing companies, so frozen fish started out at a very low quality.

  By the 1890s mechanically made ice was increasing frozen-food production. Even before the issue of fast-versus-slow freezing emerged, there was the issue of direct versus indirect—whether or not the food would have direct contact with the refrigerant, which was usually salt in some form. Direct contact was inferior since it exposed the food to salt, and part of the appeal of freezing was as an alternative to salting food. In the beginning of the twentieth century there were many experiments with different chemical formulas and equipment for freezing. The first industrial freezer in the United States was the Ottoson brine freezer. The food was submerged in a brine solution at the freezing point. The brine had the same percentage of salt as the cellular composition of the food, which was supposed to keep the salt from being absorbed by the food. But this equilibrium was nearly impossible to maintain, and often salt was absorbed into the food, ruining the product. In 1921, Paul W. Peterson built the first “indirect freezer”—a machine in which the refrigerant and the food never come into contact. The food was packed in containers and immersed in a liquid refrigerant. In 1923, the year Birdseye started his first frozen-food company, Gordon F. Taylor developed a new kind of direct-contact freezer in which whole fish moved on a conveyor belt under a spray of cold water and then were frozen with brine. The frozen fish were then sprayed with water again to wash off the brine and give them a crystalline glaze of ice. From Birdseye’s point of view, the interesting idea in Taylor’s machine was the use of a conveyor belt for mass production.

  By then the advantage of fast freezing was well known in science, and even industry had experimented with it. The earliest commercial fast-frozen food, which was whole fish in salt and ice, had been produced in 1915 while Birdseye was in Labrador.

  By the 1920s European scientists had expounded on fast freezing and the principles of crystallization, but in reality most frozen food was still slow-frozen and of very poor quality. In fact, as more frozen food became available, the quality got worse. The problem was that because of its bad reputation, it only fetched the lowest prices and so had to be made from the cheapest, poorest-quality fresh food. New York State even banned the serving of frozen food in its prisons. State laws were passed to try to protect consumers from the terrible frozen food. In the state of New York slow-frozen food could not be sold unless a store posted a sign over its entrance in letters a minimum of eight inches tall stating, “Frozen Food Sold Here.”

  Perhaps the reason Birdseye didn’t arrive at the idea of freezing sooner was that frozen food was so thoroughly associated with poor-quality food. Frozen fish was presented at the London 1883 International Fisheries Exhibition, a highly influential gathering of all the North Atlantic fishing nations that shaped attitudes about everything from eating fish to managing fisheries. The fish received horrible reviews, the press describing its smell as a “stink” and its look as “withered.” Forty years later this was still the image of frozen food.

  There was a minor breakthrough in acceptance of frozen food during World War I when the U.S. Army bought relatively small quantities of frozen fish and chicken to feed soldiers in the United S
tates. This led to a considerable amount of talk about frozen food after the war, though few people actually ate it. By the time Birdseye began his experiments with freezing food in 1923, frozen food had been around for fifty years, and all the technology he needed for the kind of production he envisioned was available. But, by his own confession, he knew almost nothing of this research and development. He did not know Ottoson’s machine, or Peterson’s, or most of the studies and debates. He only knew what he had learned about freezing in Labrador.

  In 1923 he organized his own frozen-fish company in New York by selling $20,000 in stock. Birdseye looked everywhere for investors for his big idea. At the time Henry Ford had expressed interest in frozen food, and Birdseye made an effort to get his backing but got no response. However, the Clothel Refrigerating Company, which produced refrigerators for the navy, was interested in the new company, called Birdseye Seafoods, and provided space on White Street a short distance from the Fulton Street Market, where wholesale fresh fish was bought and sold.

  The originality of Birdseye’s work was as much in the packaging as the preparation of food. He was still primarily interested in the issue of how to get the product from wholesaler to retailer to consumer in a sanitary, efficient, convenient package. He cleaned fish, chilled but did not freeze them, and shipped them in well-insulated fiberboard boxes. If his boxes had worked better, he might not have gone into freezing. But he quickly learned that this packaging was not adequate to ensure a fresh product. That was when he started thinking about the food of his Labrador years.

  Perhaps the most famous Birdseye legend is how he went to a store and spent $7 on salt, ice, and an electric fan and with these reproduced the Labrador winter and froze a fish. There is an element of truth to this. This is indeed how Birdseye worked. He found a few banal household items and solved a problem. And he loved wonder-of-science-type demonstrations. It was one of the things that would later make him popular with neighborhood children. He would dehydrate a carrot before your very eyes with household equipment like an upside-down electric coffeemaker. So he probably did perform this demonstration, though where and for whom is not known. But had this been all he accomplished with freezing, we would never have heard of him. It was a great trick, but just how to freeze, even fast freeze food, was already known. He was not just out to freeze; he was out to create an industry, to find a commercially viable way of producing large quantities of fast-frozen fish.