Birdseye
Page 12
The problem with the existing frozen food was not only that it didn’t freeze quickly enough but also that it wasn’t cold enough. Birdseye estimated that a piece of meat was not truly frozen until it reached –96 degrees Fahrenheit. Existing commercial freezing was done at about 25 degrees, only a few degrees below the freezing point.
By this time there had been a great deal of experimentation with different formulas for arriving at freezing temperature. Pressurizing gases into solids as Thilorier had done with carbon dioxide continued to yield extraordinary subzero temperatures. In 1877, Louis-Paul Cailletet liquefied oxygen and nitrogen. In 1898, only twenty-five years before Birdseye set up his company, James Dewar, a Scot, the inventor of the thermos bottle, liquefied hydrogen and reached a temperature of –250 degrees Celsius, or –418 degrees Fahrenheit. This was the age to be rethinking freezing.
Most people working in freezing did not get involved in science as sophisticated as this. They experimented with different salts and configurations of ether. Clothel’s navy refrigerator used ethyl chloride. Others used potassium nitrate or saltpeter, as Bacon had suggested centuries earlier, or calcium chloride.
Birdseye always chose low technology over high, and so he too investigated salts. For all their low technology salts are a baffling world. Anyone wishing to understand the struggle engaged in by Bacon and Boyle to move thinking away from alchemy—the belief that matter changes by magic—to science—the belief that it acts in accordance with provable natural laws—should look at salts. Though salt acts by natural laws, it can do so many different and seemingly contradictory things that it appears to operate by magic.
There are many different salts. Sodium chloride, which is the salt we eat, potassium nitrate, potassium chloride, calcium chloride, magnesium sulfide, and even monosodium glutamate are all examples of salts. A salt by definition is a compound created by the neutralization of an acid and a base. Both are extremely unstable—one because it lacks an electron and the other because it has an extra one. So they are, like a good marriage, attracted to each other because they solve each other’s problem, complete each other, and result in an extremely stable compound.
But this stable compound, the salt, has many unusual properties. Not only does it preserve food, make water buoyant, put out fires, and keep cells functioning, but it can perform a number of seemingly contradictory tasks relevant to the story of freezing. It makes water boil at a higher temperature but also makes it freeze at a lower temperature. It does these two seemingly opposite things for the same reason, because the salt mixes with water and carries properties that react differently to heat and cold. Salt has a higher boiling point and lower freezing point than water. Salt melts ice—implying heat—but it also has just the opposite effect; while it is melting ice, it absorbs heat, making everything around it colder. The ice melts because the salt is establishing a lower freezing point. But as the heat is absorbed, it chills the area to that new lower freezing point. How low a temperature it descends to depends on how much salt and what type of salt is used.
Three hundred years before Birdseye started his freezing company, Bacon had written about this, though he did not entirely understand it. It became the standard way of freezing, and it did not take long for Birdseye to learn how to drop the temperature. He experimented with different salts and different solutions and arrived at different temperatures. Much of the experimentation had gone on in his home in Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County, New York, before he acquired commercial space. He was initially interested in dry ice. Years later Birdseye would recall, “Production of perishable foods, dressed at the point of production and quick frozen in consumer packages, was initiated, so far as I am aware, in the kitchen of my own home late in 1923 when I experimentally packaged rabbit meat and fish fillets in candy boxes and froze the packages with dry ice.”
He eventually settled on calcium chloride in a solution that quickly dropped the temperature to –45 degrees Fahrenheit, which was the temperature of some of the coldest days in Labrador. He discovered that all that was necessary for fast freezing is that the temperature pass very quickly out of the first freezing temperature range, which is from 33 degrees to 23 degrees Fahrenheit. Below that, crystallization is rapid, and crystals become very small. To speed up freezing, smaller amounts had to be frozen. Before Birdseye freezing was an entirely wholesale business, and huge blocks of food, including whole sides of beef, were frozen. Fruit was frozen into four-hundred-pound blocks. The food was placed in a barely freezing environment and frozen over a number of days. Birdseye, like Gordon Taylor, froze one fish at a time and froze it quickly. His quick-frozen fish went on the market in 1924.
His packing and freezing machine weighed twenty tons, considerably larger and heavier than Clothel’s two-ton refrigerator. In 1924, Birdseye was awarded his first patent for this fish-freezing process. In his patent application dated April 18, 1924, he made the following claim: “It is well known that fish like many other dietary articles has been frozen for the purpose of suspending, or preventing, decomposition through oxidation, bacteriological or other action, but the present invention goes much further than that and accomplishes results heretofore unknown in the seafood industry.”
If Birdseye didn’t pioneer actual freezing, he had to pioneer most everything else in his process. He experimented with the different heat-insulating properties of fiberboard, cardboard, cork, and wood. His ideas were so new that the National Bureau of Standards could not furnish him with any information on the insulating properties of fiberboard. No one had tested it, and so he did it himself. His first patent makes clear that his concern was as much with packaging as with freezing itself. The patent goes into elaborate diagrams and explanation of the packaging, insulated fiberboard boxes, and was the first of many patents Birdseye was awarded for packaging.
One of Birdseye’s first true innovations was packing fish in corrugated cardboard, fiberboard, and eventually waxed cardboard, rather than the traditional balsa-wood boxes used for salt fish. Balsa wood worked well enough, but he needed to produce frozen food inexpensively, and the wooden boxes cost $1 for every pound they held. They were supposed to be returnable, but customers seldom bothered. Later in 1924 he patented his second, improved box. He was very concerned with eliminating all air pockets within the package of fish because bacteria, which led to decomposition, could grow in these spaces. In his original 1924 process he called for the packing of fish fillets, which was unusual at the time because the fish had to be filleted and skinned by hand.
By early 1924 he was out of money. But he believed he was on the path to an important innovation. He had solved a few of the practical problems, but he needed more time and more money to solve the others. Though they had three small children to raise, Bob and Eleanor knew what to do. They sold their life insurance policy for $2,500 or, according to some, $2,250. This may seem like a foolhardy thing to do, selling off all you have and sinking it into an experimental industry, but Bob always said that the only way to succeed in life was to be willing to take chances. During their long marriage, Eleanor never doubted Bob. She used to explain to their children, “Dad was born ahead of his time. There is so much going on in his head the world can’t even catch up.” Their daughter-in-law Gypsy, Kellogg’s wife, said of her, “I call her Saint Eleanor. He was just the most fortunate man to have had her for a wife.”
Birdseye Seafoods was broke within a year. New Yorkers just didn’t want to eat frozen food. But now Bob Birdseye had a different idea. He and Eleanor sold their house in Westchester and with their three children and a fourth expected moved to Gloucester.
When the Birdseyes arrived in Gloucester, the city had just celebrated its three hundredth birthday. Founded in 1623 as an English fishing station, it remained, and still is today, one of the leading fishing ports of the United States. Its deep and extensive harbor, on the headlands of a peninsula but in the sheltered lee of the wind, makes it the ideal port for New England’s richest fishing grounds.
It was a working town with a tough waterfront of bars and merchants, and the harbor was crammed with the masts and canvas sails of some 150 working fishing schooners. There were also fat-hulled, square-rigged barks from Sicily that arrived with Trapani salt. The Gloucester fish industry used enormous quantities of salt—one of the things Birdseye was about to change.
The schooner, a fast-sailing vessel, sleek and rigged not with cross spars but from bow to stern so that it would be swift and maneuverable and sail close to the wind, was an eighteenth-century Gloucester invention designed for fast voyages to the Georges Bank fishing ground and a fast sail home again. Schooners were so swift and so beautiful that they were redesigned as racing yachts. The America’s Cup race was originally a contest between Gloucester and Nova Scotia fishermen.
Gloucestermen were so in love with their wooden-hulled fishing schooners, most of them built in the nearby marshes of Essex, that in the 1920s, well into the age of engine-powered steel-hulled fishing boats, the Gloucester fleet was still mostly schooners, and fishermen continued to use them into the 1950s. But they were built for speed and not safety. They flew large topsails high on the masts and would easily blow over in a storm. They fished bottom fish, mostly cod and halibut, with hand-hauled longlines with baited hooks from small two-man rowboats called dories. The dories could capsize on a high sea, or sometimes just catch too many fish and sink to the bottom from the weight, or sometimes get lost in a fog and never find their way back to the mother schooner. Some years hundreds of men were lost at sea.
So they were a tough people, living a hard and tradition-bound life, and accustomed to tragedies that bonded them into a closely knit, hardworking blue-collar community of skilled workers, and for Birdseye this made Gloucester an ideal place for starting a new industry.
But Gloucester also had a beauty, a quality of sunlight muted through ocean haze and reflected on the water that had always attracted great painters. Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis were all working in Gloucester, bemusing the locals with their easels and palettes, when the Birdseyes arrived.
There was already an inventor in town, John Hays Hammond Jr., the brother of Birdseye’s former backer in the fur trade Harris Hammond. Although John Hays Hammond was less than two years younger than Birdseye, and even though both were in Gloucester, they were worlds apart. Not surprisingly, it was much easier for Hammond to get Hammond money behind him than it was for Birdseye. When Hammond wanted to start a company in Gloucester, his father gave him $250,000. Edison and Bell had been right when they saw potential in young Hammond. He invented remote control. In 1914 he sent an unmanned yacht guided by radio signals from Gloucester Harbor to Boston and back, a straight 120-mile course. It disconcerted fishermen encountering the ghost ship at sea. During World War I he invented a system whereby a remote-controlled ship could home in on an enemy’s searchlights. He also invented a system to protect the remote control from enemy interference and then worked on the first radio-guided torpedo. He also invented an eyewash, an altitude-measuring system for airplanes, a magnetic bottle cap remover, a meat baster, and a “panless” aluminum stove on whose surfaces food was cooked. In one respect he was much like Birdseye, constantly coming up with ideas for whatever problems confronted him.
There is no record if Birdseye took an interest in the panless stove. He might have been interested in Hammond’s cure for baldness, but it didn’t work. By the end of his life Hammond’s more than four hundred patents even outdid Birdseye. Most of Hammond’s important inventions were high-technology electronics. Hammond was also far wealthier and lived far more grandly. At the time Bob and Eleanor were settling in Gloucester, Hammond was building a castle on the west side of the harbor. He said he built the castle because it reminded him of some of the estates he had lived on as a child in England. His castle was to have a drawbridge and a ten-thousand-pipe organ.
The Hammonds were not the only wealthy family in Gloucester. The city is on the tip of Cape Ann, the last stop on what is to Bostonians “the North Shore.” Since the nineteenth century, affluent Bostonians had been vacationing or building homes along the North Shore. But many preferred to go no farther than the neighboring town of Manchester-by-the-Sea. They called the next stop “Gloucester-by-the-Smell.” Gloucester was built on a series of inlets, coves, and peninsulas, but to find the center of town, one had only to sniff. Lining most of Gloucester Harbor, which includes downtown Gloucester, were so-called fish flakes, many of them owned by the Gorton-Pew Fisheries, a merger of the two largest seafood companies in Gloucester. Flakes were rough-hewn wooden racks upon which splayed and salted cod was laid to dry. Salt cod was Gloucester’s biggest product, and it had to spend weeks drying in the sun, giving off a rich fishy odor. For people who grew up in Gloucester, it was just the smell of home, but it made a strong and often negative impression on visitors.
Birdseye moved to Gloucester to build a frozen-seafood company in a place where very fresh fish was readily available. Although he intended to sell frozen fish, the real goal of his company was to develop and patent ideas for frozen food. His company was to develop machinery and processes, patent them, and license them to other food companies. In other words, he was not as interested in founding a company as in launching a whole new industry.
The exact date when the Birdseyes moved to Gloucester is uncertain, but all the evidence points to 1925. Some accounts, including in the local newspaper, the Gloucester Daily Times, state 1923, which does not seem possible, because he was clearly running the New York company that year. The New Yorker in a 1946 article had him moving there in 1924. Others have said 1925. But the birth of his last child, Henry, in April 1925 does not appear in Gloucester birth records. His 1924 and 1925 patents list his residence as Yorktown Heights in Westchester, and only in 1926 is he listed as being from Gloucester. But Gloucester city records show that by the summer of 1925, probably starting in May or June, the Birdseyes were living in a comfortable house with a wide porch, 1 Beach Road, near an exclusive golf club. This was not a particularly deluxe neighborhood, but the neighborhoods away from the harbor were considered more desirable because they were away from the smell. The house was a spacious middle-class home in a town where people were still living in shacks by the waterfront. The Birdseye home was an easy walk to what is known as the Back Shore, the part of Gloucester on the open Atlantic, with rough and majestic granite boulders and long sand beaches.
A letter that Bob wrote to one of his backers, Isaac Rice, shows him as a warm and generous family man enjoying a Gloucester summer. He wrote to Rice:
This would be a wonderful place for you and the family to spend at least a short vacation. There is a wonderful beach for both grown-ups and children within about five minutes walk of our house and our two older kids spend about six hours a day in their bathing suits. Remember that our house is open to you at any and all times and that we will be tickled pink to have you come with as many of your family as you like for as long as you like.
Bob clearly loved the historic industrial fishing port and was to spend more years there than any other place in his life.
With his usual charm and infectious enthusiasm he brought into his company Wetmore Hodges, a young Wall Street investor. Hodges brought in two colleagues from J. P. Morgan
, Isaac Rice and Basset Jones. Together the three invested $375,000, which had the spending power of $4.6 million in 2010. Two additional investors, William Gamage and J. J. Barry, had financial connections that increased the company’s chances of raising capital. Though Hodges was a young man, bringing him in was an important step. Hodges knew many powerful New York financial people, and his father was Charles Hodges, a vice president of the American Radiator Company. Bob had also interested the father and the American Radiator Company in the future manufacturing of freezer units. Birdseye was beginning to lay the industry’s foundations. His new company, the General Seafoods Corporation, was small but with numerous investors and backers interested in gambling on his new ideas. It was going to take a considerable amount of money and business contacts to develop this little company into a whole new industry.
Bob’s brother Kellogg, who served as a company vice president, moved to Gloucester with his wife, May, who was from Massachusetts, and their two children. They lived in a historic district in the center of town. But he was only there in the early years of the company, from 1927 until it was sold in 1929. Then Kellogg and his family relocated to Boston. The Birdseye family no longer had a New York–New Jersey nucleus. Roger was in Flagstaff, Arizona; Henry was a New Yorker but had a business in Detroit; while Miriam and Ada were in Washington, D.C.