"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, a stockholder, a consultant, and a dock-walloper." Clarence Birdseye, who became known as the father of frozen food, was a man of extraordinary vision, insatiable curiosity, and enormous persistence. He used his unique gifts to develop a freezing process that not only preserved food safely, but also preserved its taste and appearance. Although the practice of preserving food by freezing has been traced back to as early as 1626, and the first commercial venture in producing frozen food to 1875, Birdseye is credited with developing, refining, and making the quick freezing process workable.

In an early radio program, Birdseye, said that the concept of frozen foods was not a new one. "Perhaps my basic contribution was the idea that a wide line of perishable foods-meats, poultry, seafood, fruits, and vegetables - could be dressed ready to cook, conveniently packaged, really quick frozen, and then delivered to housewives while still truly fresh."

Born in Brooklyn in 1886 to Clarence Frank Birdseye, a lawyer, and Ada Underwood, the daughter of a noted inventor and manufacturer, Clarence Birdseye was one of eight children. He lived summers with his family on a large Long Island farm where he spent most of his time outdoors in the fields or at the seashore. In his outdoor explorations he noticed a large number of muskrats in the area, and at age 10, through contacts at the Bronx Zoo, he trapped and sold muskrats to a customer in England. He used his profits to purchase a single-barreled shotgun. An outdoorsman and an adventurer, Birdseye also studied and practiced taxidermy as a youth.

With the move of his family to Montclair, New Jersey, where Clarence Birdseye went to high school, he showed an interest in food preparation and attended a cooking class. After graduation from high school in 1908, he worked as an office boy for a Wall Street firm in the summer before starting college. It was during this time that he developed a personal shorthand system that he used throughout his life in his private scientific journals. This shorthand system was based on his study of a portion of a mail-order course that he found on the sidewalk.

Off to college, Clarence Birdseye followed the tradition established by his father and brothers and attended Amherst. The Birdseye family finances were such that he had to work to help pay his college expenses. He used his interest in the outdoors and wildlife to earn money for college expenses, trapping and selling black rats to a geneticist at Columbia University and selling live frogs for use as reptile food to the Bronx Zoo. The nickname "Bugs" came about as a result of his interest in biology and other science courses while at Amherst. Money grew tighter and in 1910, after completion of his second year at Amherst, he left college to start work. Although his formal education ended there, Amherst later awarded him an honorary Master of Arts degree in 1941.

Birdseye continued his interest in animals and the environment. His first job after leaving college was as a naturalist with the U. S. Department of Agriculture's Biological Survey, collecting specimens of animals and birds of New Mexico and Arizona. Here he proved himself willing to eat such unusual meats as rattlesnake and is credited with making and eating a soup from mice, chipmunks, gophers, and packrats.

In this 1910-1912 period, he continued this work on the Biological Survey in the summers and during the winters held a variety of jobs-New York insurance firm work and a snow checker for the New York Department of Sanitation. He also purchased bobcat and coyote skins from traders in the Southwest and sold them to New York furriers. In the winter of 1911, he worked for the government in Washington, D. C. with his summer work taking him to Montana to study the deadly Rocky Mountain spotted fever by collecting ticks and their animal hosts. Upon return from Montana, he resigned from his job with the government to go on a six-week cruise of Labrador waters with the famous medical missionary Sir Wilfred Grenfell.

Learning on his arrival in Labrador of the phenomenal profits being made from the breeding and trapping of foxes, he left the expedition in 1912 to spend the next five years traveling by dog sled and collecting furs for sale. During this period in Labrador, Birdseye and the former Eleanor Gannett were married in 1915. In 1916 he moved his wife and their five-week-old son to Labrador where they lived in a three-room cabin situated 250 miles from the nearest doctor.

His work in Labrador required that he travel distances by dog team buying furs. Always somewhat adventurous in his eating habits, Birdseye tried starlings, blackbirds, whale, porpoise, lynx, alligator, and larger lizards. "I ate about everything...beaver tail, polar bear and lion tenderloin. And I'll tell you another thing-the front half of a skunk is excellent."

He noted that duck and caribou frozen in the extreme cold of midwinter were better than those frozen in the spring or fall. He noticed how easily food was preserved in the arctic climate. He watched the Eskimos' rudimentary quick-freeze methods, a process by which items are frozen at such a speed that only small ice crystals are able to form, and noted that quickly frozen fish retained flavor and texture better than fish frozen slowly. In an early experiment in freezing vegetables, Birdseye, in order to provide fresh vegetables to his family in this remote area, froze cabbage for later use.

In 1917 when the United States entered World War I, the Birdseye family returned to the United States, settling first in Washington, D. C. where Birdseye worked for the firm of Stone and Weber. In 1919 he moved on to work for the U. S. Housing Office as an assistant purchasing agent. Then from 1920-1922, he was employed as an assistant to the president of the U. S. Fisheries Association. He entered the wholesale fish business in 1922 and experimented with the process of quick freezing food that he had learned while in Labrador. He later said, "My contribution was to take Eskimo knowledge and the scientists' theories and adapt them to quantity production."

In 1923, with an investment of $7 for an electric fan, buckets of brine, and cakes of ice, Birdseye invented and later perfected a system of packing fresh food into waxed cardboard boxes and flash-freezing them under high pressure. "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."

Birdseye made two major contributions to the concept of freezing food-the importance of freezing food so rapidly that there would be no damage to its cellular structure (affecting taste, texture, and appearance) and freezing food in a package that could be sold directly to the consumer. Birdseye's initial idea was followed by home experiments and then later in experiments with freezing fish at a short-lived company he established in New York. After a year this first company ended in bankruptcy and he established in 1924 the General Seafoods Company. Birdseye with the assistance of financial backers set up shop in Gloucester, Massachusetts for experimental work, developing a series of quick freezing devices with the final result being the development of the first commercially practical freezer. He and his financial partners later organized this business into the General Foods Company, which served as the parent company for General Seafoods.

In 1926, Birdseye had developed a quick-freeze double-belt machine weighing 20 tons. It was later transformed into a more transportable multiple-plate freezer which was to become widely used in the frozen food industry. It became obvious that considerable capital would be required to properly develop this new frozen food industry, and in June 1929, the Birdseye business, by then owned by the General Foods Company, was sold for $22 million to Frosted Foods Company, a corporation formed and owned by Postum Company and Goldman-Sachs Trading Corporation. The newly-purchased company took the name of General Foods Corporation and changed the Birdseye brand name to Birds Eye. According to Clarence Birdseye, this change in his family name returned it to its original form-Birds Eye. It was reportedly derived when an early ancestor saved the life of an English Queen by shooting an attacking hawk squarely through its eye.

Clarence Birdseye, whose share of the purchase was just under a million dollars, was to remain with the new corporation to head up research and development. He directed 22 chemists and food technicians at the laboratory set up by the new corporation in Gloucester, Massachusetts. This research group came up with the use of coated cellophane as a wrapping to go over the cartons in which the food was frozen. It was at this laboratory that the portable multi-plate freezer was invented and built. This group also developed over a hundred varieties of processed foods which could be successfully frozen.

The sale of Birds Eye frozen foods began March 6, 1930 in test marketing in 18 stores in Springfield, Massachusetts. There were 27 items-vegetables, fruits, fish and meats in this initial consumer test. Another consumer test was run in 1934 in Syracuse, New York followed by another in Rochester, New York. From this point, frozen food moved on to nationwide distribution.

Since many retailers couldn't afford to buy freezers during the Depression, Birdseye introduced an inexpensive freezer display case and leased it to them. The ability to distribute and sell frozen foods at the retail level marked the beginning of the frozen food industry. In 1944, Birdseye leased the first insulated railroad cars and nationwide frozen food distribution became possible. In effect, Birdseye created a market for frozen foods. Refrigerator freezer cubic space in home refrigerators grew as the relevance of frozen foods grew over the next decades.

Although primarily known for his contributions to the frozen foods industry, Clarence Birdseye's interests were wide-ranging. He invented a one-man, shoulder-firing, "kickless" harpoon gun for use in hunting whales while participating in the International Whaling Commission study of whale migratory habits.

He considered this work in whaling as a hobby and during this same period he started a small company (Birdseye Electric Company) to create a single unit bulb and reflector for use in display lighting. He also designed more efficient lighting filaments and heat lamps for use in keeping food warm. In 1939, Birdseye sold the Birdseye Electric Company and it later became a part of the Sylvania Company.

In another area of interest, Birdseye developed an electrical fishing reel for use in commercial fishing. It allowed commercial fishermen to fish at deeper levels and catch more fish much more quickly and easily. And then, during the Second World War, Birdseye became interested in dried foods with an eye to improving their quality, appearance and taste. Using experiments in his kitchen at home, he developed a quick drying process for which he obtained patents.

In addition to his genius at invention, Birdseye was known for his ability in expressing his ideas. He wrote articles on everything from fox farming to food drying and while in Labrador wrote and published a fiction piece entitled "Hard Luck on the Labrador." He and his wife also wrote a book, Growing Woodland Plants, based on a long-term hobby of theirs. It was published in 1951.

The last years of Birdseye's life were devoted to the development of better methods of paper manufacture. He worked for two years on a plantation in Peru. There he developed a method of converting sugar cane waste into paper pulp, shortening to12 minutes a process that had previously taken nine hours. This is considered his last major contribution to technology. Over his lifetime he was granted 300 foreign and U. S. patents. He died in 1956 at age 69 from a heart attack. He was survived by his widow, Eleanor, and their four children-two boys (Kellog and Henry) and two girls (Ruth and Eleanor).

Birdseye was a man of many hobbies. "I have more hobbies than the law allows. Some are sissy. Some have hair on their chest." He was known for his enjoyment in cooking, gardening, Chinese checkers, and entertaining. A writer characterized him as "a man with no blisters on his ego. He talks with the simplicity of a cowhand, good humored and frank, and his speech is salty." He impressed the writer as "liking everything and everybody" and "being totally uninhibited."

As to Birdseye's opinion of himself, he said, "I do not consider myself to be a remarkable person. I did not make exceptionally high grades when I went to school. I never finished college. I am not the world's best salesman. But I am intensely curious about the things which I see around me and this curiosity, combined with a willingness to assume risks, has been responsible for such success and satisfaction as I have achieved in life."