Two Happy Clams

The friendship that forged food science

In 1895, William Lyman Underwood, director of a Massachusetts canned-food company, came to MIT seeking the help of a scientist--any scientist--who could fix the problem of his smelly canned clams. He went straight to the biology department, asking whether anyone could "suggest a cause and, better still, a remedy." The department chair passed Underwood off to his assistant, Samuel Cate Prescott, advising the chemist to teach the canner a bit about microbes.

Prescott and Underwood revolutionized canning. Credit: Courtesy of the MIT Museum

Bacteriology was then a nascent science--the word microbe had been coined only two decades earlier. But Underwood and Prescott, who had graduated from MIT in 1894, set to work on the problem in the biological laboratory housed in MIT's first building. The two men--one a thin 23-year-old assistant who would soon be appointed an MIT instructor, the other a stocky 31-year-old businessman and nature lover--liked each other immediately. Soon they were scrutinizing cans of spoiled clams every afternoon.

The cans that Underwood brought to the MIT lab were plagued by the "swells." Puffed with gas released as a by-product of bacterial metabolism, they frequently exploded after processing and threatened to tarnish the sparkling record of the William Underwood Company, which had been founded in 1822 and was renowned for the quality of its canned items, including mustard, sardines, and its famous "Red Devil" spiced-ham spread. Although a very thorough inspection process was keeping the bad cans off the market, Underwood could not tolerate the massive loss of inventory.

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Back in the lab, Prescott and Underwood detected millions of bacteria thriving in the clams, impervious to the heat of the processing techniques then used. Their daily experiments showed that these spores could survive even 24 hours of continuous frothing in boiling water. Determined to attack the spores from every angle, they tracked the source of infection to estuarial areas. After many trials, they found that applying pressurized steam at 120 ˚C killed the bacteria in 10 minutes. As MIT food scientist Samuel Goldblith '40 later recalled, the discovery "blew up the technology of the entire industry but also greatly advanced the then young science of bacteriology."

In just a few months, Underwood had found the solution to his ruined clams. But he didn't want to leave MIT. ­Working pro bono, he joined ­Pres­cott in an investigation of why canned corn, a product that the Underwood Company did not sell, often soured. Deciding that they needed to study the corn from the moment it was peeled from the husk, they relocated to a corn-­processing factory near cornfields in Oxford County, ME. Their lab was a far cry from MIT's, but they improvised with a makeshift incubator heated by candles. One night as they tried to get a few hours of sleep, cans of corn in the incubator exploded, spraying yellow mush onto the factory floor.