During these experiments, Underwood indulged his passion for photography. The March 1898 Technology Quarterly featured several of his actual-size photographs of petri dishes filled with circular spidery blooms of bacillus--each like a telescopic glance at a pockmarked moon--as well as some strikingly clear slides of microörganisms at 1,000 times their actual size.

At an 1898 meeting of the Atlantic States Packers' Association, Underwood and Prescott announced their finding that bacterial blooms would succumb to a 60-minute scalding at 120 ˚C. Trade magazine called the presentation "possibly the most important event of the occasion." After impressing the New York canning industry, the pair began applying their skills to canned peas. And then to tomatoes, spinach, sardines, and lobster meat. Prescott spent the rest of his life pursuing the disease-free banana and the perfect cup of coffee, as well as clean water and better dairy-farm inspection procedures. Their academic heirs at MIT later reminisced that the two men found in food science an outlet for their love of the natural world, because their hunt for pathogens led them to cornfields and fjords where they could devote their free time to fishing and photography.

Prescott and Underwood didn't realize much financial gain from their innovations; they never applied for what would proba­bly have been a very profitable patent on their thermal canning processes. But their dedication to their work led to discoveries that established the field of food science and technology. Anyone who uses canned vegetables or meat without a thought to their safety lives in a world shaped by the long days and nights that William ­Underwood and Samuel Prescott spent laughing over exploding cans of heated corn pulp.