Thermal death time

Thermal death time is a concept used to determine how long it takes to kill a specific bacteria at a specific temperature. It was originally developed for food canning and has found applications in cosmetics, producing salmonella-free feeds for animals (e.g. poultry) and pharmaceuticals.

In 1895, William Lyman Underwood of the Underwood Canning Company, a food company founded in 1822 at Boston, Massachusetts and later relocated to Watertown, Massachusetts, approached William Thompson Sedgwick, chair of the biology department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about losses his company was suffering due to swollen and burst cans despite the newest retort technology available. Sedgwick gave his assistant, Samuel Cate Prescott, a detailed assignment on what needed to be done. Prescott and Underwood worked on the problem every afternoon from late 1895 to late 1896, focusing on canned clams. They first discovered that the clams contained heat-resistant bacterial spores that were able to survive the processing; then that these spores' presence depended on the clams' living environment; and finally that these spores would be killed if processed at 250 ˚F (121 ˚C) for ten minutes in a retort.

These studies prompted the similar research of canned lobster, sardines, peas, tomatoes, corn, and spinach. Prescott and Underwood's work was first published in late 1896, with further papers appearing from 1897 to 1926. This research, though important to the growth of food technology, was never patented. It would pave the way for thermal death time research that was pioneered by Bigelow and C. Olin Ball from 1921 to 1936 at the National Canners Association (NCA).

...
Wikipedia