Thermal death time
Thermal death time is how long it takes to kill a specific bacterium 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. History 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