Ponder the TV dinner cranberry sauce – yes, there is a patent for that.

Ponder the TV dinner cranberry sauce – yes, there is a patent for that.

Image from vintage Swanson's TV frozen dinner ad showing cranberry sauce

Tinfoil & frozen slabs of food.

Ever lay in bed wondering about something and become obsessed with it? Over the past weekend, for reasons that admittedly mystify me, I became obsessed with the little cranberry slots in frozen tv dinners. You know that scoop of jellied red stuff that comes with frozen turkey dinners? It’s supposed to be cranberry sauce. What I began to wonder is, why doesn’t it turn into a pile of liquid goo when it’s heated in the oven? Why doesn’t it melt?  Guess what? There’s a patent for that, plus some mad cooking chemistry.

“Cranberry sauce is now so widely recognized as an almost indispensable accompaniment of any turkey dinner, that it is sorely missed when omitted from frozen turkey TV dinners.”
1964 Patent filing Ocean Spray

Ocean Spray was right, turkey dinners aren’t complete without cranberries. It’s big, big business. I can’t even envision Thanksgiving without a big dose of cranberry sauce. Adding a little tray of it to a tv dinner would be a strong selling point. Scoff at such an invention as cranberry sauce that maintains its form after being frozen & then heated, but it boils down to marketing dollars.

To Google Patent Search!

Of course, my first stop was a quick search of patents and there it was – the magic behind solidified cranberry sauce, courtesy of Ocean Spray, the cranberry behemoth in the US. They filed a patent for that tiny bit of red stuff in 1964 titled METHOD OF MAKING FROZEN DINNER CRANBERRY COMPONENT, United States Patent 73,360,385 granted 1969.

“A method for maintaining cranberry sauce in a gelled state upon thawing of a frozen TV dinner, comprising adding an acid tolerant, quick acting freeze surviving vegetable gelling agent such as hot hydrated starch to cooked cranberries, adding a sugar syrup, cooking the mix to form a sauce, placing an individual serving of the cooked sauce in the TV dinner package and subjecting the contents to a freezing environment to freeze said sauce.”
Patent filing Sept. 9, 1964, Ser. No. 395,323

Now, here’s the problem tv dinner makers faced with cranberry sauce – it wasn’t friendly to freezing.  It also wasn’t friendly to being made in large quantities. When manufacturers tried, they were left with “packages … on thawing, in an un-gelled flowing liquid so unfamiliar as to be unacceptable to the consumer” [r/f Patent]. Such a mess was unappetizing to the average consumer. So, they were faced with the conundrum of how to make cranberry sauce on a large scale, have it freeze and bake while maintaining a shape and consistency acceptable to the public – but still be cost effective.

Troubles with cranberry sauce stabilization.

An interesting issue subsequently cropped up, even after a stabilized product was made – the mechanized process of dropping the sauce onto the tv tray broke down the gelled status, creating the same problem. Something in the mechanical pumping system caused the problem.  The option of having the cranberries scooped onto the tray by hand was discarded. It was far too time consuming and labour intensive to be profitable.

So that left them with the same problem – how to get cranberries onto the tray quickly and still have it recognisable.  The solution lay in cooking chemistry. After experimenting, Ocean spray produced this mixture:

  • 500 pounds of cranberries
  • 30 pounds waxy corn starch to act as a gelling agent
  • 60 pounds of sugar syrup
  • 30 gallons of water.

The cranberries were cooked down in 25 gallons of water (at around 190F) and then strained.  The starch was mixed to the remaining water and heated to 190 F and then added to the cranberries. The syrup was immediately added and cooked until the mix reached an acceptable consistency. The sauce could then be piped directly onto the trays while hot and sent off to be quick frozen. When Ocean Spray popped the dinners into an oven, the cranberry sauce remained in a gelled state and didn’t “contaminate” the rest of the foods. And the rest is marketing history – turkey dinners complete with a little compartment of cranberries.

That’s interesting chemistry at work – you need just enough gelling agent and the right temperature to obtain optimal jelly status on an industrial scale. What’s not to love about that little blob of gelled cranberry sauce that is impervious to mechanical insertion, heat and freezing?

One thing that comes to mind is, has the recipe been altered now that that the dinners are on microwavable cardboard trays? Did they have to alter the recipe? Does microwaving effect the formula? Something to look consider.

________

Read the original patent here – Method for making frozen dinner cranberry component

Vintage ad for Swanson TV dinner with Turkey and cranberry sauce

Does Swanson still make this?

Check out my newest cranberry related patent.

Holidays, cranberries & 1 patent to put ridges on the jelly

 

Digital art Motion Project #3 – G’bye CHUM building

Digital art Motion Project #3 – G’bye CHUM building

For 4 decades CHUM radio in Toronto sat on the corner of Yonge and Jackes Street, sending out a signal all over Ontario. At one time, CHUM was THE station everyone listened to. The building itself was an ugly little squat, 2 story building, I nicknamed “the bunker” – not much to see. CHUM was sold to CTVglobemedia and operations were shipped down to their Richmond Street location. The new owners sold the property off to condo developers for $21.5 million who laid out plans to demolish the red brick bunker and erect an 11 story condo. I don’t think anyone is misty eyed over the demo. Anything would be an improvement.

This week demolition began and the CHUM building is rapidly vanishing. It’s all fenced off, so hard to get near, but yesterday the fencing was left open and I was able to grab a few shots to work with. I have a number from my balcony, kind of an awe inspiring view of the demo job, but not sure they are going to work out as far as digital art is concerned. I might just throw them up as is for the nostalgia fans. I snagged one great shot out of about 50 taken. It turned into a beautiful piece of industrial art work:

Digital art - G'bye CHUM. The demolition of the CHUM building

Goodbye CHUM – demolition of the CHUM building on Yonge Street
Sept 23 2016

 

All hail our Ant Overlords … or maybe Cat Overlords

All hail our Ant Overlords … or maybe Cat Overlords

Had the scare of my life this morning. I drifted off to sleep watching a Youtube video last night. About 3 am, I was jolted awake by soul curdling screams ….ever see the Japanese film Ringu? No, not the American remake, the original scary as shit you’re going to die a horrible lonely death movie? Yea, that one. I had one of those moments. Youtube kept chugging through videos, all of which I blissfully slept through, until the screaming wretched me back to life. By the way, never fall asleep with earbuds in, they have a habit of magnifying the screams. I looked up and saw one of those Ringu style screen flickerings and creeping ghouls and …. Well let’s just say I really, really need to stop watching monster movies. It took close to a full minute before I realised what was going on. Bit of a heart stopper moment.

Serves me right, I spent most of yesterday writing, with 50s and 60s B monster movies playing in the background. I do my best work when I can look up and see aliens and monsters ravishing earth. I plowed through some of the best monster movies yesterday, including one of my favourites – Quatermass and the Pit – the original 1958 BBC tv series, which is AWESOME …. London being taken over by humans controlled by long dead Alien Ant Overlords. You can’t get better than that, now can you? Every time I think of earth being taken over by bug overlords, I break out into a mass of giggles – can’t do worse than what’s happening now. As well,  I had stopped in to see a customer yesterday and we joked about obeying our Cat Overlords … in retrospect, there was a theme to the day and it isn’t surprising I was scared pissless with a Ringu moment.

Still from Quatermass and the Pit - courtesy BBC

So here I sit, in a bright café window, pondering whether I’d like the world taken over by Cat Overlords or Ant Overlords. Ants would be too focused on work and organisation. They might work us to death, in the name of conformity and efficiency. Cats would create a world of luxury and indulgence. But  … big drawback … we’d be worked to death supplying them with their luxuries and indulgences. Just my luck I’d be assigned to litter box duty. But cats purr … all they’d have to do is start a deep, hypnotic purr and humanity would bow down and do their bidding.

… if cats ever rise up, we’re screwed, you know that, don’t you.

 
“Drive like lightening”, the Robertson Screw

“Drive like lightening”, the Robertson Screw

How’s this for a piece of cool technology, the Robertson Screw?

Image of a Robertson screw courtesy By User:Saforrest - Taken by User:Saforrest on 9 October 2007, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2888264

Behold – the Robertson Screw

How many of us have cursed the traditional flathead screwdriver- usually that nanosecond you feel it slip in the groove and you know you’re about to suffer a disgustingly, ugly hand wound. Or cursed the Philips screw because the little star shape became damaged when the driver slipped.  There have been many attempts at improving the basic screw and my favourite is a Canadian innovation.

Development of the Robertson screw

Image of P. L. Robertson's patent illustration of Robertson Screw @1908

Patent illustration of Robertson Screw @1908Why is this a great example of tech at work? The design improves on an old idea – slip a screwdriver into the snug little square head and you can get an amazing amount of power behind it. Well, plus, for people like me who are a menace around power tools of all sorts, you never run the risk of the drill winging off creating embarrassing divots along the woodwork. There is a reason I don’t do home repairs.  But I’ll leave that for another tale.

Photo of P. L. Robertson, inventor of Robertson screw

P. L. Robertson, inventor of Robertson screw

Peter Lymburner Robertson is one of those underappreciated Canadian inventors who built a small empire a one small screw. Although many are familiar with the square head screw (commonly referred to as a Robertson), few associate it with the man who invented it. That’s him over at the side. Robertson was living in Hamilton, Ontario and worked as a travelling salesman for a Philadelphia tool company.  He often related a tale of how and why he invented the square screw. Robertson was demonstrating a spring loaded screwdriver in the summer of 1907 (the date varies between 1906 and 1907, depending on which source you look at) when it slipped and he received a bad slice on his hand. After that, he began designing a slip-less screwdriver. Withing a year, he had a satisfactory design and filed for a patent in Canada. By 1912, he held the patent internationally.

The simplicity in the design is awe inspiring:

This invention relates to screws, the heads of which have axial driving recesses or cavities instead of transverse slots punched therein and the invention consists in a recess or cavity extending into the screw head, the outer portion of the recess or cavity being prismatic and the inner portion thereof being pyramidal, the apex of the pyramid being in the axial line of the prism and of the screw. (from patent papers)

In short, the screw slot is square and punched deep into the screw head rather than a slot running the length of the screw. What makes this screw so much better than a slotted one?  Plop the screwdriver into the recessed square and it’s gripped tightly with nowhere really to slip off. You can start turning with no fear of it popping out. As well, the grip is so solid, you can put a lot of force behind each turn of the screw. The square shape also makes for a much hardier screw and more difficult to strip. As well, because the screwdriver fits so snugly into the square head, it’s possible to drill the screw with one hand, adding to its overall utility. 

Ad for the Robertson Screw

Robertson Screw ad

This was an important innovation, especially with industries looking to save time and money – a screw that could be inserted faster saved big dollars. It’s a bit hard to believe, but consider this, fewer slips of the screwdriver meant less damage to the item being manufactured. A win, win situation.

Robertson screw fails to gain a foothold

After WW1, the Ford Motor Co initially used the Robertson on its Model T and A cars. By using the Robertson, Ford said his company could save an average 2 hrs assembly time on each vehicle. This presented a massive advantage in both savings and getting cars to market faster. The deal to use the Robertson fell apart when Ford wanted P.L. Robertson to sign an agreement that would allow Ford to make and hold all distribution rights for the huge US market. Robertson was averse to signing a deal that potentially meant he would lose control over his invention.  Robertson refused to turn any rights over and unfortunately, when no monopoly was forthcoming, Ford switched over to the Philips screw. Philips was more than happy to hand over the rights.  In an odd twist of fate, this failed deal meant the Robertson never really took hold in the US, but it’s ubiquitous here in Canada. I doubt there are many toolboxes that don’t have a few Robertson screw drivers rolling around inside.

Read more:

Archives Canada – Robertson Screw and Screwdriver
You can download the patent here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US975285A/en?q=screw,roberston&inventor=Peter+Robertson&before=19100101
Robertson Fastener website has a bit of info as well

Digital art Motion Project #2- Pleasant Blvd St. Clair subway

Digital art Motion Project #2- Pleasant Blvd St. Clair subway

I was flipping through about 40 photos that I took today, looking for … the one. That shot that has the right shadows & contrast that begged for attention. I tossed over half the photos for a variety of reasons. They were either too bland or lacked a key element that drew the eye to it. Usually nothing stands out. Then once in awhile I get this: Digital art Motion Project #2 - Pleasant Blvd

 Pleasant Blvd, facing Yonge Street, in front of the St. Clair Subway exit. 
Sept. 22 2016.

Something about the way the light was bouncing off the buildings and that perfect blue sky. I liked the way the two buildings produce a curious optical illusion and look like they are tilting away from each other. The condo (The Clairmont at 1430 Yonge Street) at the end of the shot is an example of a better design. When it went up, it complimented the neighbourhood, rather than standing over it like some unholy carbuncle.

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