Nonfiction for kids interested in science, biography, and early entrepreneurs, this work explores the life story of Clarence Birdseye, the man who revolutionized the frozen food industry and changed the way people eat all over the world. Adapted from Mark Kurlansky’s adult work Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man.   Adventurer and inventor Clarence Birdseye had a fascination with food preservation that led him to develop and patent the Birdseye freezing process and start the company that still bears his name today. His limitless curiosity spurred his other inventions, including the electric sunlamp, an improved incandescent lightbulb, and a harpoon gun to tag finback whales. This true story of an early inventor/entrepreneur is not only thrilling but also explains the science and early technology behind food preservation. Simultaneously available in a hardcover and trade paperback edition. Each edition includes an 8-page black-and-white photo insert. "A fascinating story of curiosity, imagination and invention."-- Kirkus Reviews "Engaging . . . reminds young readers that the most essential ingredient to innovation is curiosity."-- Booklist "A compellingly told story with . . . curriculum connections."-- School Library Journal "Good reading for fans of biography . . . useful for students seeking facts about his adventurous man and his inventions."-- VOYA   Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling author of Ready for a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem for a Changing America ; The Food of a Younger Land ; Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World ; Salt: A World History ; 1968: The Year That Rocked the World ; and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell , among other books. He lives in New York City. Chapter 1 A Nineteenth-­Century Man Clarence Frank Birdseye II was born in Brooklyn on December 9, 1886. Both the year and the place are significant. In 1886, Brooklyn was a separate city from Manhattan and, in fact, was the third-­largest city in America and one of the fastest growing. Between 1880 and 1890 the population grew by more than a third to 806,343 people. One of the forces that made this dramatic growth possible in Brooklyn and neighboring Manhattan was refrigeration. Because of this new technology a large population could live in an area that produced no food but rather brought it in and stored it. Natural ice, collected in large blocks from the frozen lakes of New England and upstate New York, was stored in sawdust-­insulated icehouses built along the Hudson that shipped all year long. New York City used more than one million tons of natural ice every year for food and drink. While the pleasure of iced drinks in the summer had been a luxury of the wealthy ever since Roman times, in New York at the time of Birdseye’s birth it had become commonplace. Almost half of all New Yorkers, Manhattanites and Brooklynites, kept food in their homes in iceboxes—­insulated boxes chilled by blocks of natural ice. A few even had artificially chilled refrigerators, dangerous, clumsy electric machines with unpredictable motors and leaking fluids. No place else in the world was using this much ice. Birdseye was born into a world of refrigeration and would find it lacking when he left the New York City area. It was one of those things that New Yorkers took for granted. People are mostly formed over their first dozen years; Birdseye, having been born in 1886, was a nineteenth-­century man, even though he lived most of his life in the twentieth century. This, of course, was not unusual. For the first half of the twentieth century, people shaped in the nineteenth century dominated most fields. John Kennedy, elected in 1960, was the first twentieth-­century U.S. president. Historians have often commented on how historical centuries do not fit neatly between year 1 and year 99, and quite a few have thought the historical nineteenth century to be an unusually long one, lingering well into the twentieth, whereas the twentieth century to some appears to have been a short one, transitioning even before the year 2000 into a new age that would be associated with the twenty-­first century. Clearly, Birdseye was shaped by the nineteenth century. Even as an inventor, he used nineteenth-­century industrial technology for nineteenth-­century goals, as opposed to someone like his fellow Gloucester inventor John Hays Hammond, who harnessed radio impulses into such devices as remote control and was very much a twentieth-­century inventor. Birdseye’s inventions, from freezers to lightbulbs, were all mechanical and never electronic. Yet his impact on how people lived in the twentieth century was enormous. The nineteenth century, the time of the Industrial Revolution, was an age of inventions, and inventors were iconic heroes. Ten years before Birdseye’s birth, Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone. The following year Thomas Edison invented the phonogra