| Lloyd Hall |
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EARLY LIFE Lloyd Hall was born in Elgin, Illinois . His father was a Baptist minister, Lloyd's grandfather was one of the first black preachers at the church his father ministered. After attending high school in Aurora, Illinois , he earned a bachelors degree in chemistry from Northwestern University . With the onset of the United States ' involvement in World War I , he was commissioned as a lieutenant and explosives inspector in the Ordnance Department. However, he found himself at the receiving end of a variety of discriminatory practices in the military and requested transfer. Over the next nine years, he worked for several chemical laboratories, frequently as a consultant, until in 1925 he was hired by Griffith Laboratories , where he would do most of his work in food science. MAJOR WORKS Hall devoted much of his efforts to the technologies behind agents such as corn sugar and Glycerine to inhibit caking of the powder. Most of his patents in meat curing dealt with either preventing caking of the curing composition, or remedying undesired effects caused by the anticaking agents. Hall also investigated the role of Spice s in food preservation. It was commonly known that some seasonings had anti-microbial properties, but Hall and co-worker Carroll L. Griffith found that some spices carried many Bacteria , as well as Yeast and Mold spores. To counter these problems, they patented in 1938 a means to sterilize spices through exposure to Ethylene Oxide gas, a fumigant. Ethylene oxide is still used for spice sterilization in some countries, but health concerns led to its being banned for this purpose in the European Union and Japan . Hall and Griffith later promoted the use of ethylene oxide for the sterilization of medical equipment, advancing an idea that had been around for at least a few years.[http://patimg1.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=02075845&idkey=NONE Hall invented new uses of Antioxidant s to prevent food spoilage, especially the onset of Rancidity in Fat s and Oil s. Aware that unprocessed Vegetable Oil s frequently contained natural antioxidants such as Lecithin that slowed their spoilage, he developed means of combining these compounds with salts and other materials so that they could be readily introduced to other foods. HUMANITARIAN ACTIVITY After retiring from Griffith in 1959, Hall consulted for the Food And Agriculture Organization of the United Nations . From 1962 to 1964, he sat on the American Food For Peace Council . He died in 1971 in Pasadena, California . |
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