Lloyd Augustus Hall is best known for his work in the field of food technology, where he developed processes to cure and preserve meat, prevent rancidity in fats, and sterilize spices. Lloyd Augustus Hall, was born in Elgin, Illinois on June 20th 1894. He was an honor student at the East Side High School in Aurora, Illinois, where he developed his interest in chemistry. Lloyd graduated high school in the top 10 of his class in 1912. He then studied pharmaceutical chemistry at Northwestern University, earning a bachelor of science degree, followed by a master's degree from the University of Chicago. Though very qualified, Hall faced frequent discrimination while searching for employment.
After finishing college, Hall was hired by the Western Electric Company after a phone interview due to his strong communication skills. But the company refused to hire Hall when they learned he was Black. In 1916, his chemistry background enabled him to get a position as a chemist in the Chicago Department of Health laboratory. Hall then began working as a chemist for the Department of Health in Chicago followed by a job as chief chemist with the John Morrell Company. Lloyd Hall served as technical director, and as an assistant chief inspector of high explosives and research for the United States government in World War I.
Following the war, Hall married Myrrhene Newsome and they moved to Chicago where he worked for the Boyer Chemical Laboratory, again as a chief chemist. Hall then became president and chemical director for Chemical Products Corporation's consulting laboratory. During the 1920's, he became president and chemical director of consulting at Griffith Laboratories, where he would stay until retirement in 1959. Dr. Hall was also a consultant in the subsistence development and research laboratories of the Quartermaster Corps of the U.S. Army during World War II. In the early 1920’s many companies struggled to find ways to cheaply and safely preserve food.
While at Griffith, he would invent the “flash-drying” method for curing and preserving meats. This revolutionized the meat-curing industry. Hall had been working for a number of years exploring different areas of food chemistry and upon joining Griffith Laboratories began looking into methods for preserving foods. The most common food preservatives consisted of a mixture of sodium nitrate and sodium chloride (table salt). This combination often made foods bitter and unpalatable. As well, nitrogen-containing chemicals were also used to preserve meats. One of Hall’s most successful inventions addressed this problem.
In 1932, he developed a variety of complex chemical salts that could be used as a preservative without negatively impacting the taste of food. This discovery prompted his employer at the time, Griffith Laboratories, to open a factory dedicated to producing his chemical salt compounds. Hall was the scientist to discover that certain spices in the pre-seasoning process food packers used actually deteriorated preservation. In response, he developed a method utilizing ethylene oxide and a vacuum chamber that sterilized the bacteria in the spices. His discovery opened the door to inventing various food products as well.
This method is actually still utilized throughout the world by many industries on items like bandages, dressing, drugs, sutures, and cosmetics. Hall also invented new uses of antioxidants to prevent the spoiling of fats and oils. He pioneered the use of antioxidant chemicals such as lecithin, propyl gallate, and ascorbyl palmitate; creating a process to simplify how the substances were mixed with food to aid in preservation. Through research and laboratory experiments, he determined that foods that contained fats and oils tended to spoil when their ingredients reacted with oxygen in the air. His discoveries revolutionized the meatpacking industry.
One of his biggest legacies however? Improving the process of curing bacon. Not only did it shorten the curing time from weeks to hours, but enhanced the appearance and safety of the meat. Hall next addressed a problem which arose when meats were stored in containers. The sodium chloride/nitrate/nitrite combination tended to absorb the moisture from the air inside or the container and caused them to form a caked mass on top of the meat. Hall was able to determine that by adding a glycerine and alkali metal tartrate to the original combination, the glycerin and tartrate would effectively absorb the moisture without “caking”. Thus preventing the chloride/nitrate/nitrite combination from absorbing it.
Although many people thought that certain spices and flavorings also had the added benefit of preserving foods, Hall found that many of these agents actually exposed the foods to an abundance of germs, molds and bacteria. Hall set out to prevent this while at the same time allowing the spices and flavorings to retain the aroma and color. To counter these problems, he patented in 1938 a means to sterilize spices through exposure to Ethylene Oxide Vacugas. Ethylene Oxide gas is a fumigant to treat and control the growth of molds and bacteria while maintaining appearances, taste and aroma. This method was all but abandoned upon the discovery that ethylene oxide was a toxic carcinogen.
Hall and Griffith later promoted the use of ethylene oxide for the sterilization of medical equipment, helping to advance an idea that had been around for several years. These contributions to food preservation and sterilization revolutionized the way foods were processed, prepared, packed and transported, eliminating spoilage and health hazards and improving efficiency and profitability for food suppliers. In the course of his work, Hall would publish more than 5 scientific papers and receive more than 100 patents. Lloyd Hall is responsible for many of the meat curing products, seasonings, emulsions, bakery products, antioxidants, protein hydrolysates, and other substances we use to this day.
Today, the use of preservatives has been reexamined. Preservatives have been linked to many health issues. After his retirement from Griffith Laboratories in 1959, Hall was consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In addition, President John F. Kennedy appointed Hall to the American Food for Peace Council, on which he served from 1962 to 1964. Lloyd Augustus Hall was awarded several honors during his lifetime, including honorary degrees from Virginia State University, Howard University, and the Tuskegee Institute. He was inducted into the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame in 2004 and is recognized as one of the premier food scientists of the 20th century.