Lloyd Hall was an African American chemist who contributed heavily to food preservation chemistry and amassed a huge 59 patents by the end of his career. He is particularly known for producing a new way of preserving meat that kept it’s vibrant color and allowed it to be stored for a long time.

He was born on June 20, 1894 in Elgin, Illinois.

By the time Lloyd graduated high school he was a well accomplished student with four scholarships to choose from. He decided to goto Northwestern University and earned a Bachelor Degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry in 1916.

One of his fellow students was Carroll L. Griffith. She played a large roll in his career as she went onto start Griffith Laboratories, the place where he made much of his inventions and patents.

Before Griffith his career was a mass of jumping around labs. His first job was actually with the Western Electric Company , he was hired over the telephone, but on day one a personnel officer told him “we don’t take niggers.”. So he started working for the The Chicago Department of Health and moved up to Senior Chemist. From there he moved onto become chief chemist at the John Morrell Company and then the first world war broke out! During this time he was appointed as Chief Inspector of Powder and Explosives for the United States Ordnance Department.

After the war he went to Boyer Chemical Laboratory and Chemical Products Corporation before finally landing his job atGriffith Laboratories in 1925.

At Griffith he worked heavily on food preservation.

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. Up to that point, foods, and especially meats had been preserved by using sodium chloride (table salt). As well, nitrogen-containing chemicals were also used to preserve meats. It was found that nitrates chemically changed into nitrites and then into nitrous acid which caused the meats to maintain a healthy, red color (the process was referred to as curing meat). Hall found, however, that when sodium chloride, sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite were used in order to preserve and cure the meat, the nitrates and nitrites penetrated the meat much faster than did the sodium chloride. In doing so, the nitrates and nitrites adversely affected the meat by breaking it down before the sodium chloride had a chance to preserve it. In order to correct this, Hall found a while of encasing the nitrates and nitrites within a sodium chloride “shell” by utilizing a process called “flash-drying” the crystals over heated rollers. This allowed the sodium nitrate to be introduced to the meats first and dissolved, and then the nitrates and nitrites were able to penetrate the “preserved” meat and therefore “cure” it.

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 glycerine and tartrate would effectively absorb the moisture without “caking” and thus preventing the chloride/nitrate/nitrite combination from absorbing it.

Src: http://blackinventor.com/lloyd-hall/

He also worked with food serilization and left behind an amazing legacy, he made eating and preservation safer and easier for all of us!

In 1959 he retired from Griffith Laboratories and he moved to Pasadena, California. In 1971 he passed away.