History of pasteurization

Pasteurization is the named for the French scientist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). Although he first experimented with this process in 1862, pasteurization was not put to use until the early twentieth century. 

During the 1800s, human caught typhoid and tuberculosis from tainted milk. Diaries in the 1800s were extremely unsanitary and so were the dairy workers.

In 1857, Louis Pasteur discovered that souring in milk could be delayed by heating milk to between 122 and 142°F, although it was not firmly established that causative agents of spoilage and disease were microorganisms until later in that century.

In 1863, he developed a method of treating wine by heating it to kill the microorganisms that caused the wine to become vinegar. The technique was soon applied to milk.

The first commercial pasteurization equipment was manufactured in Germany in 1882.

Pasteurization began in the United States as early as 1893, when private charity milk stations in New York City began to provide pasteurized milk to poor children through the city health department, a movement that spread to other cities. In 1930s, milk pasteurization became mandatory under U.S law.

New methods of purifying food have been developed, including cold pasteurization and electronic pasteurization. Both of these methods involve the use of ionizing radiation to destroy microorganisms.
History of pasteurization