Dr Jeff Cornwall

This invention was a reaction to a possible national crisis. To avoid food poisoning, homemakers were over cooking turkeys to the point that they were dry and tasted like cardboard. The California Turkey Producers Advisory Board was concerned that Americans might change to another culinary theme for Thanksgiving if they did not find a solution.
Michael Taylor of the San Francisco Chronicle tells how one Eugene Beal led the effort to save our beloved national holiday:

Trying to solve the turkey cooking problem went on for days and days. Then one day…Goldy Kleaver looked at the ceiling sprinklers and realized they were triggered by flames melting something inside.
“Why can’t we use that principle in the turkey?” Kleaver asked his fellow board members.
…It was Beals who ran with the idea, working with another board member to find and test the alloys that would “melt at a certain temperature,….’
The group spent almost a year testing what temperatures were best suited for the cooking of turkeys.

So how does the little red pop-up actually work? Well, the best place to find out how stuff work is to go to Howstuffworks.com:

A pop-up timer found in a turkey or chicken normally has four parts:
– The outer case (typically white or light blue) (a)
– The little stick that pops up (typically red) (b)
– A spring (c)
– A blob of soft metal similar to solder (d)

The soft metal (shown in gray in the diagram) is solid at room temperature and turns to a liquid (melts) at about 185 degrees Fahrenheit (85 degrees Celsius). When the metal turns to a liquid, it frees the end of the red stick that had been trapped in the metal. The spring pops the red stick up and you know the turkey is done!

Beal sold the invention to a company that was later sold to 3M. But as told in StartupJournal, the little invention that saved Thanksgiving did not always work right. So another company, Volk Enterprises, developed a similar product that would work better.

Tony Volk shifted to a pop-up timer of his own design, similar to the Dun-Rite/3M device. Oldest son Anthony crisscrossed the country pitching pop-ups to processors and supermarket chains. In Turlock, the clan donned sanitary hairnets and put together pop-ups around the kitchen table at night.
The Volk family business was sued by 3M for patent infringement in 1982. After several years of litigation, the two sides negotiated a settlement that permitted them to manufacture pop-ups under each other’s patents. Thanks to Tony Volk’s contacts in the turkey business, his own timer business took off and, a few months before his death from cancer in 1991, Volk Enterprises acquired 3M’s pop-up business.

Sadly, the little red pop-up that Eugene Beal and Tony Volk made possible gets little respect. From StartupJournal:

Yet during holiday food shows and in cooking columns, the pop-up seldom comes in for praise. In her recipe for “Perfect Roast Turkey,” Martha Stewart advises fans to toss the little timer. “An instant-read thermometer is a much more accurate indication of doneness,” avows Ms. Stewart.
Rick Rodgers, author of “Thanksgiving 101,” says he avoids pop-ups because he worries basting will prevent them from popping properly. Sgt. First Class David Russ, a U.S. Army chef from Fort Bragg, N.C., who won the National Military Culinary Chef award in 2004, can’t stand the puncture a pop-up leaves behind. “If you get a piece of turkey on your plate with a hole in it,” he says, “you wonder where it came from.”

I intend, in my own small way, to honor the two entrepreneurs who saved Thanksgiving. In my Thanksgiving blessing I will give thanks to Eugene and Tony, and for the legacy of moist birds they left behind.