Borden, Gail

Gail Borden, (born November 9, 1801, Norwich, New York, U.S.—died January 11, 1874, Borden, Texas), American philanthropist, businessman, and inventor, who envisioned food concentrates as a means of safeguarding the human food supply. He was the first to develop a commercial method of condensing milk, and the dairy company founded by him (renamed Borden, Inc., in 1968) expanded and diversified to become a sizable conglomerate.

As a youth, Borden helped survey the future city of Covington, Kentucky, where his family settled on their travels westward. He taught school in southern Mississippi and immigrated to Texas in 1829, where he prepared the first topographical map of Texas, helped write the first constitution of that state, was cofounder of the first long-lived Texas newspaper, and laid out the city of Galveston.

Among Borden’s first inventions was a meat biscuit that won a gold medal at the Great Council exhibition in London in 1851; it was commercially unsuccessful, however. Borden next developed a process for concentrating milk, receiving U.S. and British patents in 1856, and opened a condensery in 1861.