I wonder how many of us take the humble tin can for granted? Have you ever stopped to think of the origins of this omnipresent object as you toss another one into the recycling? As the name might imply, Tastes Of History spends a lot of time teaching history in primary schools across Great Britain. Our workshops from the Stone Age to World War 2 are also mirrored by our practical cooking demonstrations at historical events around the country. While talking with children and adults, either in school or at events, one can quickly realise that many of us are ignorant (in the true sense of the word) of the history of food and such mundane objects as, say, the tin can. Yet the story of the tin can is one of ingenuity and persistence. It has changed the way we eat, the way we shop, and the way we travel.
Amazingly the inventors had no idea how widespread their innovation would become. All they had set out to achieve was to solve an ages old problem – how to feed thousands of soldiers and sailors with nutritious, fresh food when on campaign or far from their nation's shores. Despite the military power available to the late 18th-century British, French and Dutch navies, the question of nourishment was exercising the minds of the warring admirals and solving the conundrum was becoming vital to national supremacy.
Military necessity Over the centuries a seaman's diet, whether they were part of the crews of Sir Francis Drake or Admiral Horatio Nelson, hardly changed. Food stored onboard ship was meant to last many months, through damp, cold, and heat. Although 18th-century seafarers’ rations might sound less than appetising, by and large sailors were better fed than many in the labouring classes at home. Even so, the quality of provisions on board ships deteriorated quickly due to storage problems, a lack of proper ventilation, and poor drainage. Moreover, many ships' suppliers were dishonest and sent stores that were already rotten before they were taken on board. Fresh food was therefore eaten early in any sea voyage before it perished, became infested with maggots, or was eaten by rats. After that a sailor’s main rations were salted beef or pork, cheese, fish, ale and some form of long-lasting biscuits, known as ‘hard tack’ or ‘ship’s bread’, but the latter were often plagued with maggots and weevils, a type of beetle.
It was in Paris during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), a series of conflicts fought between the First French Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte and various European coalitions, that a financial reward was offered to solve the French military’s supply problem. Enter Nicolas Appert, a confectioner from Massy, south of Paris, who devised a method of heating food in sealed glass jars and bottles placed in boiling water. In so doing Appert had invented, or perhaps stumbled upon, sterilisation decades before Louis Pasteur revealed to the world how heat killed bacteria. Appert’s use of glass, however, was somewhat impractical given its heavy, fragile nature and a tendency to explode under internal pressure. Even so, he is still known as the “father of canning” despite not being the first to use tin plate.
The French Ministry of the Interior awarded Appert 12,000 Francs (possibly at the personal behest of Napoleon) on the condition he made his discovery public. His findings were duly published in 1810 in “The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances”. While Appert’s method was used by the French Navy, it was in England that his idea was fully exploited and improved. Within months, British merchant Peter Durand was granted a patent by King George III to preserve food using tinplated cans.
Patent zero As a non-corrosive coating, tin was already being used to preserve steel and iron cooking utensils. Indeed, many antique or vintage copper pans are tinplated both to preserve them and prevent food being tainted by the metal. Durand's patent, however, records he was the first to sterilise food within a sealed tin container by placing it in cold water that was gradually brought to the boil at which point the lid was opened slightly before being sealed once again. Yet a close examination of Durand’s patent, held at the National Archives in London, reveals he was not the inventor of the tin can. The wording of the patent documents it was “an invention communicated to him by a certain foreigner residing abroad”. According to extensive research by Norman Cowell, a retired lecturer at Reading University’s department of food science and technology, that “foreigner” was another Frenchman, Philippe de Girard. He had been making regular visits to the Royal Society in London to test his canned foods on its members and had used Durand as an agent to patent his own idea. The record of this hitherto unknown arrangement was discovered in the Royal Society’s library in an archived diary, entitled CB/3/6, belonging to Sir Charles Blagden, a fellow of the Society. The entry for 28 January 1811 explicitly says it is Durand's patent in name only. So, it seems that two Frenchmen were ultimately responsible for inspiring an Englishman to patent what would become the ubiquitous tin can. But that is just the beginning because Durand sold the patent to one Bryan Donkin, a Northumbrian engineer, for £1,000. Then having pocketed a fee and securing an elevated place in history, Durand disappears from the story.
Commercial canning Donkin, on the other hand, had a flair for innovation and for making his ideas profitable. He patented the first steel pen as an alternative to the quill, for example, and invented a device to measure the speed of machines. In 1811 after making a profit of £2,212 in his papermaking machine business Donkin, and his fellow collaborators John Hall and John Gamble, invested in a new interest - canning. The firm of Donkin, Hall and Gamble established a canning factory in Blue Anchor Lane in Bermondsey, adjacent to the earlier papermaking machine factory, where land was cheap but close to the River Thames docks. With Gamble leading the experiments and running of the factory to make tinned iron containers, it took a further two years to refine the preservation method for use on a commercial scale.
In April 1813, the Duke of Wellington, then Lord Wellesley, wrote to say how tasty he had found the firm's canned beef and recommended it be adopted by both the Army and the Navy. With such glowing praise, Donkin’s diary entry for Monday May 3rd records that he had begun preparations to supply the Britain’s Admiralty with what would be the world's first commercial cans of preserved food. By late spring 1813 the firm of Donkin, Hall and Gamble was appointing agents along the south coast to sell their preserved food to outbound ships, and it was around this time that the British Admiralty bought 156lb of Donkin's food to feed sick sailors in the mistaken belief that scurvy was due to over-reliance on salted meat. Despite this not being the case, the praise from seamen for this unexpected addition to their daily menu was warm and glowing, from every corner of the globe.
Just over one month later, and nine days after Wellington decisively beat the French at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain, Donkin and Gamble presented their beef to the Duke of Kent at Kensington Palace on June 3oth. Subsequently, the Duke of Kent's secretary Jon Parker wrote: “I am commanded by the Duke of Kent to acquaint you that his Royal Highness having procured introduction of some of your patent beef on the Duke of York's table, where it was tasted by the Queen [1], the Prince Regent and several distinguished personages and highly approved. He wishes you to furnish him with some of your printed papers in order that His Majesty and many other individuals may according to their wish expressed have an opportunity of further proving the merits of the things for general adoption.”
Furnished with royal approval, and with a network of agents based at key seaports to tout for custom from naval ships and merchants, Donkin, Hall and Gamble formally opened the first commercial canning factory in England. Inside the company’s first employees handcrafted sheets of tin plate into tin cans at the rate of about six an hour. These early cans ranged from 4 to 20 pounds in weight. The oldest survivor, measuring 14 cm (5.5 in) high and 18 cm (7 in) wide, can be found in the Science Museum in London. Filled with veal, it weighed a hefty 7 lbs when taken by Sir William Parry to explore the Northwest Passage. One 2½ year old can was opened by Sir Joseph Banks on behalf of the Royal Society. He declared the veal inside to be in “a perfect state of preservation”. Indeed, Banks went on to describe Donkin's work as “one of the most important discoveries of the age we live in”. On the back of such praise, business with the Admiralty took off. In 1814, the Admiralty’s order was for 2,939 lb but in 1821 that had grown to 9,000 lb. Filled with beef, mutton, carrots, parsnips and soup, the early tinned iron cans were destined for every corner of the British Empire, and with prices ranging from 8d/lb for carrots to 30d for roast beef, the company was soon making money.
Hall left the canning firm partnership in 1819, but the venture continued as Gamble and Company before eventually being acquired by Crosse & Blackwell. Nonetheless, the first steps had been taken towards realising the multi-billion pound business of today. When Gamble exhibited an array of canned foods at the Great Exhibition in 1851 to widespread approval, it must have seemed like the tin can's switch from military necessity to household must-have was only a matter of time. Yet, the road to success was nearly ruined by a meat scandal one year later that rocked public faith in tinned foods and threatened to end the fledgling canning industry.
Scandal Donkin and Gamble had employed a quality assurance system where each can spent one month of incubation at 90°C to 110°C heat before distribution, but not every canning entrepreneur was quite so rigorous. In January 1852 a group of meat inspectors gathered at the Royal Clarence Victualling Yard in Portsmouth and proceeded to open 306 cans of meat destined for the Royal Navy. It was not until they opened the nineteenth can that they found one fit for human consumption. According to the Illustrated London News, the Yard’s stone floors had to be coated with chloride of lime to mask the stench of putrid beef. The inspectors fished out pieces of heart, the rotting tongues from a dog or sheep, offal, blood, a whole kidney “perfectly putrid”, ligaments and tendons and a mass of pulp. Some organs appeared to be from diseased animals. Two hundred and sixty-four cans were condemned to a watery grave, while the remaining 42 cans of untainted food were given to the poor. A nationwide inspection ordered by the Admiralty discovered similar situations at Navy depots across the country.
The rogue supplier in question was Stephan Goldner. He had won an Admiralty contract in 1845 by undercutting all rivals through employing cheap labour at his meat factory in what is now Romania. The contract grew significantly in 1847 when the Admiralty introduced preserved meat as a general ration one day a week. The following year, however, complaints began to trickle in from victualling yards in the UK and from British seamen around the world that other parts of animals were being found in canned meat. Despite this, Goldner was awarded another contract in 1850 albeit with a warning that his meat needed to be genuine. To meet the demand, he asked if he could increase the size of the cans, but failed to make certain the meat was properly cooked. There are varying reports on how much of Goldner's meat was thrown away - one said more than 600,000 lbs to the value of £6,691. Whatever the cost, Goldner was banned from ever supplying the Navy again, but the whole episode became a public relations disaster for canned food. Predictably a nervous public was reluctant to eat anything from a tin, with many believing that to do so risked food poisoning. Moreover, housewives seemingly wanted recognisable cuts of meat rather than the uncertainty of what might or might not have been in a can. All the bad publicity meant there was a real danger people would be put off for good, a threat that still lingered ten years after the Goldner scandal.
A campaign to promote the nutritional benefits of canned produce and restore public confidence began. It proved largely successful as it coincided with demands for better food to feed a growing urban population. Not only that but at about the same time canned food became more affordable to a larger number of people. The tin can's reputation was saved. By 1865 Britain’s first mechanised meat-canning factory was established, and by 1880 Britain was importing 16 million lb of canned meat. The global market for canned produce was rising exponentially helping to create sea, canal and rail transport connections worldwide.
Refinements “Double seaming” was the next innovation to arrive in 1896. Two seaming rollers pressed two layers of material - one the lid and the other the wall of the can - to create an air-tight and contaminate free seal that ensured the can’s contents remained fresh. Very quickly household brands such as Bovril and Heinz capitalised on this and other technological developments leading to faster and more efficient canning.
The earliest Heinz baked beans had appeared in 1895 in the US, making their debut in London in 1901. Meanwhile Bovril became the main supplier of tinned food – especially “bully-beef” – to the British Army as an emergency ration during the Second Boer War (1890-1902). Alleviating the boredom of hardtack biscuits, bully-beef became a mainstay of the British Army right up until the Falklands War in 1982. Shortly afterward, from 1985 onward, field rations that had consisted almost exclusively of tinned products plus some sachets began to be replaced with pouches that were lighter and easier to pack, open and prepare.
Nothing lasts forever. The tin can’s post Second World War zenith has been further threatened in the latter half of the 20th-century by the introduction of packaging like the aforementioned pouches and cartons (for soups and drinks). These innovations have proved better suited for use with increasingly popular and affordable kitchen appliances such as refrigerators and freezers in the 1960s and microwaves in the 1980s. Although sales may have dipped due to the increased competition from a wider choice of products and packaging, the venerable tin can is certainly not about to disappear. Rather, it seems that 21st-century concerns over recycling and food packaging waste have worked to the can’s advantage. Today they are increasingly regarded as something easily recycled. Moreover, in the face of other natural and manmade threats, the can’s ruggedness and impermeability makes them an ideal choice for the stockpiling and distribution of food supplies for emergencies.
And the can opener? Yet it is one thing solving the food preservation, storage and distribution problems when the canning innovators thought little about how to open their invention. The first tin cans had such thick walls they had to be hammered open. So, for decades a hammer and chisel, a military bayonet or a rock had to suffice. As with all technology as the manufacturing process evolved, however, can walls became thinner making it possible to invent dedicated can openers. Thus, some 45 years after the commercial tin can went into production, the first can opener was patented by Ezra Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut in 1858. Eight years later, in 1866, J. Osterhoudt patented a can with an integral key opener that is still found on sardine cans and those for corned beef (pictured above).
A classic By the 1870s almost every middle-class kitchen had a can opener. The inventor of this oh so familiar household device was one William Lyman. His patented opener included a wheel that rolls and cuts around the rim of a can. In 1925 the Star Can Company of San Francisco improved Lyman's design by adding a serrated edge to the wheel. An electric version of the same type of can opener was first sold in December of 1931. Finally, some 28 years later, in 1959 Ermal Fraze invented the pop-top can (or easy-open can) in Kettering, Ohio.
So, the next time you open a can of food or drink, or discard one to be recycled, remember the humble tin can has had quite a history. Without them things would be very different, and far less convenient. Bon appétit!
References:
Bellis, M., (2019), “History of the Can and the Can Opener”, ThoughtCo 25 June 2024, Available online (accessed 3 October 2024).
Geoghegan, T., (2013), “The story of how the tin can nearly wasn't”, BBC News Magazine, Available online (accessed 3 October 2024).
Endnote:
1. Queen Charlotte, wife and consort of King George III. ▲
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