November 13, 2023 • 44 mins
How did the famous Napoleon Bonaparte set into motion the events that led to the humble can opener? From early experiments in canning to gadgets so dangerous the average person wasn't allowed to buy them, we look at the history and evolution of can openers.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech
are you? So? Longtime Tech Stuff listeners know that I
(00:24):
like to mix it up a bit on this show.
I have some episodes that focus on things like bleeding
edge technologies, you know, like quantum computing, and then I
do others that look back to much less complicated and
certainly less whibbly wobbly advancements in tech. And today we'll
be talking about one of the examples in that second category,
(00:48):
because I wanted to chat about can openers. Now, first off,
there's a good chance you've heard what is arguably one
of the most interesting facts about can opener, namely that
it took nearly fifty years from the invention of the
ten can to the invention of the ten can opener,
(01:10):
which for me brings to mind this image of a
very hungry person buried in a pile of cans saying, okay,
now what But let's turn the clock back to the
late eighteenth century and talk about what precipitated the invention
of the ten can In the first place, it was war.
(01:31):
More specifically, it was the tail end of the French
Revolutionary Wars, and those, of course would then transition into
the Napoleonic Wars. So you know, that way, it was
just convenient to go from war to war. And very
often in the descriptions of can Openers and their history,
Napoleon Bonaparte gets thrown into the story. I do not
(01:54):
know how accurate it is to say that Napoleon Bonaparte
was instrumental in this. He may very well have been,
but the timing is a little iffy. So the timing
is typically set around seventeen ninety five. So I will
get to why Napoleon may or may not have been
(02:14):
involved in this particular part of the story. But the
basis of this problem was getting fresh or at least
unspoiled food to soldiers who were out in the field.
One of the challenges that armies faced was that, you know,
you got to feed all those folks who are fighting
on your side, or else they don't fight so good
(02:36):
no more. And the darnedest thing was that sometimes you
could win a battle in a region and you could
actually take territory, but the people in that region just
seemed reluctant to sell or share food with you for
some reason, just because you had been shooting all their
neighbors and relatives. So it was really the height of rudeness.
(02:57):
And this meant that you had to depend upon your
own supply lines to bring food from much further back
up to the front, and then you would be able
to provide supplies to your troops. But obviously these supply
lines had lots of challenges right. For one thing, they
were a really attractive target. If you could disrupt your
(03:20):
enemy's supply lines, you could starve out their forces, and
that meant that you were much more likely to secure
a victory. Those good chances that they were going to surrender,
because otherwise they would be starving to death. But even
if you weren't able to disrupt the supply lines directly,
if the lines are extended far enough, then they're going
(03:42):
to encounter problems of their own, whether those are problems
because of weather or terrain, or just the distances they
have to travel. Often, by the time the supplies got
to the front, the food was spoiled. It could even
be to the point of being inedible or even dangerous.
To eat. Now, you may have heard the phrase an
army marches on its stomach. If you cannot feed your soldiers,
(04:06):
you're going to have a real rough go of it.
And so the French army offered a reward of twelve
thousand francs. If it hadn't been for the French Revolution,
it would have been a princely sum, but the royalty
had found themselves about a head shorter at this point. Anyway,
twelve thousand francs would go a really long way. And
(04:28):
obviously this was so that innovators would be incentivized to
come up with better ways to preserve food. This strategy
of offering a sizable reward in return for innovation would
become a tried and true methodology from that point forward.
In fact, you could argue DARPA, the US Defense Advanced
(04:50):
Research Projects Agency, does the same sort of thing, you know,
with things like their Grand Challenges or the ex Prize. Right,
you end up setting a very tough challenge that we
need to solve, and you attach a hefty prize to it,
and then next thing you know, you got a bunch
of smarty pants all over the place trying to be
(05:11):
the first to do that Now, most accounts say that
whomever issued the offer did so around seventeen ninety five.
And again this is why I say Napoleon may or
may not have been the dude who did this. In
seventeen ninety five, Napoleon was actually still rising through the
ranks of the French military. He did become the commander
of the Army of the Interior in seventeen ninety five.
(05:33):
In late seventeen ninety five, so presumably he could have
been in charge of making this proclamation, but he was
not in command of all of France. He had not
become the Emperor Bonaparte at this point. So whether he
was directly responsible for issuing this order or that maybe
it was some other commander or group of commanders, I'm
(05:54):
not entirely sure. But it's close enough where I guess
you could say Bonaparte made the announcement and you know,
it's close. It could very well be true, and maybe
there's even documentation somewhere that really proves it. But as
I was going through, it was like a lot of
people making the assertion but not pointing to any actual
(06:15):
like incident where it was documented proof. It was just okay,
there was a twelve thousand franc reward announced that much
seems to be true, and maybe Napoleon Bonaparte was the
person who said it, but you know, it's kind of
fun to say, Napoleon Bonaparte's the reason why we have
can openers, even though it's a long journey from there.
(06:36):
Whomever it was who did announce the reward obviously inspired
a ton of folks to get to work to try
and suss out a way to preserve food better so
that it could survive the long journey through a supply line.
And one of those people was a guy named Nicholas
Francois Appear. Spoiler alert, no pun intended, we're talking about
(07:00):
food spoilage. He also has nothing to do with can
openers directly. Nicholas Appear did not invent the can opener,
but he does have something to do with the process
of canning. Now. At Paar was not an engineer. He
was not an inventor, at least not the technological kind
of inventor. He was a chef and a distiller of alcohol,
(07:24):
and he was also a confectioner, a candy maker, kind
of the Willy Wonka of his time. He was inspired
by this offer of a reward, and through that inspiration
he indulged in a lot of experimentation that ultimately would
lead to the process of canning not cans, not ten cans,
(07:46):
but the process of canning food in order to preserve it.
And that process involves heat treating the food and the
container and thus sterilizing the container and then sealing it
and keeping that seal nice and intact, and that this
would keep food fresh indefinitely. A Pair used glass jars,
(08:11):
and he would seal the glass jars with corks and
hold those corks in place with a wire, so he would,
you know, wrap wire around the container to hold the
sealed shut. He would also use sealing wax to help
keep the seal intact, and he would place the sealed
containers in a bath of boiling water. Typically he would
(08:34):
cover the jars in canvas first to protect them so
that they wouldn't chatter. And he experimented for more than
a decade. In fact, it was around fourteen years of
trying different things before he found a process that he
could replicate pretty consistently. And one interesting thing about a
(08:54):
Pair is that his method worked, but he didn't know
why it worked. It was weird that he had found
a way that actually seemed to preserve food effectively, but
he wasn't sure what the mechanism was. Why did this
specific process result in food that would stay fresh longer?
(09:17):
He thought maybe it had something to do with forcing
air out of the container. He was thinking that, you know,
wine makers often would do the same thing, that when
they would bottle wine, they would put the wine bottle
in a boiling bath in order to force air out
before quirking it, and that this would prevent the wine
(09:39):
from going bad if you were storing it for any
length of time and not you know, just drinking it
up right away. So he thought, well, maybe the same
thing is true for food. Maybe it's just the air
that somehow the air has some sort of corruptible element
to it. Through his experiments, he figured out that the
two things that mattered the most, at least that appeared
to matter the most out of the entire process, was
(10:02):
that it was important to try and keep the food
out of contact with quote unquote the exterior air, and
that the hot water bath was absolutely essential. That if
you did not put the container in a hot water bath,
the food would still spoil inside the jar, He still
wasn't sure why this was the case. That was a
bit of a pickle. Actually, many methods of pickling involved
(10:25):
this process. No, it was a pickle because part of
the requirement for being able to claim those twelve thousand
francs was that whoever came up with the method needed
to be able to explain their methodology and actually publish
it so that everyone could benefit from the discovery. But
it's very hard to describe why something works when you
(10:46):
don't understand it yourself. So at Pair did his best,
and in eighteen ten he published his findings in a
work that was titled The Art of Preserving All Kinds
of Animal and Vegetable Substances for many years catchy title. Ultimately,
while his work described the process and that process was effective,
(11:06):
it actually missed out on what made it effective. In fact,
it would be several decades before Louis Pasteur would make
the discoveries of his own that would explain why canning
was effective. Pasteur explained that micro organisms were responsible for
things like spoilage. In fact, he identified that different microbes
(11:27):
were involved in different fermentation processes. He said, oh, well,
it's not just one thing, it's different organisms that do
these different processes. That's why all this stuff works. He
also discovered that if you were to heat up, say
foods or liquids to around one hundred twenty to one
hundred forty degrees fahrenheit or between fifty to sixty degrees celsius,
(11:49):
it would kill the microbes and it would stop the
spoiling or the fermenting process. And if you were to seal,
like hermetically seal the material away from the outside world,
assuming the seal was good, then the food or liquid
inside should be good for a very long time. And
now we call this process pasturization. But old appair this
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was like half a century earlier. It was before Pastor
had done any of this work. He had no way
of knowing that what he was doing in his canning
process was he was killing off these tiny little critters,
in fact, critters so small they couldn't be seen with
the naked eye, and thus preventing them from spoiling the
food that was stored inside these jars. But the important
(12:31):
thing was it worked. But he was using jars, he
was not using ten cans. He received the reward of
twelve thousand francs and he used it to establish a cannery,
and in fact that business would remain in operation until
the nineteen thirties. It lasted a more than a century,
but his part of our story effectively ends here. Now.
(12:54):
A Pair's process was useful, but his choice of container
left a little bit to be desired because his glass
jars are breakable, and what was really needed, especially for
the purposes of transporting military supplies, was a container that
would be more resilient, you know, the bumps and knocks
of travel. Enter the English merchant Peter Durand. So while
(13:18):
at Pair was getting ready to receive a big old
pile of francs over in France, Durand was awaiting the
award of a patent. He had come up with this
idea to store food in various containers, essentially using a
Pair's process. But he was thinking that the containers could
not just be something like a jar or pottery. It
(13:41):
could actually be made out of metal cans that were
primarily made out of iron but then coated in a
thin layer of tin. Durand's patent included the basic process
of canning, that whatever you wanted to preserve need to
be put into a container that the container needed to
be partly but not entirely sealed, an important distinction, and
(14:04):
then the can and its contents need to be heated up,
either in an oven or you know, preferably in a
boiling water bath. He was a little loosey goosey on
details like how long you needed to heat up the container.
He would argue that it depended upon the size of
the container and what you had inside of it. He
also was lucy goosey on how hot it needed to be,
(14:27):
but he did say that after this heating process, then
it needed to be sealed air tight, and it made
sense that you didn't want to have it sealed before
he started the heating process, because obviously, if you seal
the container shut and then you start heating it up
really hot, you're gonna have pressure building up inside that
container and next thing you know, you've got yourself a
(14:48):
boom or a shatter on your hands. So that was
an important part of it. Now Durand had experimented with
this process, because the story goes he had heard of
out the app pair's approach through a colleague of his
who came from France, and so he hears about this
(15:10):
process and he's very skeptical at first, so he starts
to experiment with it himself and he finds that it
seems to work. So then he tries to get some
backing from the Royal Societies of the UK, where you
had these groups of very learned people who were part
(15:30):
of organizations that we would fund scientific discoveries and scientific advancements.
So he caned some food. He puts some food inside
iron cans coated in tin, and he uses the canning
process to sterilize the cans and the food and then
to seal it away. And then he has a collection
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of these cans loaded onto a navy vessel that then
goes off on a voyage of some sort and it's
gone for like half a year. It does its shippy
ship stuff and it sails around and then comes back eventually,
and then Durand and some folks from the Royal Society
end up going in and they get the ten cans,
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they hack them open and they find that yes, indeed,
half a year later, the food that was stored inside
those cans is still good. It's still edible, it's unspoiled.
So Durand gets his patent in eighteen ten, same time
that a pair is getting his reward from France. And
this is when we say that food in ten cans originates.
(16:38):
It's in eighteen ten. Effectively, Durand sold his patent to
some businessmen. He did not go into business for himself
to become a canner. Instead he sells it to a
couple of entrepreneurs who looked to turn this process into
a profitable business. Now they were already familiar with the
(16:58):
process of ten So tenning is when you actually apply
a very thin coating of tin to some other material,
typically iron or steel. So the iron or steel provides
durability and strength, right, it's a very strong metal, But
the problem is these metals are prone to corrosion, to rusting.
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Tin is not nearly as strong as iron or steel,
but it also is resistant to corrosion. So by applying
a thin layer of tin to an iron or steel surface,
you can benefit from the strength of the underlying material
while protecting against rust and with the corrosive nature of
(17:43):
some foods. Like some foods are really acidic, for example,
or really salty, a coating of tin is absolutely necessary
to protect the material from actually eating through the can itself,
like to cause corrosion. The whole point of the can
was to keep food preserved and safe to eat. It
would hardly be safe if the food actually ate the can.
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But these early cans, as you might imagine, were really
thick and heavy and hard to get into, right. I mean,
we're talking about cans made out of iron and then
coated in ten and often these early ones were made,
you know, by hand. There was not like a process,
a mechanical process to make the cans that was really
(18:29):
easy to repeat. But they were effective. They could keep
food safe inside, and the food wasn't just safe from spoilage,
it was largely safe from being eaten because getting to
the food was really hard. The general approach to getting
into one of these cans was to bust out a
hammer and chisel and you just go to town on
(18:50):
the top of that can in an effort to get
into the food inside. Like there was no can opener,
there was no pull tab. There was nothing that you
could use to open these cans apart from tools at
your disposal to cut in, pierce the lid, pry it
off and hopefully not spill all the food in the process.
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The canning process in general and the use of ten
cans in particular slowly spread throughout the UK and Europe,
and a few years later, like around eighteen eighteen or so,
it reached America. The first American patent for ten cans
goes out in eighteen twenty five. It was awarded to
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an Englishman named Thomas Kinnett, who had built his own
canning business back in Old Blightie and decided that he
wanted to expand over to the New World as well. Now,
despite the spread of the practice of canning itself, the
proliferation of ten cans actually moved fairly slowly. Complicating matters
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was that it would take time for engineers to develop
methods to mass produce cans. So in the early days
of producing tenned cans, the methods in employment would allow
for about six cans to be produced in an hour
at a single station. Six cans in an hour is
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not very much. You can't mass produce at that speed.
A man named Henry Evans would end up creating a
way to make cans at much faster speeds using a die.
This was not the same Henry Evans that McCauley culkin
would play in the film The Good Son, though, if
you are not careful with your search terms. When you're
(20:35):
searching for research about this person, you're going to end
up with a lot of villain wikis about the fictional
character Henry Evans from The Good Son. I know because
I kept wondering why McCauley Culkin was popping up while
I was trying to search the history of tend can manufacturing.
Though the actual historical Henry Evans was active in the
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eighteen forties and he used a dye to significantly speed
up tin can production. Now, a die is a tool
in machinery that allows to form or cut metal into
a specific shape. And there are lots of different kinds
of dyes. Like some dies are a piece of metal
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that has a very small hole cut into it, and
you draw other metal through this hole in order to
form wire, for example. That's the type of die. There
are casting dies. These dyes are used to create molds, right,
So this is like a form that you have and
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then you create a mold around that form. Then you
use that mold to cast copies of the die's shape
to make whatever you know, component you're trying to make.
And then there was a third type of die still
is a third type of die called stamping dyes, and
these are used with a mechanical press and you stamp
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material into a specific shape. So the de that Henry
Evans made to produce ten cans was of this last type.
It was a stamping dye, and thus, using a pressing
machine and the right dye and the right material, a
worker could make a brand new tin can with one
operation of this press. So what had started out as
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a six cans per hour job per station now became
sixty per hour using a single machine, and a manufacturing
facility might have several of these presses, so it became
possible to produce cans on a much larger scale. We're
still not in like the modern era of mass manufacture,
but it now became more of a practical technology. Right
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like before, if you were only able to produce six
cans in an hour per station, you're probably not producing
enough to make a huge difference, Like you'd be dedicating
your work to probably a very specific purpose such as
canning foods for the military, but not for the average person.
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Now you were able to do this at a bigger scale.
It was starting to open up more opportunities. Around that
same time, another inventor named Alan Taylor patented a machine
that could produce cylindrical can ends, so like the top
and bottom of the cans. So you had Evans method
that produced the body of the ten can, and you
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had Taylor's method that would produce the ends of the can.
We were really in business now, even though we still
didn't have an actual can opener. Another big development happened
in the mid eighteen fifties when Henry Besmer discovered how
to process cast iron into steel, so steel would become
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the preferred method to provide the stability for tin cans
rather than iron, and you could use a whole lot
less steel to provide that same level of stability, and
thus you could significantly reduce the weight and the thickness
of the cans, which would make them much more practical
for common use. Further down the line, now we're right
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on the verge of it. It was an eighteen fifty
eight that's when we get our hero at least as
far as can openers goes, because from eighteen ten to
eighteen fifty eight, for nearly fifty years, we had this
approach to preserving food in ten plated iron cans. But
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we did not have a dedicated means of opening the
cans apart from brute force and a hammer and chisel.
But in eighteen fifty eight we get the brilliant Ezra J.
Warner from the United States with a patent on a
device that would serve as the first dedicated can opener.
I'll tell you more about that can opener in just
(24:54):
a moment, but we're going to take a quick break
to thank our sponsors. Okay, before the break, I mentioned
that in eighteen fifty eight, ezra J. Warner gets a
patent for a dedicated can opener. It did not look
(25:16):
like the type of can opener that you typically use today,
the kind that has the handles and the little the
twisty key like device and you put it at the
top of the can and you squeeze the handles together
and it pierces the can, and you turned the little
key like device and it rotates the can and you
open it up. No, it didn't look anything like that. Instead,
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it was what folks would later describe as a bayonet
and sickle style can opener. So part of this can
opener had a piece of metal that came to a point,
and you would use this point this bayonet to pierce
a hole in the lid of the can, and typically
you were aiming at near the edge of the can,
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right near the edge of the top of the lid,
so you pierce the lid. Then you would insert the
sickle shaped part of the can opener into the hole
you just made, and using a sawing motion, you know,
using the end of the handle as like a lever,
and pushing down and pulling up over and over and
(26:21):
over again, you would force the blade of the sickle
to cut through the tinned lid of your can. Now,
according to Ezra's patent. This is quoting directly from the
patent quote A child may use it without difficulty or
risk end quote. However, a cursory examination of contemporary reports
(26:45):
about this can opener, as well as the practice of
what Grossers did at the time, suggests that maybe Ezra
was being a little overly generous with his assessment of
how easy his invention was to use, because most accounts
say that the mines of the tin can, once you
were done using this can opener on them, were jagged
(27:05):
and sharp. There are more than a few articles that
would joke about you had to be careful you could
lose a finger in the process of trying to remove
the lid that you had just sawn off the end
of the can. Soldiers in the Civil War used the
tool because, you know, they were already in a pretty
dangerous situation, so throwing in the potential to lose a
(27:26):
finger while getting at your beans was just part of
the joys of war. I guess. The can openers were
not sold to the general public. In fact, if you
were to go to a grocer's as a regular citizen
and you wanted to buy something that was in a tin,
the grocer would actually go ahead and open the tin
for you right there in the store. I'm assuming you
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would transfer the contents to something else, like a jar.
But the reason for this was because you know, it
required a bit of practice to get these cans open,
and it required a lot of care to make sure
you did so without cutting yourself. So again, this was
not something that was sold to the general public. The
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advancements in ten can manufacturing meant that the cans themselves
were becoming much more thin and light weight, and there
were new methods made to a fix a lid to
the top of a can. This also would improve things
quite a bit. These methods meant the lids weren't harder
to get into than Fort Knox the way they had
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been in the past. So you can actually create an
alternative to the separate can opener, and in eighteen sixty
six a guy named Jay Osterholt received a patent for
a new type of ten can, one where you could
use a key opener with the can. Either the key
would already be attached to the can, or you'd insert
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the flap of metal into the key and then bend
it around the end of the key. Then you just
twist the key. So it's sort of a predecessor to
the poll tab opener that you see on a lot
of cans these days. You can actually still find some
types of tin foods that have a version of the
key opener, like stuff like ten sardines often have a
(29:13):
key opener on the lid, and as the name implies,
the lid of the can has a little protrusion essentially
that's shaped like a key, and it's either already attached
to the lid or you attach it the way I
just mentioned. When you twist the key, it starts to
pry the lid off from the top of the ten,
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at least it's supposed to. I've never actually had much
luck with these, but that's probably because I'm also left handed.
Then I find it really awkward to hold the can
and twist the key the way you're supposed to, because
I want to do it the opposite way. So it's
really frustrating for me to try and access these cans.
But that's a me problem. Generally speaking, they worked really well,
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and actually a lot of different companies came up with
different variations of this idea. So for a while, a
lot of the cans that were coming out had some
form of key used to peel back a lid so
that you could get access to what was inside, and
that was the primary way people got access to the
(30:17):
food that were inside tended cans, at least for the
general consumer. For things like commercial purposes like restaurants, or
again like big organizations like the military, it was a
different story. But for the general consumer that became kind
of the go too. Now. Other inventors were still working
to improve the design that Ezra Warner had come up
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with with the first can opener. One design I saw
was kind of interesting. It also had a bayonet style
piercer component to it. This will be a little tricky
to explain in audio, but I'll give it a go.
So imagine that you have a can opener that's essentially
a handle, and it extends out at one point. You
(30:59):
have an adjustable blade. It can move, you know, up
or down the length of the can opener. At the
very end of this tool, you have a hook, a
sharp hook. And what you do is you take a
can and instead of trying to poke a hole near
the edge of the tin, which is the way Ezra's
(31:21):
can opener worked, you would try and poke a hole
in the center of the lid and the hook would
stay in that hole. Meanwhile, you would adjust the blade
that can move up or down the length of the
can opener so that it would be right at the
edge of the can's lid, so like right up against
the lip of the can, and you would press down
(31:45):
using the can opener like a lever, and pierce the
blade into the edge of the can. Then you would
twist the can and or you know, move the can
opener in a circular direction around the can, and you
would physically cut through the can lid so the hook
(32:07):
would remain pierced in the center of the lid. It
would act as sort of like a hub. I think
of it almost like the spindle on a turntable with
a record album. The hook would remain there and the
blade would be on the edge of the tin, and
you would just twist the can and push the handle
of the can opener to start cutting your way around
(32:29):
this circumference of the can. And at the end you
could use that little hook in the center of the
lid to help lift the lid out of the can
and get access to the food inside. Again, you would
end up with some pretty sharp edges. But I actually
really dug the simplicity of this design. There are lots
of videos online by the way of vintage can openers
(32:50):
and folks demonstrating how these would work. Again, I would
probably have a lot of trouble with them because it
looks like most of them were made for right handers,
so I would want to try and push the wrong way,
which means the dull side of the blade would be
what I'd be pushing against. I wouldn't get anywhere, But
they are really really cool. Then we get to a
(33:10):
guy named William Lyman around eighteen seventy, an old Billy
created a can opener similar to the one I just described,
where you would use a bayonet like hook protrusion on
the end to pierce the center of the tin lid,
and near the edge of the tin, you had again
an adjustable blade, but this blade was shaped like a wheel,
(33:33):
so it's not just a razor sharp blade that you
would pierce into the edge of the can. It was
a wheeled blade, and you'd push down hard enough to
make that piercing and you would turn the can, and
the wheeled blade would also turn as you were rotating
the can and cut through the top of the lid.
That wheeled blade would become a main component of modern
(33:56):
can openers, but at this stage in the eighteen seventies,
still looking at a pretty simple, purely mechanical gadget. Now,
the process for manufacturing cans continue to advance significantly over
the following decades, with companies finding new ways to make
cans quickly and efficiently and consistently and out of progressively
thinner materials while still being sturdy and stable and most
(34:21):
importantly hermetically sealed. Various methods to affix lids to cans
were being developed and deployed over the years. The humble
can opener would also see lots of different variations as well,
though nearly all of them involved putting in a pretty
good amount of elbow grease to get the stuff what
was inside the can safely out of it while also
(34:43):
you know, keeping all your fingers intact in the process.
So the next big advancement for can openers wouldn't happen
until nineteen thirty one. So remember we were just in
eighteen seventy. Now we're all the way up to night
teen thirty one, and there were a couple of big
advancements that happened right around this time. First up was
(35:06):
the invention of a guy named Charles Arthur Bunker, who
got a patent in nineteen thirty one for this approach.
So it was Bunker who created a toothed wheel system
like gears inside the can opener. So you would position
the can opener blade on the edge of a tin
lid held in place by the can's lip, and you know,
(35:29):
using leverage, you would pierce the lid of the tin
and the geared wheels would actually grip the edge of
the can's lid like that little lip. So they're gripping together,
and when you would turn a handle on the end
of the can opener, it would turn one of these
two gears, and the other gear would also end up
(35:51):
having to turn and this would force it would you know,
pinch the can and force it to rotate, and thus
it would be pressed again. And it's this wheeled blade
that was part of the can opener, So you'd have
to twist like a dozen times or so and you
would have yourself an open can. The geared wheel component
became the other major part of modern day manual can openers,
(36:15):
coupled with that wheeled blade that came from William Lyman's
invention in eighteen seventy. Now I need to mention there
was actually another company that was using a dual wheel
mechanism to grip a can for the purposes of cutting
the lid open. And the company that made this was
called the Star can Opener Company, And in fact, they
(36:37):
sued Bunker's own company, the Bunker Clancy Company, because they said, well,
we already made this invention, this mechanism of using this
weeld system to grip a can so that when you
turn a handle, you rotate the can and you can
cut it open. So Bunker didn't actually invent that we
did six years ago, but the lawsuit got thrown out
(36:59):
for some reason or another. I'm not sure what happened,
and it is weird that this company that had an
invention that predated the patent by six years was essentially dismissed. Anyway,
those gears made all the difference, I guess in that lawsuit.
And Bunker's company would also introduce the world's first electric
can opener, also in nineteen thirty one, and it too
(37:24):
used those geared wheels to grip onto the lip of
a tin can lid, and in this case, instead of
having to manually turn a little handle over and over
and over again, electricity would power a motor to make
those wheels turn, and that would mean that the electric
motor would cause the can to rotate, and the opener's
(37:44):
blade would be pressed against the lid of the can
and thus cut through the lid like Butta. Unfortunately for Bunker,
he was a bit too far ahead of his time.
The United States and the world in general was still
in the process of electrification, and a lot of households
had no been wired for electricity, and the ones that
were didn't really have can opener on the priority list
(38:07):
of the stuff what they wanted to have electrified. So
the electric can opener dates all the way back to
nineteen thirty one, but it would be another couple of
decades before the technology would be considered practical for the
average person and become a consumer item. In fact, the
first commercially successful electric can opener design would launch in
(38:29):
the nineteen fifties, and it was a father daughter project.
The father in this case was a guy named Walter
Hess Bodele, and his daughter Elizabeth Bodle, contributed significantly to
the actual design and esthetic of the device, and together
they made a countertop electric can opener that was freestanding,
(38:50):
It was attractive in that nineteen fifties kind of way,
and it actually was a commercial success. Now this pretty
much brings us up to speed on the general evolution
of can openers. There are some bits that didn't really cover,
Like there's the industrial bondser line of can openers. They
kind of look like a combination of a vice and
(39:11):
a with a crank on top. These were made for
commercial operations like restaurants and such, so you would mount
it on like an industrial table in like a you know,
a restaurant setting, and you would place you know, your
large canned goods, like the big cans of can food
onto essentially a rotating platform that would sit at the
(39:33):
base of this device. You would clamp the blade down
and by turning the crank, you would rotate the can
and cut open the lid. These were really useful, again
in industrial settings, not so much for consumers, but they
were really important. I also didn't cover a can opener
that I really like, a style of can opener I
(39:55):
really like. As I mentioned, I'm left handed, and that
means that I would often struggle with, you know, the
manual can openers. Even left handed designed can openers always
felt weird to me, maybe because I had forced myself to,
you know, struggle with a right handed can opener, and
I mean it always looked like a horror show, like
(40:15):
I did not do a good job at opening cans.
When when my family finally got an electric can opener,
when I was maybe like ten or so, I thought
it was fantastic because suddenly I could open cans just
like anyone else. But flash forward a few years back,
I am shopping for an electric can opener and I
found a hands free one and I actually really love it.
(40:36):
And there are lots of different variations for this style
of can opener, so I'm not going to call out
the specific brand I have. There are lots of different
ones that use the same principles, so you can find them,
you know, in places like online stores and stuff. I'll
just describe how it works. So it looks like it's
just a little like handle, actually a thick handle because
(40:57):
it is battery powered, so the batteries fit in this
and you lay it across the top of a can,
like flat out across the top of the can. It
has a little section that goes over the edge of
the lip, and when you press a button on the
top of this can opener, it has wheels that grip
(41:19):
that lip edge and a blade that cuts into the can,
and then the motor turns the wheels and the whole
can opener just rotates over the top of the can.
It makes a full circle. Once it does, you hit
the button again, you can lift the top off. Mine
cuts the lid on the outside edge, so the whole
(41:39):
like lip of the can comes off at the top
and makes it really simple to remove and then access
the food that's inside, and so just with a touch
of a button, I can get into masspaghettios, which is
absolutely brilliant in my mind. Like I said, there's lots
of different variations on this specific design. But the interesting
(41:59):
thing to me is that the elements that were in
president in like William Lyman's can opener in eighteen seventy,
that wheeled blade, or the one of from nineteen thirty
one where you get the geared wheels in Bunker's design,
(42:20):
those are all part of these hands free can openers too.
They're still making use of those those innovations that are now,
you know, in one case well over a century old,
and then the other one we're getting pretty close to it.
I just think that's really cool that it's just again
slight variations on tried and true designs. But that's the
(42:42):
story I found. Napoleon Bonaparte led to the creation of
the can opener sort of, which is kind of similar
to when I say that the reason we have lawnmowers
is because folks in Europe really liked building castles and
going to war with each other. I mean, who knows,
maybe I'm going to find out that some other random
and like I don't know, the adjustable office chair actually
(43:03):
owes its existence to medieval warfare or something. We'll have
to find out about that one. Anyway, I hope you
found this history of the can opener interesting and understand
now why it took almost fifty years from the invention
of the ten can to get to the invention of
the ten can opener, and maybe you have a greater
appreciation for can openers. I know in my household, I
(43:27):
really appreciated the electric can opener because again, it gave
me the ability to access canned foods in a way
that was much easier than the manual can opener method,
which I always struggled with. And I also know there
were other entities in my house that appreciated the can
opener the way I did, and that would be my cats,
(43:48):
because as soon as they heard the electric can opener going,
they would flock to me, so they had I think
the appropriate reverence for can openers something that we should
all reflect on upon occasion, because tend food often gets
a bad rap. But seriously, modern society wouldn't exist the
(44:09):
way it does without it, and arguably without the can opener,
that never would have been as important an invention. So yeah,
I just thought it was an interesting topic to cover
for an episode of tech Stuff. I hope you are
all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(44:36):
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech
are you? So? Longtime Tech Stuff listeners know that I
(00:24):
like to mix it up a bit on this show.
I have some episodes that focus on things like bleeding
edge technologies, you know, like quantum computing, and then I
do others that look back to much less complicated and
certainly less whibbly wobbly advancements in tech. And today we'll
be talking about one of the examples in that second category,
(00:48):
because I wanted to chat about can openers. Now, first off,
there's a good chance you've heard what is arguably one
of the most interesting facts about can opener, namely that
it took nearly fifty years from the invention of the
ten can to the invention of the ten can opener,
(01:10):
which for me brings to mind this image of a
very hungry person buried in a pile of cans saying, okay,
now what But let's turn the clock back to the
late eighteenth century and talk about what precipitated the invention
of the ten can In the first place, it was war.
(01:31):
More specifically, it was the tail end of the French
Revolutionary Wars, and those, of course would then transition into
the Napoleonic Wars. So you know, that way, it was
just convenient to go from war to war. And very
often in the descriptions of can Openers and their history,
Napoleon Bonaparte gets thrown into the story. I do not
(01:54):
know how accurate it is to say that Napoleon Bonaparte
was instrumental in this. He may very well have been,
but the timing is a little iffy. So the timing
is typically set around seventeen ninety five. So I will
get to why Napoleon may or may not have been
(02:14):
involved in this particular part of the story. But the
basis of this problem was getting fresh or at least
unspoiled food to soldiers who were out in the field.
One of the challenges that armies faced was that, you know,
you got to feed all those folks who are fighting
on your side, or else they don't fight so good
(02:36):
no more. And the darnedest thing was that sometimes you
could win a battle in a region and you could
actually take territory, but the people in that region just
seemed reluctant to sell or share food with you for
some reason, just because you had been shooting all their
neighbors and relatives. So it was really the height of rudeness.
(02:57):
And this meant that you had to depend upon your
own supply lines to bring food from much further back
up to the front, and then you would be able
to provide supplies to your troops. But obviously these supply
lines had lots of challenges right. For one thing, they
were a really attractive target. If you could disrupt your
(03:20):
enemy's supply lines, you could starve out their forces, and
that meant that you were much more likely to secure
a victory. Those good chances that they were going to surrender,
because otherwise they would be starving to death. But even
if you weren't able to disrupt the supply lines directly,
if the lines are extended far enough, then they're going
(03:42):
to encounter problems of their own, whether those are problems
because of weather or terrain, or just the distances they
have to travel. Often, by the time the supplies got
to the front, the food was spoiled. It could even
be to the point of being inedible or even dangerous.
To eat. Now, you may have heard the phrase an
army marches on its stomach. If you cannot feed your soldiers,
(04:06):
you're going to have a real rough go of it.
And so the French army offered a reward of twelve
thousand francs. If it hadn't been for the French Revolution,
it would have been a princely sum, but the royalty
had found themselves about a head shorter at this point. Anyway,
twelve thousand francs would go a really long way. And
(04:28):
obviously this was so that innovators would be incentivized to
come up with better ways to preserve food. This strategy
of offering a sizable reward in return for innovation would
become a tried and true methodology from that point forward.
In fact, you could argue DARPA, the US Defense Advanced
(04:50):
Research Projects Agency, does the same sort of thing, you know,
with things like their Grand Challenges or the ex Prize. Right,
you end up setting a very tough challenge that we
need to solve, and you attach a hefty prize to it,
and then next thing you know, you got a bunch
of smarty pants all over the place trying to be
(05:11):
the first to do that Now, most accounts say that
whomever issued the offer did so around seventeen ninety five.
And again this is why I say Napoleon may or
may not have been the dude who did this. In
seventeen ninety five, Napoleon was actually still rising through the
ranks of the French military. He did become the commander
of the Army of the Interior in seventeen ninety five.
(05:33):
In late seventeen ninety five, so presumably he could have
been in charge of making this proclamation, but he was
not in command of all of France. He had not
become the Emperor Bonaparte at this point. So whether he
was directly responsible for issuing this order or that maybe
it was some other commander or group of commanders, I'm
(05:54):
not entirely sure. But it's close enough where I guess
you could say Bonaparte made the announcement and you know,
it's close. It could very well be true, and maybe
there's even documentation somewhere that really proves it. But as
I was going through, it was like a lot of
people making the assertion but not pointing to any actual
(06:15):
like incident where it was documented proof. It was just okay,
there was a twelve thousand franc reward announced that much
seems to be true, and maybe Napoleon Bonaparte was the
person who said it, but you know, it's kind of
fun to say, Napoleon Bonaparte's the reason why we have
can openers, even though it's a long journey from there.
(06:36):
Whomever it was who did announce the reward obviously inspired
a ton of folks to get to work to try
and suss out a way to preserve food better so
that it could survive the long journey through a supply line.
And one of those people was a guy named Nicholas
Francois Appear. Spoiler alert, no pun intended, we're talking about
(07:00):
food spoilage. He also has nothing to do with can
openers directly. Nicholas Appear did not invent the can opener,
but he does have something to do with the process
of canning. Now. At Paar was not an engineer. He
was not an inventor, at least not the technological kind
of inventor. He was a chef and a distiller of alcohol,
(07:24):
and he was also a confectioner, a candy maker, kind
of the Willy Wonka of his time. He was inspired
by this offer of a reward, and through that inspiration
he indulged in a lot of experimentation that ultimately would
lead to the process of canning not cans, not ten cans,
(07:46):
but the process of canning food in order to preserve it.
And that process involves heat treating the food and the
container and thus sterilizing the container and then sealing it
and keeping that seal nice and intact, and that this
would keep food fresh indefinitely. A Pair used glass jars,
(08:11):
and he would seal the glass jars with corks and
hold those corks in place with a wire, so he would,
you know, wrap wire around the container to hold the
sealed shut. He would also use sealing wax to help
keep the seal intact, and he would place the sealed
containers in a bath of boiling water. Typically he would
(08:34):
cover the jars in canvas first to protect them so
that they wouldn't chatter. And he experimented for more than
a decade. In fact, it was around fourteen years of
trying different things before he found a process that he
could replicate pretty consistently. And one interesting thing about a
(08:54):
Pair is that his method worked, but he didn't know
why it worked. It was weird that he had found
a way that actually seemed to preserve food effectively, but
he wasn't sure what the mechanism was. Why did this
specific process result in food that would stay fresh longer?
(09:17):
He thought maybe it had something to do with forcing
air out of the container. He was thinking that, you know,
wine makers often would do the same thing, that when
they would bottle wine, they would put the wine bottle
in a boiling bath in order to force air out
before quirking it, and that this would prevent the wine
(09:39):
from going bad if you were storing it for any
length of time and not you know, just drinking it
up right away. So he thought, well, maybe the same
thing is true for food. Maybe it's just the air
that somehow the air has some sort of corruptible element
to it. Through his experiments, he figured out that the
two things that mattered the most, at least that appeared
to matter the most out of the entire process, was
(10:02):
that it was important to try and keep the food
out of contact with quote unquote the exterior air, and
that the hot water bath was absolutely essential. That if
you did not put the container in a hot water bath,
the food would still spoil inside the jar, He still
wasn't sure why this was the case. That was a
bit of a pickle. Actually, many methods of pickling involved
(10:25):
this process. No, it was a pickle because part of
the requirement for being able to claim those twelve thousand
francs was that whoever came up with the method needed
to be able to explain their methodology and actually publish
it so that everyone could benefit from the discovery. But
it's very hard to describe why something works when you
(10:46):
don't understand it yourself. So at Pair did his best,
and in eighteen ten he published his findings in a
work that was titled The Art of Preserving All Kinds
of Animal and Vegetable Substances for many years catchy title. Ultimately,
while his work described the process and that process was effective,
(11:06):
it actually missed out on what made it effective. In fact,
it would be several decades before Louis Pasteur would make
the discoveries of his own that would explain why canning
was effective. Pasteur explained that micro organisms were responsible for
things like spoilage. In fact, he identified that different microbes
(11:27):
were involved in different fermentation processes. He said, oh, well,
it's not just one thing, it's different organisms that do
these different processes. That's why all this stuff works. He
also discovered that if you were to heat up, say
foods or liquids to around one hundred twenty to one
hundred forty degrees fahrenheit or between fifty to sixty degrees celsius,
(11:49):
it would kill the microbes and it would stop the
spoiling or the fermenting process. And if you were to seal,
like hermetically seal the material away from the outside world,
assuming the seal was good, then the food or liquid
inside should be good for a very long time. And
now we call this process pasturization. But old appair this
(12:11):
was like half a century earlier. It was before Pastor
had done any of this work. He had no way
of knowing that what he was doing in his canning
process was he was killing off these tiny little critters,
in fact, critters so small they couldn't be seen with
the naked eye, and thus preventing them from spoiling the
food that was stored inside these jars. But the important
(12:31):
thing was it worked. But he was using jars, he
was not using ten cans. He received the reward of
twelve thousand francs and he used it to establish a cannery,
and in fact that business would remain in operation until
the nineteen thirties. It lasted a more than a century,
but his part of our story effectively ends here. Now.
(12:54):
A Pair's process was useful, but his choice of container
left a little bit to be desired because his glass
jars are breakable, and what was really needed, especially for
the purposes of transporting military supplies, was a container that
would be more resilient, you know, the bumps and knocks
of travel. Enter the English merchant Peter Durand. So while
(13:18):
at Pair was getting ready to receive a big old
pile of francs over in France, Durand was awaiting the
award of a patent. He had come up with this
idea to store food in various containers, essentially using a
Pair's process. But he was thinking that the containers could
not just be something like a jar or pottery. It
(13:41):
could actually be made out of metal cans that were
primarily made out of iron but then coated in a
thin layer of tin. Durand's patent included the basic process
of canning, that whatever you wanted to preserve need to
be put into a container that the container needed to
be partly but not entirely sealed, an important distinction, and
(14:04):
then the can and its contents need to be heated up,
either in an oven or you know, preferably in a
boiling water bath. He was a little loosey goosey on
details like how long you needed to heat up the container.
He would argue that it depended upon the size of
the container and what you had inside of it. He
also was lucy goosey on how hot it needed to be,
(14:27):
but he did say that after this heating process, then
it needed to be sealed air tight, and it made
sense that you didn't want to have it sealed before
he started the heating process, because obviously, if you seal
the container shut and then you start heating it up
really hot, you're gonna have pressure building up inside that
container and next thing you know, you've got yourself a
(14:48):
boom or a shatter on your hands. So that was
an important part of it. Now Durand had experimented with
this process, because the story goes he had heard of
out the app pair's approach through a colleague of his
who came from France, and so he hears about this
(15:10):
process and he's very skeptical at first, so he starts
to experiment with it himself and he finds that it
seems to work. So then he tries to get some
backing from the Royal Societies of the UK, where you
had these groups of very learned people who were part
(15:30):
of organizations that we would fund scientific discoveries and scientific advancements.
So he caned some food. He puts some food inside
iron cans coated in tin, and he uses the canning
process to sterilize the cans and the food and then
to seal it away. And then he has a collection
(15:52):
of these cans loaded onto a navy vessel that then
goes off on a voyage of some sort and it's
gone for like half a year. It does its shippy
ship stuff and it sails around and then comes back eventually,
and then Durand and some folks from the Royal Society
end up going in and they get the ten cans,
(16:14):
they hack them open and they find that yes, indeed,
half a year later, the food that was stored inside
those cans is still good. It's still edible, it's unspoiled.
So Durand gets his patent in eighteen ten, same time
that a pair is getting his reward from France. And
this is when we say that food in ten cans originates.
(16:38):
It's in eighteen ten. Effectively, Durand sold his patent to
some businessmen. He did not go into business for himself
to become a canner. Instead he sells it to a
couple of entrepreneurs who looked to turn this process into
a profitable business. Now they were already familiar with the
(16:58):
process of ten So tenning is when you actually apply
a very thin coating of tin to some other material,
typically iron or steel. So the iron or steel provides
durability and strength, right, it's a very strong metal, But
the problem is these metals are prone to corrosion, to rusting.
(17:22):
Tin is not nearly as strong as iron or steel,
but it also is resistant to corrosion. So by applying
a thin layer of tin to an iron or steel surface,
you can benefit from the strength of the underlying material
while protecting against rust and with the corrosive nature of
(17:43):
some foods. Like some foods are really acidic, for example,
or really salty, a coating of tin is absolutely necessary
to protect the material from actually eating through the can itself,
like to cause corrosion. The whole point of the can
was to keep food preserved and safe to eat. It
would hardly be safe if the food actually ate the can.
(18:08):
But these early cans, as you might imagine, were really
thick and heavy and hard to get into, right. I mean,
we're talking about cans made out of iron and then
coated in ten and often these early ones were made,
you know, by hand. There was not like a process,
a mechanical process to make the cans that was really
(18:29):
easy to repeat. But they were effective. They could keep
food safe inside, and the food wasn't just safe from spoilage,
it was largely safe from being eaten because getting to
the food was really hard. The general approach to getting
into one of these cans was to bust out a
hammer and chisel and you just go to town on
(18:50):
the top of that can in an effort to get
into the food inside. Like there was no can opener,
there was no pull tab. There was nothing that you
could use to open these cans apart from tools at
your disposal to cut in, pierce the lid, pry it
off and hopefully not spill all the food in the process.
(19:12):
The canning process in general and the use of ten
cans in particular slowly spread throughout the UK and Europe,
and a few years later, like around eighteen eighteen or so,
it reached America. The first American patent for ten cans
goes out in eighteen twenty five. It was awarded to
(19:32):
an Englishman named Thomas Kinnett, who had built his own
canning business back in Old Blightie and decided that he
wanted to expand over to the New World as well. Now,
despite the spread of the practice of canning itself, the
proliferation of ten cans actually moved fairly slowly. Complicating matters
(19:53):
was that it would take time for engineers to develop
methods to mass produce cans. So in the early days
of producing tenned cans, the methods in employment would allow
for about six cans to be produced in an hour
at a single station. Six cans in an hour is
(20:14):
not very much. You can't mass produce at that speed.
A man named Henry Evans would end up creating a
way to make cans at much faster speeds using a die.
This was not the same Henry Evans that McCauley culkin
would play in the film The Good Son, though, if
you are not careful with your search terms. When you're
(20:35):
searching for research about this person, you're going to end
up with a lot of villain wikis about the fictional
character Henry Evans from The Good Son. I know because
I kept wondering why McCauley Culkin was popping up while
I was trying to search the history of tend can manufacturing.
Though the actual historical Henry Evans was active in the
(20:56):
eighteen forties and he used a dye to significantly speed
up tin can production. Now, a die is a tool
in machinery that allows to form or cut metal into
a specific shape. And there are lots of different kinds
of dyes. Like some dies are a piece of metal
(21:17):
that has a very small hole cut into it, and
you draw other metal through this hole in order to
form wire, for example. That's the type of die. There
are casting dies. These dyes are used to create molds, right,
So this is like a form that you have and
(21:39):
then you create a mold around that form. Then you
use that mold to cast copies of the die's shape
to make whatever you know, component you're trying to make.
And then there was a third type of die still
is a third type of die called stamping dyes, and
these are used with a mechanical press and you stamp
(22:01):
material into a specific shape. So the de that Henry
Evans made to produce ten cans was of this last type.
It was a stamping dye, and thus, using a pressing
machine and the right dye and the right material, a
worker could make a brand new tin can with one
operation of this press. So what had started out as
(22:23):
a six cans per hour job per station now became
sixty per hour using a single machine, and a manufacturing
facility might have several of these presses, so it became
possible to produce cans on a much larger scale. We're
still not in like the modern era of mass manufacture,
but it now became more of a practical technology. Right
(22:46):
like before, if you were only able to produce six
cans in an hour per station, you're probably not producing
enough to make a huge difference, Like you'd be dedicating
your work to probably a very specific purpose such as
canning foods for the military, but not for the average person.
(23:06):
Now you were able to do this at a bigger scale.
It was starting to open up more opportunities. Around that
same time, another inventor named Alan Taylor patented a machine
that could produce cylindrical can ends, so like the top
and bottom of the cans. So you had Evans method
that produced the body of the ten can, and you
(23:28):
had Taylor's method that would produce the ends of the can.
We were really in business now, even though we still
didn't have an actual can opener. Another big development happened
in the mid eighteen fifties when Henry Besmer discovered how
to process cast iron into steel, so steel would become
(23:49):
the preferred method to provide the stability for tin cans
rather than iron, and you could use a whole lot
less steel to provide that same level of stability, and
thus you could significantly reduce the weight and the thickness
of the cans, which would make them much more practical
for common use. Further down the line, now we're right
(24:11):
on the verge of it. It was an eighteen fifty
eight that's when we get our hero at least as
far as can openers goes, because from eighteen ten to
eighteen fifty eight, for nearly fifty years, we had this
approach to preserving food in ten plated iron cans. But
(24:31):
we did not have a dedicated means of opening the
cans apart from brute force and a hammer and chisel.
But in eighteen fifty eight we get the brilliant Ezra J.
Warner from the United States with a patent on a
device that would serve as the first dedicated can opener.
I'll tell you more about that can opener in just
(24:54):
a moment, but we're going to take a quick break
to thank our sponsors. Okay, before the break, I mentioned
that in eighteen fifty eight, ezra J. Warner gets a
patent for a dedicated can opener. It did not look
(25:16):
like the type of can opener that you typically use today,
the kind that has the handles and the little the
twisty key like device and you put it at the
top of the can and you squeeze the handles together
and it pierces the can, and you turned the little
key like device and it rotates the can and you
open it up. No, it didn't look anything like that. Instead,
(25:36):
it was what folks would later describe as a bayonet
and sickle style can opener. So part of this can
opener had a piece of metal that came to a point,
and you would use this point this bayonet to pierce
a hole in the lid of the can, and typically
you were aiming at near the edge of the can,
(25:59):
right near the edge of the top of the lid,
so you pierce the lid. Then you would insert the
sickle shaped part of the can opener into the hole
you just made, and using a sawing motion, you know,
using the end of the handle as like a lever,
and pushing down and pulling up over and over and
(26:21):
over again, you would force the blade of the sickle
to cut through the tinned lid of your can. Now,
according to Ezra's patent. This is quoting directly from the
patent quote A child may use it without difficulty or
risk end quote. However, a cursory examination of contemporary reports
(26:45):
about this can opener, as well as the practice of
what Grossers did at the time, suggests that maybe Ezra
was being a little overly generous with his assessment of
how easy his invention was to use, because most accounts
say that the mines of the tin can, once you
were done using this can opener on them, were jagged
(27:05):
and sharp. There are more than a few articles that
would joke about you had to be careful you could
lose a finger in the process of trying to remove
the lid that you had just sawn off the end
of the can. Soldiers in the Civil War used the
tool because, you know, they were already in a pretty
dangerous situation, so throwing in the potential to lose a
(27:26):
finger while getting at your beans was just part of
the joys of war. I guess. The can openers were
not sold to the general public. In fact, if you
were to go to a grocer's as a regular citizen
and you wanted to buy something that was in a tin,
the grocer would actually go ahead and open the tin
for you right there in the store. I'm assuming you
(27:48):
would transfer the contents to something else, like a jar.
But the reason for this was because you know, it
required a bit of practice to get these cans open,
and it required a lot of care to make sure
you did so without cutting yourself. So again, this was
not something that was sold to the general public. The
(28:09):
advancements in ten can manufacturing meant that the cans themselves
were becoming much more thin and light weight, and there
were new methods made to a fix a lid to
the top of a can. This also would improve things
quite a bit. These methods meant the lids weren't harder
to get into than Fort Knox the way they had
(28:31):
been in the past. So you can actually create an
alternative to the separate can opener, and in eighteen sixty
six a guy named Jay Osterholt received a patent for
a new type of ten can, one where you could
use a key opener with the can. Either the key
would already be attached to the can, or you'd insert
(28:53):
the flap of metal into the key and then bend
it around the end of the key. Then you just
twist the key. So it's sort of a predecessor to
the poll tab opener that you see on a lot
of cans these days. You can actually still find some
types of tin foods that have a version of the
key opener, like stuff like ten sardines often have a
(29:13):
key opener on the lid, and as the name implies,
the lid of the can has a little protrusion essentially
that's shaped like a key, and it's either already attached
to the lid or you attach it the way I
just mentioned. When you twist the key, it starts to
pry the lid off from the top of the ten,
(29:33):
at least it's supposed to. I've never actually had much
luck with these, but that's probably because I'm also left handed.
Then I find it really awkward to hold the can
and twist the key the way you're supposed to, because
I want to do it the opposite way. So it's
really frustrating for me to try and access these cans.
But that's a me problem. Generally speaking, they worked really well,
(29:56):
and actually a lot of different companies came up with
different variations of this idea. So for a while, a
lot of the cans that were coming out had some
form of key used to peel back a lid so
that you could get access to what was inside, and
that was the primary way people got access to the
(30:17):
food that were inside tended cans, at least for the
general consumer. For things like commercial purposes like restaurants, or
again like big organizations like the military, it was a
different story. But for the general consumer that became kind
of the go too. Now. Other inventors were still working
to improve the design that Ezra Warner had come up
(30:38):
with with the first can opener. One design I saw
was kind of interesting. It also had a bayonet style
piercer component to it. This will be a little tricky
to explain in audio, but I'll give it a go.
So imagine that you have a can opener that's essentially
a handle, and it extends out at one point. You
(30:59):
have an adjustable blade. It can move, you know, up
or down the length of the can opener. At the
very end of this tool, you have a hook, a
sharp hook. And what you do is you take a
can and instead of trying to poke a hole near
the edge of the tin, which is the way Ezra's
(31:21):
can opener worked, you would try and poke a hole
in the center of the lid and the hook would
stay in that hole. Meanwhile, you would adjust the blade
that can move up or down the length of the
can opener so that it would be right at the
edge of the can's lid, so like right up against
the lip of the can, and you would press down
(31:45):
using the can opener like a lever, and pierce the
blade into the edge of the can. Then you would
twist the can and or you know, move the can
opener in a circular direction around the can, and you
would physically cut through the can lid so the hook
(32:07):
would remain pierced in the center of the lid. It
would act as sort of like a hub. I think
of it almost like the spindle on a turntable with
a record album. The hook would remain there and the
blade would be on the edge of the tin, and
you would just twist the can and push the handle
of the can opener to start cutting your way around
(32:29):
this circumference of the can. And at the end you
could use that little hook in the center of the
lid to help lift the lid out of the can
and get access to the food inside. Again, you would
end up with some pretty sharp edges. But I actually
really dug the simplicity of this design. There are lots
of videos online by the way of vintage can openers
(32:50):
and folks demonstrating how these would work. Again, I would
probably have a lot of trouble with them because it
looks like most of them were made for right handers,
so I would want to try and push the wrong way,
which means the dull side of the blade would be
what I'd be pushing against. I wouldn't get anywhere, But
they are really really cool. Then we get to a
(33:10):
guy named William Lyman around eighteen seventy, an old Billy
created a can opener similar to the one I just described,
where you would use a bayonet like hook protrusion on
the end to pierce the center of the tin lid,
and near the edge of the tin, you had again
an adjustable blade, but this blade was shaped like a wheel,
(33:33):
so it's not just a razor sharp blade that you
would pierce into the edge of the can. It was
a wheeled blade, and you'd push down hard enough to
make that piercing and you would turn the can, and
the wheeled blade would also turn as you were rotating
the can and cut through the top of the lid.
That wheeled blade would become a main component of modern
(33:56):
can openers, but at this stage in the eighteen seventies,
still looking at a pretty simple, purely mechanical gadget. Now,
the process for manufacturing cans continue to advance significantly over
the following decades, with companies finding new ways to make
cans quickly and efficiently and consistently and out of progressively
thinner materials while still being sturdy and stable and most
(34:21):
importantly hermetically sealed. Various methods to affix lids to cans
were being developed and deployed over the years. The humble
can opener would also see lots of different variations as well,
though nearly all of them involved putting in a pretty
good amount of elbow grease to get the stuff what
was inside the can safely out of it while also
(34:43):
you know, keeping all your fingers intact in the process.
So the next big advancement for can openers wouldn't happen
until nineteen thirty one. So remember we were just in
eighteen seventy. Now we're all the way up to night
teen thirty one, and there were a couple of big
advancements that happened right around this time. First up was
(35:06):
the invention of a guy named Charles Arthur Bunker, who
got a patent in nineteen thirty one for this approach.
So it was Bunker who created a toothed wheel system
like gears inside the can opener. So you would position
the can opener blade on the edge of a tin
lid held in place by the can's lip, and you know,
(35:29):
using leverage, you would pierce the lid of the tin
and the geared wheels would actually grip the edge of
the can's lid like that little lip. So they're gripping together,
and when you would turn a handle on the end
of the can opener, it would turn one of these
two gears, and the other gear would also end up
(35:51):
having to turn and this would force it would you know,
pinch the can and force it to rotate, and thus
it would be pressed again. And it's this wheeled blade
that was part of the can opener, So you'd have
to twist like a dozen times or so and you
would have yourself an open can. The geared wheel component
became the other major part of modern day manual can openers,
(36:15):
coupled with that wheeled blade that came from William Lyman's
invention in eighteen seventy. Now I need to mention there
was actually another company that was using a dual wheel
mechanism to grip a can for the purposes of cutting
the lid open. And the company that made this was
called the Star can Opener Company, And in fact, they
(36:37):
sued Bunker's own company, the Bunker Clancy Company, because they said, well,
we already made this invention, this mechanism of using this
weeld system to grip a can so that when you
turn a handle, you rotate the can and you can
cut it open. So Bunker didn't actually invent that we
did six years ago, but the lawsuit got thrown out
(36:59):
for some reason or another. I'm not sure what happened,
and it is weird that this company that had an
invention that predated the patent by six years was essentially dismissed. Anyway,
those gears made all the difference, I guess in that lawsuit.
And Bunker's company would also introduce the world's first electric
can opener, also in nineteen thirty one, and it too
(37:24):
used those geared wheels to grip onto the lip of
a tin can lid, and in this case, instead of
having to manually turn a little handle over and over
and over again, electricity would power a motor to make
those wheels turn, and that would mean that the electric
motor would cause the can to rotate, and the opener's
(37:44):
blade would be pressed against the lid of the can
and thus cut through the lid like Butta. Unfortunately for Bunker,
he was a bit too far ahead of his time.
The United States and the world in general was still
in the process of electrification, and a lot of households
had no been wired for electricity, and the ones that
were didn't really have can opener on the priority list
(38:07):
of the stuff what they wanted to have electrified. So
the electric can opener dates all the way back to
nineteen thirty one, but it would be another couple of
decades before the technology would be considered practical for the
average person and become a consumer item. In fact, the
first commercially successful electric can opener design would launch in
(38:29):
the nineteen fifties, and it was a father daughter project.
The father in this case was a guy named Walter
Hess Bodele, and his daughter Elizabeth Bodle, contributed significantly to
the actual design and esthetic of the device, and together
they made a countertop electric can opener that was freestanding,
(38:50):
It was attractive in that nineteen fifties kind of way,
and it actually was a commercial success. Now this pretty
much brings us up to speed on the general evolution
of can openers. There are some bits that didn't really cover,
Like there's the industrial bondser line of can openers. They
kind of look like a combination of a vice and
(39:11):
a with a crank on top. These were made for
commercial operations like restaurants and such, so you would mount
it on like an industrial table in like a you know,
a restaurant setting, and you would place you know, your
large canned goods, like the big cans of can food
onto essentially a rotating platform that would sit at the
(39:33):
base of this device. You would clamp the blade down
and by turning the crank, you would rotate the can
and cut open the lid. These were really useful, again
in industrial settings, not so much for consumers, but they
were really important. I also didn't cover a can opener
that I really like, a style of can opener I
(39:55):
really like. As I mentioned, I'm left handed, and that
means that I would often struggle with, you know, the
manual can openers. Even left handed designed can openers always
felt weird to me, maybe because I had forced myself to,
you know, struggle with a right handed can opener, and
I mean it always looked like a horror show, like
(40:15):
I did not do a good job at opening cans.
When when my family finally got an electric can opener,
when I was maybe like ten or so, I thought
it was fantastic because suddenly I could open cans just
like anyone else. But flash forward a few years back,
I am shopping for an electric can opener and I
found a hands free one and I actually really love it.
(40:36):
And there are lots of different variations for this style
of can opener, so I'm not going to call out
the specific brand I have. There are lots of different
ones that use the same principles, so you can find them,
you know, in places like online stores and stuff. I'll
just describe how it works. So it looks like it's
just a little like handle, actually a thick handle because
(40:57):
it is battery powered, so the batteries fit in this
and you lay it across the top of a can,
like flat out across the top of the can. It
has a little section that goes over the edge of
the lip, and when you press a button on the
top of this can opener, it has wheels that grip
(41:19):
that lip edge and a blade that cuts into the can,
and then the motor turns the wheels and the whole
can opener just rotates over the top of the can.
It makes a full circle. Once it does, you hit
the button again, you can lift the top off. Mine
cuts the lid on the outside edge, so the whole
(41:39):
like lip of the can comes off at the top
and makes it really simple to remove and then access
the food that's inside, and so just with a touch
of a button, I can get into masspaghettios, which is
absolutely brilliant in my mind. Like I said, there's lots
of different variations on this specific design. But the interesting
(41:59):
thing to me is that the elements that were in
president in like William Lyman's can opener in eighteen seventy,
that wheeled blade, or the one of from nineteen thirty
one where you get the geared wheels in Bunker's design,
(42:20):
those are all part of these hands free can openers too.
They're still making use of those those innovations that are now,
you know, in one case well over a century old,
and then the other one we're getting pretty close to it.
I just think that's really cool that it's just again
slight variations on tried and true designs. But that's the
(42:42):
story I found. Napoleon Bonaparte led to the creation of
the can opener sort of, which is kind of similar
to when I say that the reason we have lawnmowers
is because folks in Europe really liked building castles and
going to war with each other. I mean, who knows,
maybe I'm going to find out that some other random
and like I don't know, the adjustable office chair actually
(43:03):
owes its existence to medieval warfare or something. We'll have
to find out about that one. Anyway, I hope you
found this history of the can opener interesting and understand
now why it took almost fifty years from the invention
of the ten can to get to the invention of
the ten can opener, and maybe you have a greater
appreciation for can openers. I know in my household, I
(43:27):
really appreciated the electric can opener because again, it gave
me the ability to access canned foods in a way
that was much easier than the manual can opener method,
which I always struggled with. And I also know there
were other entities in my house that appreciated the can
opener the way I did, and that would be my cats,
(43:48):
because as soon as they heard the electric can opener going,
they would flock to me, so they had I think
the appropriate reverence for can openers something that we should
all reflect on upon occasion, because tend food often gets
a bad rap. But seriously, modern society wouldn't exist the
(44:09):
way it does without it, and arguably without the can opener,
that never would have been as important an invention. So yeah,
I just thought it was an interesting topic to cover
for an episode of tech Stuff. I hope you are
all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(44:36):
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