WHERE THE TIN CANS CAME FROM

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32903, 29 April 1972, Page 11

WHERE THE TIN CANS CAME FROM

(By

DAVID GUNSTON)

Let’s open a tin, we say—and the pattern of eating thus has been part of everyday life for generations. Millions of people open millions of tins every day almost everywhere.

But how did it all begin? Who inspired the idea of canning food? Who filled the first container successfully? And how well did it keep? Appropriately enough the inspirer of the canning revolution was the leading, figure in another kind of revolution and the man who declared "An army marches on its stomach”—Napoleon. Realising that much of the disease and weakness among his soldiers and sailors was due to lack of fresh food when on active service, he persuaded the French Government to offer a prize to whoever could invent a way of preserving meat and vege-

tables fresh in storage for many months. Vastly superior The winner was another Frenchman, a Paris confectioner named Nicolas Appert, and in 1810 he devised a method of preserving food that was vastly superior to the old practices of drying, salting or pickling. More or less by chance, he found the way to “seal the seasons” was to put the fresh food in wide-mouthed glass jars, sealing them air-tight with layers of cork and wax and then—most originally—to stand the jars in boiling water.

It was rather like fruitbottling today, but neither Appert nor his many imitators knew why the food preserved in this manner kept very well, which it did. They all believed it was due to the exclusion of the air, but in fact the bacteria of decay were killed by the heat treatment; whereas in all the previous methods, although the air had been excluded,

the bacteria were sealed inside the containers to start their deadly work of putrefaction.

Real reason In those days men knew little or nothing about bacteria. Oddly enough, it was a third Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, who was to discover the real reason for Appert’s success, half a century later. Millions of jars of preserved food were prepared by the Appert process for Napoleon’s men, and the inventor himself was officially honoured as a “Benefactor of Humanity,” which indeed he was.

But the first real commercial success in preserving food came some years afterwards in England, where metal cans were used instead of glass bottles. Hie man who had the foresight to see that the future lay in metal not glass containers was Bryan Donkin, a Northumbrian, who had already bought the patent rights of the new process.

Setting up with two partners he opened the world’s first commercial cannery in Bermondsey, London, and by the year 1820 saw his methods in use in Boston and New York. Donkin perfected a way of using tin-plate, almost exactly as all tins are today.

He canned a wide variety of foodstuffs, calling his containers “canisters” (a word derived from the Greek, “kanastron,” a basket made of reeds), Which in time became shortened to “can” and which led to “canning” and “cannery.” Donkin had far more financial success from his work than did Appert: he sold large quantities of his canisters to the British Navy. His business grew rapidly, and soon the fame of tinned food spread round the world. High cost The only snag was the high cost, due to the lengthv and laborious methods of making the cans. All the tins were cut out by hand, then

hand-soldered, and even a good craftsman could turn out only about 10 a day. When he offered British housewives their first canned food in 1830, it was very expensive and quite out of the reach of most households. A quart of canned peas cost three shillings—then roughly the average weekly rent of a fair-sized house. Nor did the household cook’s worries end there. Doubtless with naval needs across the far-flung Empire in mind, Donkin’s tins were built to last—large, heavy, drum-shaped containers, often holding several pounds of food, and carried about by means of a ring set in the lid. So domestic users of his products had to equip themselves with a hammer and chisel? The modem tin-opener only came later, when the tin-plate used became thinner. and the individual tins smaller. Parry’s expedition

A striking testimony to the excellence of this early can-

ning was given when some tins of soup supplied to Parry’s Arctic expedition of 1824 were opened in 1937 and found to be perfectly wholesome. Even more remarkable evidence came to light in 1958 when a 71b tin of roast veal supplied by Donkin's firm to the same expedition but sealed in 1823 and known to be the world’s oldest unopened tin, was opened by scientists of the British Food Manufacturing Industries Research Association under controlled conditions. Although 135 years old, the veal was still nutritious, although it tasted rather bitter and contained more traces of harmful metal (iron. tin. lead) than would be allowed today. But it was not putrid. Similarly, some tinned roast mutton dating from 1849 and a Christmas pudcanned in 1900 for troops serving in the Boer \ ~ although dry, were both still edible, though it was discovered that these early canners probably overcooked their food to be on the safe side.