RISE OF THE INDUSTRY

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 81, 6 April 1938, Page 13

RISE OF THE INDUSTRY

for tin cans. He had them cut out by hand from sheets of metal. A rapid workman of his could produce sixty cans a day.

Appert published a book on his methods of preserving food. Among his experiments was one by which he had attempted to condense milk by evaporation.

Concentrating on canning solid fcod, his imitators forgot this line of inquiry.

Fifty years afterwards, in New York, Gail Borden learned how to produce a tinned concentrate from fresh milk. His discovery was not a purely scientific one, but he was moved to it by pity for young children in sailing ships who were often deprived of their vital food When the cow on board ran dry. This accident had so many fatal results that he set to work to produce condensed milk.

The remarkable religious sect of “the Shakers” financed him. He worked in povferty for many years, and suffered ridicule, but in the end he prevailed.

America had cause to thank Borden when this method of condensing milk was used for supplying the Northern Armies in the Civil War.

During that war a certain Press correspondent named Charles Page was struck by Borden’s idea. When, in 1865, he went to Switzerland as TTnitPd ho it with

him and started a factory at Cham. It was the foundation of the Nestle Company. A man named James D. Dole also took to canning out of necessity, for he went to Hawaii to farm pineapples only to find that he could not export the ripe fruit. He began canning in a small way; within twelve years he was exporting 5,000,000 cases of cans a year.

At the same time a young man named Heinz was experimenting with horse-radish in Pennsylvania. He found them growing behind a deserted house. He added beans and other vegetables, and gradually evolved a great canning conce n. Food preserving began with the necessity of supplying troops in wartime. It became a science for experimenters popularly regarded as cranks.

Then the industry grew and canned foods of one sort and another became ir dispensable. Now its original purpose appears to be on the way to fulfilment, for England and other countries see in canning a method of reducing the danger of one of the less spectacular but very real war dangers, blockade.

According to Miss Janet Bond, head of the Canned Foods Advisory Bureau i i this country, Britain could live on only a moderate reserve of canned food in war-time.

The question of preservation is p»asilv p«cAvorod. f«-*r recently a nrimi-