1795 The Can’s History Begins
The can’s distinguished history began in 1795 when the French government, led by Napoleon, offered a prize of 12,000 francs to anyone who could invent a method of preserving food for its army and navy.
Napoleon’s troops were being decimated more by hunger and scurvy than by combat. As his soldiers resorted to foraging for food on their own, Napoleon famously noted that an army “travels on its stomach.” Military prowess and colonial expansion required that a way of keeping food unspoiled over distance and time be discovered.
1809 Invention
Nicolas Appert, “father of canning,” received the 12,000 franc prize from the French government for preserving food by sterilization.
A Parisian named Nicholas Appert came up with the idea. A jack of all trades, Appert used his experience as a former candy maker, vintner, chef, brewer and pickle maker to perfect his technique. After experimenting for 15 years, Appert successfully preserved food by partially cooking it, sealing it in bottles with cork stoppers and immersing the bottles in boiling water. His theory of canning was all his own—Pasteur’s discoveries regarding bacteria were still almost a half-century away. But Appert assumed that, as with wine, exposure to air spoiled food. So food in an airtight container, with the air expelled through the boiling process, would stay fresh. It worked.
Samples of Appert’s preserved food were sent to sea with Napoleon’s troops for a little over four months. Partridges, vegetables, and gravy were among 18 different items sealed in glass containers. All retained their freshness. “Not a single substance had undergone the least change at sea,” Appert wrote of the trial. He was awarded the prize in 1810 by the Emperor himself. Like all good national heroes, Appert soon wrote a book called The Book of All Households: or Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years. It described in detail the process for canning more than 50 foods and was widely relied upon.
Nicolas Appert devised the method of heating food in sealed glass jars and bottles placed in boiling water. This was effectively sterilisation, decades before Louis Pasteur showed the world how heat killed bacteria.
Despite the impracticalities – glass was heavy, fragile and liable to explode under internal pressure – Appert has gone down in history as the “father of canning”, despite not being the first to use tin plate.
He was awarded 12,000F by the French Ministry of the Interior – thought to be at the personal behest of Napoleon Bonaparte – on condition that he made his discovery public and in 1810 he duly published his findings in The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances.
The French public and press were loud in their praises – “Appert has found a way to fix the seasons” said one paper. The French Navy used his method, but it was in England that Appert’s idea was fully exploited and improved.
First English language edition of the first book on canning as a food preservation technique.
August 25, 1810 First Patent Received
Peter Durand, a British merchant, received the first patent for the idea of preserving food using tin cans.
Peter Durand was granted a patent from King George III for the idea of preserving food in “vessels of glass, pottery, tin or other metals or fit materials.”
Durand intended to surpass Appert and fashion containers out of tinplate. Made of iron coated with tin to prevent rusting and corrosion, tinplate could be sealed and made airtight but was not breakable like glass. A cylindrical canister and soldered lid would be much easier to handle than a fragile bottle with an unreliable cork.
Tin was already used as a non-corrosive coating on steel and iron, especially for household utensils, but Durand’s patent is the first documented evidence of food being heated and sterilised within a sealed tin container.
His method was to place the food in the container, seal it, place in cold water and gradually bring to the boil, open the lid slightly and then seal it again.
In some quarters, he is hailed as the “inventor” of the tin can, but a closer look at the patent, held at the National Archives in London, reveals that it was “an invention communicated to him by a certain foreigner residing abroad”.
Extensive research by Norman Cowell, a retired lecturer at the department of food science and technology at Reading University, reveals that another Frenchman hitherto uncredited by history, an inventor called Philippe de Girard, came to London and used Durand as an agent to patent his own idea.
The smoking gun that unmasks Durand can be found in the almost illegible handwritten diary of Sir Charles Blagden, a fellow of the Royal Society.
Within these pages, in a big red book entitled CB/3/6 in the society’s library, it is revealed that Girard had been making regular visits to the Royal Society to test his canned foods on its members.
And on 28 January 1811, Blagden explicitly says it is Durand’s patent in name only.
Girard was forced to come to London because of French red tape, says Cowell, and he couldn’t have taken out the patent in England at a time when the two countries were at war.
“The philosophy in England was entrepreneurial, there was venture capital. People were prepared to take a risk and go bankrupt. In France if someone had a good idea they took it to the Academie Francaise and if they thought it was a good idea they might get a ‘pourboire’ [tip].”
Bryan Donkin
Durand sold the patent to engineer Bryan Donkin for £1,000 and he disappears from the story, having pocketed a fee and secured an elevated place in history.
It took Donkin two years to refine the method set out by Girard for use on a commercial scale.
The venture was partly funded by Sir John, who played little active part in the business. The other partner John Gamble led the experiments and the running of the factory when the cans rolled off the floor that summer of 1813.
The first high-profile plaudit had come from the Duke of Wellington, then Lord Wellesley, who wrote in April to say how tasty he had found Donkin’s canned beef, and recommended it for both the Navy and Army.
Nine days after Wellington decisively beat the French at Vitoria in Spain, Donkin and Gamble presented their beef to the Duke of Kent at Kensington Palace on 30 June.
The duke requested more cans to try out on his family and the following day, Donkin collected the glowing letter from the Counting House in Lombard Street. The duke’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, 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.”
Anything but fulsome praise from the royals might have spelt the end for Donkin’s experiments. He had plenty of other projects on the go, according to his diaries, like a new counting instrument, a mill in Greenwich and a new shoemaking machine devised by Sir Marc Brunel.
His early cans ranged from four to 20lb in weight. The oldest survivor can be found in the Science Museum in London, measuring 14cm (5.5ins) high and 18cm (7ins) wide, and weighing a hefty seven pounds when filled with veal and taken by Sir William Parry to explore the Northwest Passage.
In 1813, the Admiralty bought 156lb of Donkin’s food, feeding it to sick sailors, because it was mistakenly thought that scurvy was due to over-reliance on salted meat.
The praise from seamen for this unexpected addition to their daily menu was warm and glowing, from every corner of the globe.
William Warner, surgeon of the ship Ville de Paris, wrote in 1814 that canned food “forms a most excellent restorative to convalescents, and would often, on long voyages, save the lives of many men who run into consumption [tuberculosis] at sea for want of nourishment after acute diseases; my opinion, therefore, is that its adoption generally at sea would be a most desirable and laudable act”.
In Chile, there is a cove named Caleta Donkin, so called because the crew led by Capt Fitzroy were so delighted with their canned food.
Donkin and Gamble even had a system of quality assurance – each can spent one month of incubation at 90-110C heat before going out.
And each was numbered to help track its origins. “This is the sort of thing that food factories today strive for,” says Cowell.
Donkin roast veal can
Perhaps the most gratifying seal of approval came from Sir Joseph Banks, on behalf of the Royal Society, who opened a can of veal two-and-a-half years old and declared it to be in “a perfect state of preservation”.
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 order was for 2,939lb and in 1821 it was 9,000lb. Then other players came on to the market, clearly infringing the 14-year patent.
But Donkin’s company was making money – prices ranged from 8d/lb for carrots to 30d for roast beef.
He expanded his client base by wooing polar explorers like Parry. For them, canned food was hugely beneficial because the perils of getting stuck in the ice all winter meant they had to haul two or three years of food on voyages.
Parry also brought with him preserved cocoa from Fortnum & Mason, purchased using his own personal account, as a treat for his officers and crew. The upmarket London retailer was quick off the mark to start a canning business on its Piccadilly premises, offering wealthy Britons – the Empire builders – a “taste of home”.
Donkin’s interest in canning ended in 1821 when he dissolved his partnership with Hall and Gamble. It isn’t clear why, but the impression from his diaries is that canning was more of an engineering challenge than a passion.
Some of his personal letters reveal a man finding the commercial climate to be tough, as a debt-ridden nation adjusted to peace after years of fighting.
To his brother in 1817, he says: “What do you think will be the end of these portentous times? From the information I obtained during my recent peregrinations; universal distress seems to pervade the whole community of this country and the manufacturing part in particular.”
These anxieties did not blunt his enthusiasm. Donkin continued his papermaking machine business and later assisted Sir Marc Brunel in tunnelling under the River Thames. He became a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Noting he had been a magistrate in Surrey in his later years, his obituary from the Royal Society said: “His life was one uninterrupted course of usefulness and good purpose.”
After his death in 1855, he was buried in a family plot in Nunhead Cemetery, south London. It’s an indication of how much history has overlooked his achievements that on a recent visit, cemetery staff were unaware who he was.
His resting place is overshadowed by the imposing sarcophagus next to him for the shipbuilder John Allan. And even on his own grave, his name appears rather as a footnote, below three other relatives named Bryan Donkin and their spouses. There is no mention of his achievements.
Donkin was a fascinating man and a brilliant engineer who has been recognised in his sphere, says John Nutting, editorial director of The Can Maker magazine. But he’s been forgotten by the wider world.
“That period from 1790 to 1880 was a blitz of all sorts of technical achievements and he wasn’t in the forefront of what you would see from day to day. He wasn’t a guy like Brunel who was involved in ships and trains and all those big infrastructure projects.”
Donkin’s engineering company remained in Bermondsey until 1902, when it moved to Chesterfield. His successor at the helm of the world’s first tin canning business, John Gamble, moved the factory to Cork in Ireland in 1830, where there was a larger supply of cattle and the shipping route to the US offered an endless supply of custom.
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.
But then came a food scandal that threatened to strike the fledgling industry with a fatal blow.
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 Navy.
It was not until they opened the 19th can that they found one fit for human consumption.
Instead of perfectly preserved beef, they found putrid meat so rotten that the stone floors needed to be coated with chloride of lime to mask the stench, according to an account in the Illustrated London News.
Sometimes the smell was so overpowering the inspectors had to stop and leave the room for fresh air before resuming their grim task.
They fished out pieces of heart, 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.
They condemned 264 cans that day, throwing them into the sea. The remaining 42 cans were given to the poor.
This scene was repeated across the country, as part of a nationwide inspection ordered by the Admiralty. They found meat at Navy depots to be “garbage and putridity in a horrible state”.
A letter to the Times in 1853 revealed that officers of The Plover threw 1,570lb of canned meat overboard in the Bering Straits because “we found it in a pulpy, decayed and putrid state, and totally unfit for men’s food”.
The supplier in question was Stephan Goldner, who had won the Admiralty contract in 1845 by undercutting all rivals, thanks to cheap labour working at his meat factory in what is now Romania.
That contract grew significantly in 1847 when the Admiralty introduced preserved meat as a general ration one day a week. The following year 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, with a warning that his meat needed to be genuine. In order to meet the demand, he asked if he could increase the size of the cans, but he didn’t cook the meat sufficiently.
There are varying reports on how much of Goldner’s meat was thrown away – one said more than 600,000lb to the value of £6,691
A government select committee was appointed to investigate and questions were asked in the Commons.
There was a danger that this bad publicity might put people off canned food for good, a threat that still lingered 10 years later.
Writing in Victorian London in 1865, the doctor and writer Andrew Wynter said: “It does seem suicidal folly on the part of the public to conceive a prejudice against a discovery which is of great public importance in a hygienic point of view, and which has been attested and proved.”
Goldner was banned from ever supplying the Navy again. It was also revealed that he had supplied the meat to Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition that perished in the Arctic in mysterious circumstances in 1847.
Lady Franklin launched five ships in search of her husband, leaving Fortnum cans on the ice in the desperate hope that he would find them. In total more than 50 expeditions joined the search.
Bodies eventually recovered were found to have a high lead content and to this day, many people believe the 129 crew members were poisoned by leaking lead in their poorly soldered tin cans.
More recent research suggests the canned food supplied to Franklin was not acidic enough for that to happen and the lead was more likely to have come from the internal pipe system on the ships.
The whole Goldner episode was a PR disaster for canned food
1812 — 1825 Search For New Territory
Sir William Edward Parry made two arctic expeditions to the Northwest Passage in the 1820’s and took canned provisions on his journeys.
Sir William Edward Parry, by Samuel Drummond
THE GREAT INTERNATIONAL SEARCH FOR NEW TERRITORY further propelled the use and notoriety of the can. Likewise, the advantages of well preserved canned food enabled bolder expeditions. Explorers in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, such as Otto von Kotzebue of Russia, were quick to benefit. He wrote of a “discovery made lately in England” which he thought “too important not to be made use of,” and took some canned meats with him on his voyage in 1815.
Sir William Edward Parry made two arctic expeditions to the Northwest Passage in the 1820’s and took canned provisions on his journeys. One four-pound tin of roasted veal, carried on both trips but never opened, was kept as an artifact of the expedition in a museum until it was opened in 1938. The contents, then over one hundred years old, were chemically analyzed and found to have kept most of their nutrients and to be in fairly perfect condition. The veal was fed to a cat, who had no complaints whatsoever.
As cans traveled over land and sea, can making spread as well. In Germany, where tinplate had been invented hundreds of years earlier, tin cans were made by hand by plumbers—artisans who, in those days, worked primarily with lead, zinc, tin and other metals.
The father of the can manufacturing industry in the United States was an Englishman who immigrated to the new country and brought his newfound canning experience with him. Thomas Kensett set up a small canning plant on the New York waterfront in 1812 and began producing America’s first hermetically sealed salmon, lobsters, oysters, meats, fruits and vegetables. Kensett began his operation using glass jars but, finding glass expensive, difficult to pack and easily broken, soon switched to tin. He and his father-in-law, Ezra Daggett, were awarded the U. S. patent for preserving food in “vessels of tin” by President James Monroe in 1825.
A competitor, Charles Underwood, set up shop in Boston and preserved fruits, pickles, and condiments in crocks. Underwood was also an Englishman and had landed in New Orleans originally, but found no one there interested in his canning idea. After making his way to Boston on foot, he started his business which shipped its products primarily to South America and the Far East. He too eventually switched to tin.
http://www.cancentral.com/can-stats/history-of-the-can
1812 “Book for All Households” is Published
