In 1810 a Parisian confectioner named Nicolas Appert collected a prize of 12,000 francs from Napoleon's government for solving one of warfare's oldest problems: how to feed an army without poisoning it. French forces were fighting across Europe on rations of salted meat and hard biscuit, and scurvy and spoilage killed more reliably than muskets. The government had offered the reward to anyone who could preserve food for troops on the march, and Appert — after some fourteen years of patient experiment in his workshop — had the answer. The government's condition for awarding the money was that he publish the method rather than patent it, which he duly did that same year in a book on the art of preserving animal and vegetable substances.
Appert's technique was elegantly simple: pack food into glass bottles and jars, seal them with cork and wax, and boil the sealed containers for hours. Partridges, vegetables, milk, even whole sheep's parts emerged months later still edible — sometimes, tasters reported, quite pleasant. What nobody could explain was why it worked. Appert suspected air was the enemy; the true mechanism, the killing of microorganisms by heat, would not be understood until Louis Pasteur's work half a century later. Appert was preserving food against creatures no one knew existed, which makes his achievement one of the great feats of practical science outrunning theory.
Glass, however, travels badly in a baggage train. The decisive packaging swap happened across the Channel, where in 1810 a British merchant named Peter Durand patented the idea of using containers of tinplate — iron sheet coated with tin against rust. Durand was not the inventor so much as the agent: the concept is generally credited to a French engineer, Philippe de Girard, who used Durand to register it in London. Durand sold the patent for a thousand pounds to Bryan Donkin and John Hall, engineers who by 1813 had a canning factory running in Bermondsey and were supplying preserved meats to the Royal Navy. Testimonials flowed in from ships' captains and, after samples reached the royal household, from grander tables still. Tinned food accompanied Arctic expeditions searching for the Northwest Passage, feeding explorers through winters that would once have meant starvation.
Hammer and chisel
There was just one omission, so glorious it has become a fable about invention: nobody had invented a way to open the things. Early cans were made from heavy wrought iron plate, hand-soldered, with walls so thick that some weighed more empty than full. The instruction printed on Donkin-era tins was disarmingly frank: cut round the top near the outer edge with a chisel and hammer. Soldiers and explorers improvised with bayonets, knives and rocks. The gap endured for roughly half a century, until thinner steel cans made lighter tools plausible: Robert Yeates, a London cutler, produced a claw-lever opener in 1855, and the American Ezra Warner patented his own design in 1858, just in time for the tool to ride along with the armies of the American Civil War. The reassuring rotating-wheel opener familiar today arrived later still, with William Lyman's 1870 patent and its descendants; sardine tins with their own soldered-on keys, and ring pulls generations after that, completed the long apology to the consumer.
Canning had its disasters, and one became legend. The Franklin expedition, which vanished seeking the Northwest Passage in the 1840s, carried thousands of tins from a supplier who had won the contract cheaply, and lead from the solder was long blamed for poisoning the crews. Modern analyses have complicated that neat story — the expedition's water system and other sources are now considered likelier culprits, and scurvy, cold and starvation did the rest — but the tale fixed in the public mind the horror of a bad tin. The industry's answer, over decades, was the sanitary can, machine-made and solder-free.
Appert, for his part, spent his prize money expanding his works, was ruined more than once as wars rolled over France, and died in poverty in 1841, a benefactor of every larder in Europe and barely remembered in his lifetime. The process he invented still bears his name in French — appertisation — and his wider legacy is hard to overstate: the can decoupled eating from harvest and geography, fed cities, armies and expeditions, and quietly rearranged the world's diet. Not bad for a technology that spent its first fifty years waiting for its opener.
Quiz nuggets
- Nicolas Appert won a 12,000-franc prize from Napoleon's government in 1810 for preserving food by sealing and boiling it.
- Appert used glass jars; the 1810 tinplate can patent was registered in London by Peter Durand, crediting work of Philippe de Girard.
- Bryan Donkin and John Hall's Bermondsey factory was canning food for the Royal Navy by 1813.
- Early tins carried the instruction to open them with a chisel and hammer; Robert Yeates's opener came in 1855, Ezra Warner's in 1858.
- Pasteur's germ science, explaining why canning worked, came about fifty years after Appert's method.