Potted History
In 1811, during perhaps the greatest period of technological and scientific advance in human history, Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, hailed it as ‘one of the most important discoveries of the age’. It would go on to transform intercontinental transportation, shrinking the world considerably and allowing the discovery of several previously unknown shipping routes. Although it saw of a series of scandals and safety scares, it virtually eliminated scurvy on long sea journeys, and changed the way we think about food. It has fuelled two centuries of military campaigns, underpinned a multi-billion-dollar industry, brought everyday dairy produce to the masses, changed our perceptions of seasonality, and led to the founding of many of the world’s largest food brands. Today, it is available in every food store, often looked down on as cheap, poor quality and low status.
The canning of food, like so many great discoveries, was almost certainly inspired by war. The industry it spawned was definitely shaped by conflict, from the Napoleonic wars through to the two great wars of the twentieth century. Napoleon famously believed that an army marches in its stomach, and it is widely, although probably falsely, claimed that he inspired its creation by offering a prize to any Frenchman who devised a novel way of preserving food for his troops.
Although the competition legend is almost certainly false, it was a 19th Century French scientist, Nicholas Appert, who initially developed the techniques that led to the modern canning industry. Being French, his first attempts to preserve food in sealed, heated vessels, involved old Champagne bottles. Although he had a good deal of success and developed several of the techniques still used today, he never moved away from glass containers, which were heavy, cumbersome and prone to exploding. A tendency for shards of boiling hot glass to fire out in all directions meant that his techniques were never successfully industrialised and failed to help Napoleon’s cause. But under the emperor’s instruction, he published full details of his work in 1810, creating in the groundbreaking ‘L’Art de Conserver, Toutes les Substances Animales et Vegetales’.
Although Appert’s discoveries had little practical impact on the war effort, the next stage of the story was shaped by the same conflict. A few months after ‘L’Art de Conserver’ was published, an Englishman named Peter Durand filed a patent for the preservation of food in tin plated cans, using a heat process strikingly similar to the one Appert had outlined. The Englishman is frequently credited with pioneering the technology, but his often-repeated story is probably not what it seems. It is almost certain that Durand, Christened Pierre Durand and the son of French parents living in London, was acting as an agent for the French inventor Phillipe de Girard, who had been working on tin plate as a solution to the problems created by glass in Appert’s work. As a French national, Girard would have been unable to file a patent in London at the time, but was aware that there was greater potential for the process to be industrialised in England. It seems that he found a friendly, well-connected English national in Durand and paid him to file the patent on his behalf.
Two years later, Durand famously sold the patent to two London businessmen for £1000, a large some at the time, but in retrospect something of a bargain. Appert was said to be furious that it had been sold for so little and was also not doubt also angry that he had been slow to move away from glass vessels into something more practical, so missing out on potential riches. Bitter and driven to failure in other ventures, both Appert and Girard died in poverty in France. Durand went on to live an otherwise uneventful life, after presumably only collecting a small brokers fee for his involvement, although he was falsely acclaimed as the pioneering inventor of the canning industry for many decades after his death. But Brian Donkin and John Hall, the two businessmen who saw such value in the patent, would go on to change the world.
Donkin, a Northumbrian engineer of huge talent and drive, had already transformed the paper industry by developing innovative new drying machinery, and developed a unique process for the manufacture of iron pen nibs. He set about doing the same for food, taking Durand’s patent and developing ways of creating an industrial process from it. Along with Hall, and a third partner John Gamble, they opened the first commercial food canning operation in 1813 at a site in Bermondsey. The site was dedicated to manufacturing tinned produce for the British Admiralty, giving them an endorsement that would create huge demand around the world.
The company clearly understood how powerful endorsements would be in getting people to accept the new technology, rapidly receiving recommendations from the Duke of Wellington, the Queen and the Prince Regent. Canned meats and vegetables soon became staples of British explorers and seafarers, outlasting most other types of preserved food, and most importantly helping to prevent scurvy on long voyages.
Although in some ways the manufacturing methods were crude by today’s standards, with roughly cut tinplate cans hand soldered shut after being boiled in water baths, it was surprisingly effective, a tribute to Donkin’s engineering skill. In 1937, cans left from Sir Edward Perry’s 1824 expedition were opened at the National Maritime Museum and the contents found to be in good condition.
This is perhaps because, as well as pioneering the industrialisation of the process, Donkin, Hall and Gamble also understood that reputation was everything, especially as the lives of their seafaring customers were often in their hands. Their company is thought to have pioneered many food safety techniques, including batch traceability and positive release, incubating and testing samples before the rest of the production run was allowed out to customers.
It must have deeply hurt Appert and Girard to see how successful the London canning industry became, and it is certainly true that it would never have been possible without their work. But as with many such inventions, a lot of the progress came down to the industrialists who commercialised it, making it safe, consistent, practical and reliable. It was just as vital that Donkin, Hall and Gamble understood the power of reputation, brand and endorsement, especially for a product which must have seemed at the time to be witchcraft, allowing meats and vegetables to be safely eaten years after being stored.
In 1810, after his seminal book was published, the French press proudly announced that Appert had ‘found a way to fix the seasons’. But it was not until the relatively unheralded British industrial pioneers put in the hard yards, that the discovery changed the world. Donkin, a truly great engineer and innovator, left the canning industry after just a few years, going on to support on several significant projects, including working with Sir Marc Brunnel to create the first tunnel under the River Thames, helping to build the Caledonian canal, and even working with Charles Babbage on his difference engine, widely considered to be the first computer.
As the canning industry developed in Donkin’s absence, things very nearly fell apart. Despite the industry’s pioneers working hard to develop a reputation for safety and quality, problems developed as other, less scrupulous players muscled in. Most famously, Stephan Goldner, a businessman who had won several admiralty contracts by undercutting rivals, was found to be putting lives at risk in the most horrific way. He favoured the production of larger cans to save money, which were often not adequately heat processed. He also based his factory in Romania to utilise cheap produce and labour, but seemingly sacrificed quality at the same time. An admiralty inspection of his produce at London docks in 1852 found that out of 306 cans inspected, 264 were unfit for human consumption. As well as being putrid, several being sold as meat contained whole diseased organs, tendons and parts of dogs or cats. As the cans were opened, the smell was said to be so bad that inspectors had to frequently leave the room for air and had to be washed with lime at the end of the day to remove the stench.
For many voyages dependent upon Goldner’s produce, the implications were far more serious. The inspected cans were set to be loaded onto boats for expeditions, where sailors’ lives would depend on them being edible. With no external signs that there was anything wrong, many suspect cans had already left the docks, and reports started to come in from around the world of tins being opened to find putrid animal parts, diseased kidneys, bones, skin, rats, mice and tonnes of rotten meat. Perhaps most damningly, Goldner was discovered to have provided produce for Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated ‘Terror’ expedition to discover the North-West passage in 1847, a voyage that resulted in the death of all 129 crew. Although it was never firmly established that Goldner’s produce was to blame for their deaths, the poor publicity from the incident nearly killed off the canning industry, just when it was on the cusp of moving from a military and seafaring essential, to a domestic one.
Swift action and a change in the way food manufacturing was inspected saved the industry. John Gamble, the early partner of Donkin and Hall, expanded the business, moving it to Ireland and developing export channels. But whilst his dream of bringing canned food to everyday homes faltered at home, across the Atlantic, industrial canning grew at incredible pace in the late nineteenth century. Post 1850, almost all the significant and lasting innovations that shaped the industry happened stateside. Automated sealing removed the need for skilled metalworkers. Lacquers and coatings were developed to stop foods reacting with the tin plate. The can opener, developed a full forty years after the first cans, allowed domestic cooks easy access to produce. The revolutionary double seam, a masterpiece of engineering simplicity that probably deserves its own blogpost, created safer, simpler, cheaper cans. Standardisation of heat processing techniques, formalised by Karl Mayer in the 1920s and discussed in a previous post, removed the scourge of botulism before it derailed the growing industry. And the development of a safe process for the production of tinned condensed milk created huge demand, establishing several enduring food brands and bringing cans into the majority of US homes.
Canned foods became everyday essentials in the US, but it wasn’t until after the 1914-18 war that the European industry began to flourish. Demand for tinned produce from US soldiers led to modern canning factories becoming established throughout Europe, largely copying US innovations and processes. Competing demand for steel during the Second World led to the development of the aluminium cans that dominate the industry today, and pioneering work on openings led to the successful canning of drinks in the 1950s.
Speak to technologists who work on long life foods, and most will tell you that canning is still the best way to package and process food. Although produce in jars and plastic pouches are almost universally seen as more desirable by consumers, cans are an enduring innovation for good reason, allowing quick heat transfer, consistent sealing and an almost perfect barrier. It would be of huge benefit to the safety, quality and sustainability of our food system if the snobbery surrounding canned produce could be stripped away.
Innovation is incredibly difficult. It takes creativity and hard work in exactly the right combination, famously requiring about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Breakthroughs such as canning are incredibly rare, but given the significant shifts required in the way we eat over the next few years, we need several such changes to happen very soon. If we want a sustainable food system that prevents global hunger, we require creatives like Appert and Girard, working alongside modern day Donkins, Halls and Gambles. We need to recognise moments of genius and find ways of converting them into mass produced products people want to buy. And whilst we do this, we need to understand the need for safety, consistency, and reputation to help the adoption of new technologies. If we want to build a better food future, we need to learn from the great innovations of the past.
