It was a long time to wait and you'd have been very hungry if you had a few cans of food and lacked the inventiveness to open the things. They would've been well past their use by date.In 1795 Napoleon offered a cash prize of 12,000 francs for a new way of keeping and preserving food for the French military.
Nicolas Appert was onto it with his method of placing food in glass jars and heating them.
The process was underway with inventor Peter Durand producing the first cans made of iron and tin in 1810.
The canning method was successful and having stocks of canned food became a status symbol in Europe's middle class homes.
But there was a problem. Opening the cans required brute strength or ingenuity or both.
Fortunately for the hungry masses, Ezra Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut, came along in 1858 with the first basic can opener.
Then in 1878 William Lyman invented the can opener variety that most of us use today.
Bill, what would we've done without you...
When he's not busy inventing ways to destroy the planet man can be very resourceful.
ReplyDeleteThose awful to use old ones still are a thing of beauty and ingenuity!
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