Peter Durand Produced Canned Food In 1810 And Forty Eight Years Later Ezra Warner Invented The Can Opener...

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... 

England's Old London Bridge Is Now In America's Arizona...

The old nursery rhyme about London Bridge falling down was correct as Mr Sharkey reminded me yesterday.
The first London Bridge was made by the Romans in 43AD. That and subsequent bridges were destroyed by invaders and fire.
The 1831 London Bridge featured bridge lamps fashioned from melted down cannons that belonged to Napoleon's Army.
After the Second World War, bridge traffic increased to the point that the bridge did start crumbling with bits falling into the Thames.
England's government was in dire financial straits so it put the bridge up for sale. It needed someone willing to buy the crumbling heirloom and remove it for them.
Luckily, Robert McCulloch, founder of Lake Havasu City in Arizona and chairman of McCulloch Oil Corp offered $2,460,000 which was enough to do a deal.
The bridge was dismantled and each stone numbered. Everything was shipped the ten thousand miles to Long Beach California and then trucked to Lake Havasu City.
Reconstruction began in 1968 and the new bridge opened on October 10, 1971.
This London Bridge crosses a narrow boating channel that connects with Thompson Bay on the Arizona side of Lake Havasu.
See, some nursery rhymes are true...