We fell down a rabbit hole this week after noticing how satisfying it is to crank open a can of tomatoes. Turns out the humble can opener took almost 50 years longer to invent than the can itself. Nobody seems embarrassed about this, which we find delightful.
Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner, figured out food preservation in sealed glass jars around 1810, which won him a prize from Napoleon who was tired of his armies starving on long campaigns. An Englishman named Peter Durand took the idea, swapped glass for tin-plated iron, and patented the tin can the same year. By 1813 the British Royal Navy was stocking cans of beef and vegetables on ships. These early cans were thick, heavy, hand-soldered things. Some weighed more than a pound empty. The labels literally instructed sailors to open them "with a chisel and hammer, cutting round the top near the outer edge." That was the official method. For nearly five decades.
So what did people actually do? They improvised. Soldiers used bayonets. Sailors used knives, rocks, whatever was handy. There are accounts of Arctic explorers in the 1820s shooting cans open with rifles when the metal was frozen too hard to pry. One early can of veal from an 1824 expedition sat unopened in a museum until 1938, when someone finally cracked it and reportedly found the meat still edible. Which says more about Victorian preservation than we're comfortable with.
The reason the opener took so long is pretty simple. Early cans were too thick for any lever-based tool to work on. It wasn't until the 1850s that manufacturing improved enough to make cans with thinner walls. Once the metal got thinner, the opener became possible. Ezra Warner patented the first real can opener in the US in 1858. It looked like a bent bayonet with a guard, and you basically sawed your way around the lid. The friendly rotating-wheel opener we all know didn't arrive until 1870, courtesy of William Lyman, and the smooth-edge version most of us own now is a 1980s invention.
There's a tempting moral here about shipping a product without thinking through how customers will use it. We're not going to make it. The fun part is just imagining a British sailor in 1815, holding a can of mystery stew and a chisel, wondering what he did to deserve this. Fifty years of humanity opening cans with weapons and improvisation before someone said, hey, maybe a dedicated tool. We love this story because it's a reminder that the obvious solution is sometimes obvious only in hindsight, and sometimes it takes half a century for "obvious" to show up.
If you've got a favorite bit of "wait, that took HOW long to invent" trivia, send it over and we'll chase it down for a future Friday.
— Alexander & Amanda @ SBATC
