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Speaker 1: your attention to this matter, Jacob.
Speaker 2: Today's show has everything. It's got drama, it's got war,
Speaker 2: military exploits, wild inventions, corporate intrigue. It has both monopoly
Speaker 2: and trust busting, yes, both sides. And it has a
Speaker 2: polar expedition trapped in ice. And it is all this
Speaker 2: entire story packed into this little guy right here. A can,
Speaker 2: A tin can. The tin can is so ubiquitous, so simple,
Speaker 2: you never think about it, and yet I have thought
Speaker 2: a lot about it. It is the complete and total
Speaker 2: perfection of a technology. It is cheap, it is small,
Speaker 2: you can recycle it. It does its job food. Whatever's
Speaker 2: in this one I took the label off lasts for years.
Speaker 1: But beyond that.
Speaker 2: Railroads are interesting, sure, Chips and computers, yeah, somewhat transformative.
Speaker 2: But the can is time travel, endless, summer packed in tin.
Speaker 2: I'm Robert Smith, I'm.
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein, and this is Business History, a show about
Speaker 1: the history of business today.
Speaker 2: On the show, not one, not two, but three stories
Speaker 2: about cans. The can spans two hundred years, and I
Speaker 2: brought along the perfect can for each act.
Speaker 1: Act one.
Speaker 2: Our first can Napoleon brand baby corn. It represents the
Speaker 2: birth of canning technology in France. Our second can Heinz
Speaker 2: baked beans, development of the tin in the UK. And
Speaker 2: this the humble can of beer represents American corporate takeover
Speaker 2: of the entire industry. Oh it's fine, it's fine, my
Speaker 2: dad drinking. Sure, let's metaphorically open can number one. Napoleon,
Speaker 2: baby corn, and the military culinary complex. So back in
Speaker 2: the seventeen nineties, Napoleon Bonaparte had a problem invading Russia.
Speaker 2: Not yet, not yet, it's before that. His problem was
Speaker 2: a way for him to build up the strength to
Speaker 2: invade Russia. His problem was putrid, disgusting food for his troops,
Speaker 2: rotting food. So this is after the French Revolution, royals beheaded,
Speaker 2: no more kings. France is being run by something called
Speaker 2: the Directory.
Speaker 1: I would think it would be the direct Diurete, but
Speaker 1: apparently it's not.
Speaker 2: The Directory, the Directoire, right, And Napoleon's not yet in charge,
Speaker 2: but you know, he's pretty close. He's running the military.
Speaker 2: He's waging these military care campaigns for France in places
Speaker 2: like Italy and Egypt. And you know, especially if you're
Speaker 2: going to Egypt, right, Like, food is a huge problem.
Speaker 2: In order to feed your troops, you have to go
Speaker 2: to these really extreme measures. Now, people have done this
Speaker 2: for hundreds of years, right, thousands of years. You could
Speaker 2: dry meat, you could smoke meat, you could salt meat.
Speaker 2: You know, it's tough, it doesn't taste very good, but
Speaker 2: it lasts for a while. For vegetables, you could pickle
Speaker 2: them in vinegar. This was a common thing. Again, it
Speaker 2: doesn't taste great, right once in a while. But if
Speaker 2: you think six months on beef, jerky and pickles, I
Speaker 2: think it's bad.
Speaker 1: You're not going to be a fighting shape.
Speaker 2: Bad for the digestion. And that's what Napoleon realized was
Speaker 2: that this wasn't just a logistical problem. This was a
Speaker 2: morale problem. And especially if they're French, they're very demanding
Speaker 2: about this thing.
Speaker 1: Right. Oh, they had this thing called hard tech heart tach.
Speaker 2: It's a cracker, thick flower and water cracker that's like
Speaker 2: been baked four times. There is no moisture whatsoever in it.
Speaker 2: It breaks your teeth. They call it a molar breaker.
Speaker 2: So Napoleon says, okay, we need to have some sort
Speaker 2: of food so I can go on these long campaigns,
Speaker 2: you know, the Russian winter and all. And in seventeen
Speaker 2: ninety five, the French government, urged on by Napoleon, decides
Speaker 2: to do something. The government offers a prize twelve thousand
Speaker 2: francs small fortune at the time for anyone who could
Speaker 2: come up with a way to preserve large quantities of food.
Speaker 1: I love prizes as incentives for technological breakthroughs, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting kind of big economic idea. Right, How
Speaker 1: do you if you're a government and you want some
Speaker 1: technological breakthrough to emerge in the world, how do you
Speaker 1: incentivize that Napoleon is not inventing this idea? Right? Decades earlier,
Speaker 1: the British had famously done something similar for a transportation
Speaker 1: problem of their own. They needed a way for ships
Speaker 1: to figure out longitude. Right could figure out latitude by
Speaker 1: the stars, but longitude was hard, and the British, I
Speaker 1: guess early in the seventeen hundreds, issued a prize for
Speaker 1: that and it worked. Somebody invented a clock that works
Speaker 1: on a ship and that is enough to tell you
Speaker 1: longitude and this still goes on. Interestingly, this is not
Speaker 1: some antiquated thing. The one that came to my mind
Speaker 1: was the DARPA Grand Challenge in the US funded by
Speaker 1: the US military basically the US government in the early
Speaker 1: twenty first century, which was for self driving cars, and
Speaker 1: it really gave birth to the modern self driving car
Speaker 1: industry that is sort of flourishing today.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So this is what Napoleon does with cans,
Speaker 2: which are sort of the autonomous vehicles of their day,
Speaker 2: really sort of right, And the prizes run through something
Speaker 2: called the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry does
Speaker 2: exactly what it says, right, and the nation's scientists start.
Speaker 1: Working on it.
Speaker 2: But to your point, you could not have predicted who
Speaker 2: won this prize because it did not go to a
Speaker 2: scientist or a biologist, someone who worked with the government.
Speaker 2: It comes from this unlikely hero. His name is Nicholas Francois,
Speaker 2: a Pierre, not a biologist, not a chemist.
Speaker 1: He's a chef, perfect par fai.
Speaker 2: Technically a candy maker, right. He candies fruits and jams.
Speaker 2: He's sort of famous in Paris, and by all accounts
Speaker 2: a very jovial guy. Right. He's a candy maker, He's
Speaker 2: the candy man. He's bald, he has these mischievous devil eyebrows.
Speaker 2: No training, but he spent his life in hospitality. He
Speaker 2: bottled wine for the revolutionaries during the fighting. So in
Speaker 2: seventeen ninety five a pair hears about this prize and
Speaker 2: in the back of his shop at night, he starts experimenting. Now,
Speaker 2: at this point, there is no scientific theory for why
Speaker 2: things spoil. You know, maybe the humors are bad, or
Speaker 2: demons get into the butter.
Speaker 1: They know bacteria exists, but they don't know germs cause disease.
Speaker 1: They don't know what's going on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Louis Pastor hadn't even been born yet, right, he's
Speaker 2: going to come in fifty sixty years later. So in
Speaker 2: his candy shop appairs basically doing trial and error to
Speaker 2: preserve food. He starts with different containers. He starts with
Speaker 2: champagne bottles, which apparently is the most popular thing. A
Speaker 2: rans they're just lying around, but he's.
Speaker 1: Like, and I guess he's thinking, like wine gets preserved,
Speaker 1: Champagne is preserved when it's in the bottle. Something's happening there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And honestly, maybe it was the bottle, like they
Speaker 2: just didn't know, right, So he starts trying preserving food
Speaker 2: in champagne. Maybe it sort of works sometimes, right, then
Speaker 2: he has specialty made jars because you know, getting the
Speaker 2: chicken leg into the champagne bottle. I know we've all
Speaker 2: tried it. It does not work well. So he starts
Speaker 2: filling them with different foods. He starts different ways of
Speaker 2: sealing them, wax, cork, cooking them at different temperatures. Hundreds
Speaker 2: of bottles he's doing this, He's checking them weeks later,
Speaker 2: months later. Neighbors report that sometimes they would go into
Speaker 2: the back of his shop and they would be like
Speaker 2: meat slurry on the ceiling because his bottles had exploded.
Speaker 2: And then he had as an insight, right, he'd made champagne,
Speaker 2: he made wine, and he knows that wine works better,
Speaker 2: just tastes better if you get all of the air
Speaker 2: out of it. Doesn't know why, but he's like, well,
Speaker 2: I'm going to try this with meat. I'm going to
Speaker 2: essentially take my jar, fill it up to the very
Speaker 2: top with meat, steal it with no air, and then
Speaker 2: slowly start boiling it, really get it up to temperature,
Speaker 2: because you can't have it rapidly boiling or it will explode.
Speaker 2: He experiments like this for ten years, ten years, ten years, which,
Speaker 2: if you think about it right, you have to You
Speaker 2: don't know if it's worked until you've waited a month,
Speaker 2: two months.
Speaker 1: It's hard to iterate. You can't get that many iterations
Speaker 1: in a year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so he figures out that like, essentially, if
Speaker 2: you don't boil it enough, it's going to kill you.
Speaker 2: But if you boil it too long, the food will
Speaker 2: be destroyed, you know. So he's thinking about hospitality and
Speaker 2: how someone will want to eat it. It's not just
Speaker 2: a technical thing, it's how do I make get appetizing
Speaker 2: And it seems to be working at this point ten
Speaker 2: years later. But he has to test it the most
Speaker 2: extreme tests you can have for a can of food.
Speaker 2: In eighteen oh sixty, goes to the French Navy with
Speaker 2: an experiment. He packs eighteen different foods, including green beans, peas, plums, meats,
Speaker 2: seals them, boils them, hands them to a French captain
Speaker 2: and says, do your worst. They set sail for four months,
Speaker 2: the summer heat, the roll of the waves, gnarly sailors,
Speaker 2: I don't know. Four months later they have a shipboard ceremony.
Speaker 2: They bring out the jars. One of them is a
Speaker 2: jar of preserved partridges in gravy, very popular in France
Speaker 2: at the time. They open it up, doesn't explode, sniff it,
Speaker 2: it's all right. No mold, smells like stew, and they
Speaker 2: taste it and the woila in crob fresh as a
Speaker 2: Montmont cafe sort of probably Partridges, right, this is it, right,
Speaker 2: No more rancid salt pork for the troops. Like he
Speaker 2: has solved the problem. In eighteen oh nine, the Society
Speaker 2: of Encouragement gather as they eat his summer peas in
Speaker 2: the middle of winter, and they declare a pair the winner.
Speaker 2: Napoleon personally approves the prize payment, but there is a catch.
Speaker 2: A pair had a dream of becoming very rich on
Speaker 2: his discovery. It's not a scientist, he's a businessman. He
Speaker 2: runs a shop.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: He had already started to sell glass preserved foods at
Speaker 2: the Maisson de a Paire, his shop.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: He wanted to patent his discovery make a fortune, but
Speaker 2: the French government said, wait.
Speaker 1: Just a minute.
Speaker 2: We know you won, but at this point this is
Speaker 2: critical technology for the nation. In order to get the prize,
Speaker 2: you have to publish your findings, show everyone your secrets,
Speaker 2: but you can't own the intellectual property. That's what the
Speaker 2: money is for. Yeah, that's what the prize is for.
Speaker 2: They're buying it from him. They do give him a
Speaker 2: choice and says, fine, I will take the money and
Speaker 2: He wrote a book which you can read to this day.
Speaker 2: I read the whole thing. It's not just about the
Speaker 2: theory of preserving food. Canning as they called it. By
Speaker 2: the way, the can is not for the physical can,
Speaker 2: it's for canister. So jars are canning. Cans are canning.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: The name of his book is the art of preserving
Speaker 2: all kinds of animal and vegetable substances for many years.
Speaker 2: So it is like canning for dummies. It's a canning cookbook.
Speaker 2: It's an exact canning cookbook. Here, read a little bit
Speaker 2: about the summer peas.
Speaker 1: Put them in the water bath in order to boil
Speaker 1: for an hour and a half when the season is
Speaker 1: cool and moist, and two hours when it's hot and dry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it depends on the weather. Love that well, this is
Speaker 1: ten years of experimentation talking.
Speaker 2: This guy knows right, and so at this point, Like
Speaker 2: a Pair is pretty famous in France. He publishes this book.
Speaker 2: Napoleon now has his wagons filled with canned peas. They
Speaker 2: call it food a la a pear. So a Pair
Speaker 2: uses his prize to build the first food preservation facility.
Speaker 2: He is going to make money off of this. He
Speaker 2: tries and at this point, they're very expensive. This is
Speaker 2: essentially bespoke, handmade vegetables.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: He sells it only to the very rich of French society,
Speaker 2: but they're the first people on earth to experience this
Speaker 2: like radical idea that you did not have to eat
Speaker 2: what's in season right now.
Speaker 1: It just never occurred like that.
Speaker 2: You could have peaches or strawberries if it wasn't the summer.
Speaker 2: Like that's insane. It just never happened. But all of
Speaker 2: a sudden you could walk in the middle of a
Speaker 2: Parisian winter and see all these things and bring them home. Right,
Speaker 2: it was amazing. Now, at this point Napoleon is in charge,
Speaker 2: decides he's going to try to take over Europe and
Speaker 2: be well fed at the same time, and this would
Speaker 2: come back to bite Nicholas a pair after the break,
Speaker 2: the military weapon of preserved food leaks.
Speaker 1: To francis enemies.
Speaker 2: It's jars versus tins on the battlefield.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're back from the break. It is time now
Speaker 1: for the story of Can number two. Can number two.
Speaker 2: You may recall Heinz Baked Beans technically an American company
Speaker 2: but very popular in the UK. This is the UK
Speaker 2: version and this chapter is about the mass market for cans.
Speaker 2: Mere months after a Pair publishes his strict instructions and
Speaker 2: how to put food in a jar, a patent application
Speaker 2: is filed, not in Paris but in London, across the
Speaker 2: English Channel. And it's not just about jars, like any patent,
Speaker 2: any good patents out there, it lists everything the inventor
Speaker 2: can think of, right, all the ways you can think
Speaker 2: to put food into a container. Bottles yes, jars, yes, pottery,
Speaker 2: I don't know. It didn't catch on And crucially for
Speaker 2: our story, iron covered in tin. And surprisingly, the patent
Speaker 2: is not from our inventor, Nicholas a Pair. It is
Speaker 2: from a merchant who, as far as we know, had
Speaker 2: no food experience whatsoever. His name's on various patents through
Speaker 2: the years. His name is Peter Durant.
Speaker 1: So it's he like a nineteenth century patent troll, just
Speaker 1: pile it up intellectual property. Does he start suing people?
Speaker 1: It's interesting.
Speaker 2: We don't know what he's up to, But when you
Speaker 2: look at the fine print of the patent, he doesn't
Speaker 2: really say it's his idea. He says, I'm quoting here
Speaker 2: an invention communicated to him by a certain foreigner. Residing
Speaker 2: abroad are. It does not say who the unnamed foreigner is,
Speaker 2: but at this point England France are bitter rivals. You
Speaker 2: can understand why a pair or anyone else wouldn't want
Speaker 2: to sell military secrets to the British, right, it makes
Speaker 2: total sense. Napoleon would throw you in jail, kill you.
Speaker 1: Right now?
Speaker 2: Is Durand a frontman for Nicholas?
Speaker 1: A pair? We don't know.
Speaker 2: We know he's granted this patent in the UK and
Speaker 2: takes it to the US, and then almost immediately he
Speaker 2: sells the patent to someone who actually makes it happen
Speaker 2: for about a thousand quid. Right, So the man who
Speaker 2: buys the patent is Brian Duncan. And he was exactly
Speaker 2: what the Can needed. He was just a practical guy
Speaker 2: who solved problems.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: He developed the first machinery to make paper. I know
Speaker 2: people had handmade paper, right, and he's the one that said, no,
Speaker 2: you can have giant machines to make paper.
Speaker 1: Seems remarkably late, but I guess not because the Industrial
Speaker 1: Revolution had just come along, right. Everything was hand made
Speaker 1: until basically they.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he had already patented and manufactured the first
Speaker 2: steel pen, which if you think about it, a pen
Speaker 2: is like a can.
Speaker 1: For ink, a tiny can, a tiny thin can for ink.
Speaker 2: So Brian Duncan already had a factory like ready to go,
Speaker 2: and at this point you could sort of see that
Speaker 2: like military and governments are good encouraging innovation, and they're
Speaker 2: great as first purchasers of products because they'll pay anything, right,
Speaker 2: but they're not the best at creating cheap, efficient products.
Speaker 2: And for preserved foods to become a worldwide phenomenon, this
Speaker 2: is going to take a half century of Brian Duncan's work, right.
Speaker 1: This is an important idea. You hear it all the
Speaker 1: time now from people starting companies. This idea that we
Speaker 1: think about the breakthrough the prototype, but in fact, going
Speaker 1: from the prototype, which is sort of where France, this
Speaker 1: is a little bit past that, but it's not at scale,
Speaker 1: it's not for everybody. It's this military technology that rich
Speaker 1: people are also using. Going from that to the cheap
Speaker 1: ubiquitous thing is in many ways harder and more important
Speaker 1: than the initial breakthrough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in fact, we think about patents right as
Speaker 2: this protection for the inventor, but it's more than that,
Speaker 2: Like patents are away for someone to have a protection
Speaker 2: while they do what you're talking about, while they perfect
Speaker 2: the technology and make it actually happen well.
Speaker 1: And the other thing about patents is they force you
Speaker 1: to share how to do it, which is part of
Speaker 1: the idea. You could keep it a trade secret if
Speaker 1: you want. If you figure something out, you could just
Speaker 1: not tell anybody and own it for as long as
Speaker 1: nobody else figures it out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Coca Cola didn't patent the precise and stamos for
Speaker 2: Coca Cola.
Speaker 1: So the patent is a trade off. You get to
Speaker 1: own the intellectual property for a fixed amount of time
Speaker 1: and then everybody knows.
Speaker 2: Now Brian Doncan has to actually make this happen at scale.
Speaker 2: They decide they're going to go for cans. No more
Speaker 2: exploding bottles, right, it doesn't make any sense right to
Speaker 2: try and transport food long distances in glass. And also,
Speaker 2: just as France had a lot of champagne bottling technology,
Speaker 2: Britain at this point is the leader in metal technology.
Speaker 2: So Brian Duncan and its partners Gamble and Hall, I believe,
Speaker 2: and it's Dunk and Gamble and Hall or Duncan, holl
Speaker 2: and Gamble something like that. They take this suspicious pattern,
Speaker 2: and they get to work and they immediately see that
Speaker 2: metal is the way to go for the future of
Speaker 2: canning technology because glass is kind of stupid. Right, You're
Speaker 2: trying to transport food and glass and you have to
Speaker 2: like treat it like a little baby. And they'd already
Speaker 2: been developing cooking utensils which were made of iron but
Speaker 2: covered in tin. So you have the iron makes it
Speaker 2: strong and cheap, right, but you have this non reactive
Speaker 2: tin coating so that everything doesn't taste like iron.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And so in eighteen twelve Duncan sets up the first
Speaker 2: can factory. And to your point about innovations, right, the
Speaker 2: first cans do not look like this the cans we
Speaker 2: have today.
Speaker 1: They're not thin at all. What do they look like.
Speaker 2: They are four to twenty pounds apiece, they have thick
Speaker 2: sodder seams of lead. They're about the size of a
Speaker 2: paint can. And Donkan can make six of them per hour.
Speaker 1: Technology. I mean, it's not gonna feed the.
Speaker 2: World yet, it's gonna get better, right, But Duncan is
Speaker 2: already thinking like a marketer. So as soon as he's
Speaker 2: got this giant kettle bill filled with meat, he sends
Speaker 2: it off to the Duke of Wellington and the Royal family.
Speaker 2: You know, you gotta try this, right. I'm sure that
Speaker 2: they don't open them themselves. They have people for this,
Speaker 2: but they bring it to the table and they love it.
Speaker 1: They love it.
Speaker 2: The Royal family is like, this is perfection, tasty, right.
Speaker 2: So he's got that stamp of approval, gets government contracts
Speaker 2: for the British Army, British Navy.
Speaker 1: They'll pay anything for this, right.
Speaker 2: Because they're now fighting Napoleon, you know, so setting aside
Speaker 2: like the military strategy, you know, you could picture the
Speaker 2: Battle of Waterloo. However you picture the Battle of Waterloo,
Speaker 2: I picture it as the French eating partridges in gravy
Speaker 2: stored in bottles, and on the British side roast beef
Speaker 2: and carrot soup. I never finished the story of our
Speaker 2: French candy maker, Nicholas, a pair legend. He tried to
Speaker 2: stay in the canning business. He built a factory in
Speaker 2: the town of Massi, outside Paris and France. He was
Speaker 2: making a go at marketing the technology. He was even
Speaker 2: experimenting with square cans la la I know, easier to stack,
Speaker 2: easier to ship.
Speaker 1: Aikia I feel like Aikia should be making square cans
Speaker 1: flat pack cans.
Speaker 2: It has more weak points, I know, but you know,
Speaker 2: a pair is like trying to make this happen. But
Speaker 2: in eighteen fourteen, his main man, Napoleon, plunged the entire
Speaker 2: continent into war. Remember Prussian and Austrian forces destroy his factory.
Speaker 2: Huh karma, You know you help the military and the
Speaker 2: military comes back to bite you. The government let him
Speaker 2: rebuild in Paris, gave him money to switch from glass
Speaker 2: bottles to tin. Then the politics change and the government
Speaker 2: evicted him, and he wrote a letter to them. He said,
Speaker 2: I gave my life to science and to mankind. You
Speaker 2: are taking away the premises I thought ought to be mine.
Speaker 2: Then he passed away in eighteen forty one. He was poor.
Speaker 2: He's buried in a pauper's grave, but we hope he's
Speaker 2: perfectly preserved. So Donkin's already thinking bigger than Nicholas. Epero
Speaker 2: is still over in France, and he realizes that like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you can sell it to the military, but really that's
Speaker 2: an ad. That's an ad to sell it to everyone else.
Speaker 2: So Donkin's agents start taking these giant cans. Imagine these
Speaker 2: agents were very burly, giant muscles, right, and they start
Speaker 2: taking them to the wharves where the ships are, to
Speaker 2: the port towns, saying like, oh, the royal family loves it.
Speaker 2: We sold it to the British Navy. Don't you want
Speaker 2: to take this on your travels around the world. So
Speaker 2: they would sell this as like this chance to dine
Speaker 2: like a king out on the water. At the time,
Speaker 2: there was a problem of scurvy. And I'm sure you've
Speaker 2: heard about this, right. Scurvy we know now is a
Speaker 2: shortage of vitamin C. And if you go on long
Speaker 2: voyages and you're not eating fruits and vegetables, you have
Speaker 2: a shortage of vitamin C and your gums start to
Speaker 2: bleed and you start to bruise and have these hemorrhages.
Speaker 2: Like it's a terrible situation. And up to this time
Speaker 2: it was a huge problem for navies around the world
Speaker 2: because they'd be gone on voyages for months and months
Speaker 2: and months at a time, and Duncan's agents would would
Speaker 2: hustle the ship.
Speaker 1: Captains to take some aboard. Right.
Speaker 2: He's like, when you're in the latitudes in the south Sea,
Speaker 2: you can bring a little bit of British meat with you.
Speaker 2: Dogan's company also sells the cans to what I consider
Speaker 2: the influencer of the eighteen hundreds. I am referring, of course,
Speaker 2: to the explorer. Oh, you know with the with the hat,
Speaker 2: the pith helmet, and the little and the khakis. Right now,
Speaker 2: at this point explorers are really starting to make progress
Speaker 2: in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Speaker 1: Not so much the pith helmet and khakis.
Speaker 2: I picture them up there right now though they have
Speaker 2: the the first fur covered in yeah, and the coats
Speaker 2: made of seals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So this is the age where men would join the
Speaker 2: Explorers club, right, and they would raise money for these
Speaker 2: big expeditions, and so it was a little bit like
Speaker 2: an influence. These people were famous and they would be
Speaker 2: out on the ice for several years. You wouldn't know
Speaker 2: what's going to happen to them, and they'd come back triumphant,
Speaker 2: all without eating a single vegetable for years. So it
Speaker 2: was a problem from a can point of view. So
Speaker 2: Duncan his company send their tinnedveal stew to one of
Speaker 2: the most famous explorers of the time, Sir Joseph Banks.
Speaker 2: He had saled with Captain James Cook, he was a
Speaker 2: member of the Royal Society, and Banks sat down to
Speaker 2: dine on the two year old canned veal and declared
Speaker 2: it one of the most important discoveries of.
Speaker 1: The age we live in.
Speaker 2: Huh and this man new discoveries, the new discoveries.
Speaker 1: It is a real breakthrough. We're kind of making fun
Speaker 1: of it, but it's real.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely real, right, because you immediately see this as
Speaker 2: a tool. The can is a tool well for military conquest,
Speaker 2: but it's a tool for exploration, and soon it will
Speaker 2: be a tool to transform, you know, the way countries worked.
Speaker 1: Really, there was no refrigeration. To state what is perhaps obvious,
Speaker 1: it's just hard for us to understand the scarcity of
Speaker 1: fresh food at that time. In the winter, even on land,
Speaker 1: people would get sick at the end of the winter.
Speaker 1: There was this thing called winter sickness because you wouldn't
Speaker 1: eat fresh food all winter, so that by the time
Speaker 1: spring came, everybody would be kind of sick.
Speaker 2: Exactly right. And this is what Sir Joseph Banks saw.
Speaker 2: It's just that at the time only the military and
Speaker 2: the explorers had the money to buy it. Soon everyone would,
Speaker 2: but at this moment it is for the well funded.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So there is this one dramatic moment that seals the
Speaker 2: legend of the ten William Perry is in the Arctic
Speaker 2: on his ship HMS Fury. Love those names, HIMS Fury,
Speaker 2: and as often happened, maybe happen every time they get
Speaker 2: trap and the ice flows right, the ice starts to
Speaker 2: crush the ship and they decide they have to abandon
Speaker 2: ship go over land, right, so they throw all the
Speaker 2: cans out onto the ice.
Speaker 1: They drag them to a beach.
Speaker 2: They take a few of the cans and takes the months,
Speaker 2: but they eventually get to safety.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Four years later, another explorer, John Ross, trying the same thing,
Speaker 2: same thing happens to him. He also get stuck in
Speaker 2: the ice, except his men are hungry and they are desperate,
Speaker 2: but they stumble upon the cans. Perry's cans from HMS
Speaker 2: Fury are on the beach. They open the cans.
Speaker 1: It's four years later, saves their lives. Cans. It's so impressive.
Speaker 1: I can't believe it's because they're heavy.
Speaker 2: They take one of these cans back to London to
Speaker 2: show everyone the cans saved our lives, and you can
Speaker 2: still see the can at the Science Museum in London.
Speaker 1: Is the meat still good? Great question?
Speaker 2: In the nineteen thirties, so this is like a hundred
Speaker 2: year after it was canned. Right in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 2: scientists open it for analysis to quote them, it was
Speaker 2: in perfect condition.
Speaker 1: Did they eat it? They did not eat it.
Speaker 2: They reportedly fed it to laboratory mice and a cat,
Speaker 2: all of which survived.
Speaker 1: Okay, heay, until the mouse was eaten by the cat.
Speaker 2: That does happen. They can't the scientists can't prevent nature, right.
Speaker 2: So Donk and his company have now locked up the
Speaker 2: government contracts the explorers.
Speaker 1: There's other competitors. Now.
Speaker 2: They just need a way to convince regular people that
Speaker 2: everyone needs canned foods, right, And this is a harder
Speaker 2: sell because if you think about it, up to this
Speaker 2: point in history, you probably never bought food that you
Speaker 2: didn't see, that you couldn't actually inspect. Right. So for
Speaker 2: the regular person they're like, oh, yeah, there's a fish
Speaker 2: inside this can.
Speaker 1: You'd be like, I don't know.
Speaker 2: You're operating on trust, and maybe there wasn't a lot
Speaker 2: of trust, especially about industrial things at the time, right,
Speaker 2: especially industrial food.
Speaker 1: Another level of trust required which really didn't exist.
Speaker 2: Right, So eighteen fifty two, unfortunately for the can industry,
Speaker 2: the newspapers are filled with the Great Can Scandal.
Speaker 1: Putting the can back into the scandal, the s candle scandal.
Speaker 2: Right, A group of meat inspectors were opening cans bound
Speaker 2: for the Royal Navy. First can rotten, second can spoiled.
Speaker 2: It wasn't until the nineteenth can that they found one
Speaker 2: that they said a human could eat. So the technology
Speaker 2: of cans was mostly working. It was the contents and
Speaker 2: what they put into the can that was completely gross.
Speaker 2: Now at this point there are a lot of competitors
Speaker 2: making cans, putting food into cans, and one of them
Speaker 2: figured out, well, if nobody can see inside, why don't
Speaker 2: I put the cheapest meat I can and possibly find
Speaker 2: into these cans, Jacob, I want you to read from
Speaker 2: the newspaper coverage at the time.
Speaker 1: So this is a list of what they found inside
Speaker 1: the cans. Pieces of heart, coagulated blood, pieces of liver,
Speaker 1: ligaments of the throat, pieces of intestines in short, garbage
Speaker 1: and putridity in a horrible state.
Speaker 2: And those weren't even on the paper on the outside
Speaker 2: of the can.
Speaker 1: Even say garbage or putridity on the list of ingredients.
Speaker 2: Apparently they even found a dog's tongue. They trace the
Speaker 2: problem back to Romania or Moldova, depending on which sources
Speaker 2: you use. I take it they didn't write that on
Speaker 2: the can either, right, huge pr scandal. Inspectors around the
Speaker 2: globe start to spot check cans. They find the same thing,
Speaker 2: lousy meat inside. Everyone's reading about this, as you can imagine,
Speaker 2: like what do they find today in the cans? The
Speaker 2: can manufacturers strike back with a huge advertising campaign. They
Speaker 2: have you know, testimonial and pain kidding, Oh that doesn't
Speaker 2: work there. They have testimonials, awards awarded for you know,
Speaker 2: the fine meat service, right, seals of approval. They start
Speaker 2: to pitch the nutritional claims. They do can demos at
Speaker 2: fares and expos There's stunts like they had this public
Speaker 2: dinner prepared solely from Can meats that only cost a
Speaker 2: penny for you to come and eat it. Yeah, I know, right,
Speaker 2: And as we talked about last week in our show
Speaker 2: about the grocery chain A and P, this is the
Speaker 2: birth of the brand. They're really starting to signal there
Speaker 2: are no dog tongues in this can.
Speaker 1: Well, A brand is truly valuable in this context. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you literally can't see inside the can. For one thing,
Speaker 1: the industrialization of food means you're getting farther from the source.
Speaker 1: And today I feel like we primarily think of brands
Speaker 1: as sort of superficial marketing tools. Maybe maybe not, but
Speaker 1: truly brands can signal quality. If some people are putting
Speaker 1: rotten meat inside their cans and you reliably are not,
Speaker 1: that is meaningful. A brand is meaningful in that context.
Speaker 2: And they're starting to realize you can have different brands
Speaker 2: for different people. The sales aspect of this, apparently they
Speaker 2: sold cans to women called My Lady Can and Little
Speaker 2: Duchess Can.
Speaker 1: The Virginia Slimbs of Cans.
Speaker 2: Exactly for men, Jack tar Brand and Sailors Savories.
Speaker 1: Oh manly Canley go down to the pub.
Speaker 2: And have some Sailors Savories. And perhaps most importantly of all,
Speaker 2: in the marketing of the can, they developed the can opener.
Speaker 1: Wait, yes, and decades. I didn't even think of the cannabies.
Speaker 1: What were they doing before this? How did you open
Speaker 1: a can? Before the can open? Years since the first
Speaker 1: how did you open a can for fifty years?
Speaker 2: So it boggles the mind on some of the cans.
Speaker 2: They had instructions which were get a hammer and a chisel,
Speaker 2: and just like dun't dunk, dunk, dun't dun't dunk to
Speaker 2: open the can.
Speaker 1: I am a ghast it does. Here's a question. Here's
Speaker 1: a question, what is a thing today where we have
Speaker 1: the can but not the can opener? Where once some
Speaker 1: new thing is going to be invented, they're like, how
Speaker 1: did you go so long without the thing? To use
Speaker 1: the thing? What would it be? I don't you know.
Speaker 2: I was thinking about all the chords and everything, and
Speaker 2: I know they're starting to solve that with the just
Speaker 2: placing something down and charge.
Speaker 1: A dream of where you're just in an electric field
Speaker 1: where your thing is is charging just ambiently. I don't
Speaker 1: know the physics of that, but yes, maybe someday they'll
Speaker 1: be like, you had to plug in your things all
Speaker 1: the time, how did you live? Okay? The can opener.
Speaker 2: Now everyone's using a hammer and chisel. I was thinking
Speaker 2: about this, and perhaps the notion of convenience wasn't associated
Speaker 2: with food. In the eighteen hundreds. You had specialists cooks
Speaker 2: and chefs, and you know at the time housewives who
Speaker 2: would spend all day cooking. There was no easy, fast
Speaker 2: way to do anything in the kitchen.
Speaker 1: So it's like you already have peas from six months ago,
Speaker 1: this miracle. Oh now you're saying it's too hard to open.
Speaker 1: Nobody to take the time. My hammer is way over there.
Speaker 2: My chisel, Who is my chisel. The first can opener
Speaker 2: was developed by Ezra Warner, and I saw a picture
Speaker 2: of it. It looks like basically a piece of metal
Speaker 2: a little hook on it. It looks a little bit
Speaker 2: like the kind of can openers you get at a
Speaker 2: camping store.
Speaker 1: Those are terrible can openers where you have to kind
Speaker 1: of hook it every time. There's no way you're sawing
Speaker 1: the can. All the sharp edges, oh so sharp.
Speaker 2: So once you do this, it's not just that the
Speaker 2: edge is sharp, but it's jagged and.
Speaker 1: It's extremely hard to open. Again, I would rather use
Speaker 1: a hammer and chisel. It was terrible, but people.
Speaker 2: Started to buy it, and some stores would stock one
Speaker 2: single can opener and they would open the can for
Speaker 2: you before you left. Oh yeah, I'm having peas tonight.
Speaker 2: The rotary design didn't come until eighteen seventy, and.
Speaker 1: Such a beautiful tool that has the two little gears
Speaker 1: and the handle. I love a can opener.
Speaker 2: By the end of the eighteen hundreds, cans were something
Speaker 2: everyone could buy, and they did. Everyone forgot about the
Speaker 2: dog tongue. I will personally never forget about it. But
Speaker 2: everyone forgot about this. And it was helped along by
Speaker 2: this huge movement of rural folks into the city. So
Speaker 2: industrialization was reducing the labor needed on farms. Factories were
Speaker 2: opening in the cities. People were coming into crowded areas
Speaker 2: of New York and Chicago, and it's really hard to
Speaker 2: get fresh foods into the city, into the tenements and apartments,
Speaker 2: and cans were the answer. The killer app for cans
Speaker 2: condensed milk, because.
Speaker 1: You're in the city. I thought it was the can opener.
Speaker 2: No, the stuff inside the condensed milk milk made by
Speaker 2: Borden In eighteen fifty six. They would put the milk
Speaker 2: in the can in Connecticut and bring it down to
Speaker 2: New York City and people were like, oh, this reminds
Speaker 2: me of having a cow, except very sweet. As we
Speaker 2: know with condensed milk.
Speaker 1: Because again, refrigeration, cold chain is still not a thing.
Speaker 1: If you live in a city, it's hard to get
Speaker 1: milk they used to have. I think it was cows
Speaker 1: in Central Park in Manhattan for the milk. For the milk,
Speaker 1: if I recall correctly, like they would give it to
Speaker 1: the children or something.
Speaker 2: Campbell Soup eighteen ninety five. Huh, same year our can
Speaker 2: of Hines baked beans.
Speaker 1: It's a US company.
Speaker 2: But a year later they debuted in the UK, and
Speaker 2: for reasons I will never understand, the British decide to
Speaker 2: eat it.
Speaker 1: For breakfast with sausage and tomatoes. Seems incredible. It's a
Speaker 1: whole it's a whole thing, right, full English. We'll be
Speaker 1: back in a minute with one more can. Robert Smith,
Speaker 1: it is time for our story to arrive in twentieth
Speaker 1: century America, USA.
Speaker 2: Development of the aluminum beer can, the silver bullet on
Speaker 2: the corporate battlefield.
Speaker 1: See what you did there.
Speaker 2: By the twentieth century food cans look pretty much like
Speaker 2: they do today, standardized size, thinner walls. But these little things,
Speaker 2: I would argue, have transformed the earth. It's easier for
Speaker 2: people to move food, so now it's easier to move
Speaker 2: to the cities. Also transformed farming. Think about this for
Speaker 2: a moment. If you're growing tomatoes in the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: in New Jersey. With cans, there is no limit to
Speaker 2: the amount of tomatoes that you can grow. Because you
Speaker 2: could put them in a can, you could sell them
Speaker 2: years later, and this is just one thousand miles away. Also,
Speaker 2: as we saw in the last episode, cans now make
Speaker 2: it easier for grocery stores to open all the logistics chains,
Speaker 2: and all of these things mean cheaper food. You mentioned
Speaker 2: our story about A and P how expensive food was
Speaker 2: for people. Now you can eat out of cans, and
Speaker 2: you have an economy of scale at some margin emerging
Speaker 2: for food. So as the scale grows, it is perhaps
Speaker 2: inevitable that a behemoth will emerge. On March twentieth, nineteen
Speaker 2: oh one, it's kind of amazing there's this happened on
Speaker 2: one day. A bunch of rich people finally pull off
Speaker 2: their plan to combine ninety percent of America's tin can
Speaker 2: manufacturers into one giant. Do they call it can Co?
Speaker 1: They do not.
Speaker 2: They call it the American Can Company.
Speaker 1: I love, I love those turn of the twentieth century names.
Speaker 1: You just say, what the company does us steel, American
Speaker 1: Can Company, I mean American was right there. One hundred
Speaker 1: years later, one hundred percent. They would have called it
Speaker 1: American who can you can? American? Thank you for calling
Speaker 1: it the American Can Company.
Speaker 2: One hundred and twenty three factories from Brooklyn to Seattle.
Speaker 2: And even in the emerging age of monopolies, this one
Speaker 2: was huge. People called it the tin Can Trust.
Speaker 1: Yes, this was the trust era, and weirdly, even though
Speaker 1: anti trust laws had been passed a few decades before this,
Speaker 1: this was this era when they were essentially not enforced.
Speaker 1: Was this a JP Morgan move? This sounds extremely JP Morgan,
Speaker 1: JP Morgan wannabes, But it was a dream team of capitalists.
Speaker 1: You had William the Judge Moore was an actual judge
Speaker 1: at some point who created trust like the National Biscuit Company,
Speaker 1: the Meisco and Diamond match Still, yeah, there's some match
Speaker 1: king story that somebody told me to do. Put it
Speaker 1: on the list. On the list.
Speaker 2: You had Daniel the Czar read. I don't know why
Speaker 2: I was called that. He was the steel baron, William Leeds,
Speaker 2: who was the tin plate King, William Tinplate leads Tinny
Speaker 2: and someone who actually knew how to make food in
Speaker 2: a can helpful Edwin Norton. And Edwin became the president
Speaker 2: of the trust and it was clever how they did it.
Speaker 2: They went to all these different can manufacturers and said,
Speaker 2: you know, we want to do a deal. We wanted
Speaker 2: to close on this one.
Speaker 1: Date tanufacturers and stop one stop, keep going.
Speaker 2: The team already controlled much of the tin supply, so
Speaker 2: it was, you know, a carrot stick situation on the manufacturers.
Speaker 2: They said, oh, you know, it would be a shame
Speaker 2: if you suddenly had to pay more for your tin supply.
Speaker 2: You're really going to want to sell your can company
Speaker 2: to us. And then when the can manufacturers were scared,
Speaker 2: they offered very large checks for the factories to sell out,
Speaker 2: and all they had to do he was promised that
Speaker 2: they could not re enter the canned business for fifteen years.
Speaker 1: It's so anti competitive.
Speaker 2: One hundred and twenty three factories. They did some calculations
Speaker 2: afterwards and looked at how much they paid for all
Speaker 2: these companies, and it was pretty clear that they could
Speaker 2: have just built new factories for the same.
Speaker 1: Price, but then they would have had to compete.
Speaker 2: Then they would have had to compete. So instead, of course,
Speaker 2: they take these companies and what's the first thing they do.
Speaker 2: They shut a bunch of them down, seventy percent of
Speaker 2: the factories were just like, you're out of business, close
Speaker 2: them down, fire everybody, and then.
Speaker 1: Jack up prices. What do you suppress supply any raise prices.
Speaker 2: Book, we've talked about monopolies that are they really a monopoly,
Speaker 2: that this was a monotony.
Speaker 1: Leaning into it. They're the guy with the top hat
Speaker 1: on the board, dude.
Speaker 2: One of the things we're learning in the show is
Speaker 2: that really pulling off a true monopoly.
Speaker 1: Is very difficult.
Speaker 2: Yes, they bought almost all the factories, shut them down,
Speaker 2: raise prices, but at that point now it is much
Speaker 2: more profitable to get into the can business.
Speaker 1: It's not like they have intellectual property. It's not like
Speaker 1: they can prevent other people from making tin cans. Tin
Speaker 1: cans are basically a commodity, and there is this truism
Speaker 1: in commodities, which is the cure for high prices is
Speaker 1: high prices. If suddenly people are paying absurdly high prices
Speaker 1: for tin cans, other people are going to build their
Speaker 1: own tin can factories and start competing to sell tin cans.
Speaker 1: And they did.
Speaker 2: It was a little bit of a tin rush people
Speaker 2: getting into the business. And one of the Dream Team
Speaker 2: members was about to defect. Edwin Norton, the guy who
Speaker 2: actually knew something, was unhappy. I imagine it was because
Speaker 2: he actually knew how to can food, and the rest
Speaker 2: of them are just guys in top hats, smoking cigars.
Speaker 1: And telling him what to do.
Speaker 2: He had signed a contract that said he could never
Speaker 2: compete with the American Can Company, obviously, but he spotted
Speaker 2: a loophole. Contracts said nothing about family members. Edward Norton
Speaker 2: organized with his son, wait for it, the Continental Can
Speaker 2: Company shiny new factory in Syracuse, and in fact, the
Speaker 2: technology was better than the old American Can factories that
Speaker 2: they had.
Speaker 1: Could have gone with Cantinental keep going.
Speaker 2: By nineteen oh five, it was American Can versus Continental Can,
Speaker 2: the trust versus the rebel. The American Can boys were furious,
Speaker 2: and for the next half century this would be one
Speaker 2: of those epic industrial rivalries. It was so fierce that
Speaker 2: Fortune magazine said their relationship was tart tart tart in
Speaker 2: Fortune Magazine. That's like fist cluably that's good for consumers.
Speaker 2: I mean, two doesn't seem like enough to me.
Speaker 1: Two. I feel like you could still Doopoly's sort of
Speaker 1: tacit price fixing. Or maybe explicit price fixing. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised that it's only two. I guess is it
Speaker 1: because there's an economy of scale and so it's hard
Speaker 1: to enter and compete.
Speaker 2: It's a duopoly. There's two big ones, but there's lots
Speaker 2: of little ones. Yeah, and in fact, ten years later,
Speaker 2: the US government slow as they are like, huh can monopoly.
Speaker 1: There's one thing we've learned enough the show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if there's one thing we've learned to this show,
Speaker 2: it's that the government is so slow to respond to
Speaker 2: the what's going on in competition? Right, it takes them
Speaker 2: ten years to get all their briefs together. So this
Speaker 2: goes before a judge and it's against American Can.
Speaker 1: Has nothing to do with the Continental Can.
Speaker 2: Clearly American Can acted like the mafia. They intentionally tried
Speaker 2: to dominate the industry, screw the little guy. But the
Speaker 2: judge determines then really pull it off. He said that
Speaker 2: the current state of competition with the new entrants and
Speaker 2: the Continental Can, he said it was like basically fine.
Speaker 2: He decides not to take a hammer and chisel to
Speaker 2: the company.
Speaker 1: Well done.
Speaker 2: He wrote that he was reluctant to destroy so finally
Speaker 2: adjusted an industrial machine.
Speaker 1: I'm fine. Anythink they practiced. I don't know. There was
Speaker 1: a dude named the Judge who started the company.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying, well, it is good for beer drinkers
Speaker 2: everywhere that the Judge did not break up American Can
Speaker 2: because they were about to make the last big breakthrough
Speaker 2: of our can saga.
Speaker 1: Beer.
Speaker 2: It is the holy grail of canning.
Speaker 1: At this point. It's served in bottles.
Speaker 2: No one's figured out how to make it work in cans,
Speaker 2: and they want to figure it out because beer people
Speaker 2: think that beer is better if it isn't exposed to light,
Speaker 2: I guess, and cans block the light. It keeps on
Speaker 2: oxygen better.
Speaker 1: Presumably the fact that it's harder to break a can matters.
Speaker 1: Countries getting bigger, you're transporting beer more.
Speaker 2: But the problem is beer because of the way it is,
Speaker 2: tends to react with the metal, which makes the beer
Speaker 2: taste metallic, which people hate, and it.
Speaker 1: Weakens the can.
Speaker 2: And since beer is carbonated and under pressure, it would
Speaker 2: blow the cans apart.
Speaker 1: The weaken cans apart.
Speaker 2: It was sort of a yease fueled explosive device. Apparently,
Speaker 2: the pressure in a beer can is twice that of
Speaker 2: a cart who knew. American Can started to work on
Speaker 2: this in nineteen oh nine. They wouldn't solve it till
Speaker 2: after prohibition, were secretly working on it in nineteen thirty five.
Speaker 2: The answer was something they called the kig liner. Each
Speaker 2: tin distant for beer was lined with a form of plastics.
Speaker 2: This is before aluminum, so it's still the tin cans
Speaker 2: that we know. But they started out with pine resin
Speaker 2: and enamel was the first thing they tried. They ended
Speaker 2: up with something called vinyl light plastic. Vinyl plastic was
Speaker 2: eventually used in another famous product with a siding on
Speaker 2: My House that too, but the vinyl record yl. At
Speaker 2: one point, I think American Can owned a vinyl manufacturer
Speaker 2: that actually supplied record vinyl. As they became a conglomerate,
Speaker 2: American Can needed to test this out and they partnered
Speaker 2: with the Krueger Beer Company of Newark, New Jersey to
Speaker 2: release the first canned beer. American Can offered to put
Speaker 2: in the canning equipment for free and crew would only
Speaker 2: have to pay if it was a success, and the
Speaker 2: very first can of beer it looked just like a
Speaker 2: vegetable can. Steal in tin sold individually. An American can
Speaker 2: was thinking about this because they're already thinking about how
Speaker 2: long it had taken for can openers, and so they
Speaker 2: developed a special can opener. You can't just crank the
Speaker 2: top of your beer can and then put your lips
Speaker 2: to the sharp edge of metal. They developed something called
Speaker 2: a church key. That's what they call it. I don't
Speaker 2: know why, but it puts a little triangle indentation in
Speaker 2: the top of the can.
Speaker 1: We used to do this for canned orange juice when
Speaker 1: we were camping when I was a kid. It was
Speaker 1: like tin can orange juice, and you do it on
Speaker 1: two sides. You do it on one side to drink
Speaker 1: out of it, on the other so that the air
Speaker 1: pressure pushes the orange juice into your mouth.
Speaker 2: I guess they didn't know if any of this was
Speaker 2: going to work, so they sent the first batch to Richmond, Virginia, figuring, Oh,
Speaker 2: it's a flop in Richmond, No one's gonna hear about
Speaker 2: it in New York City.
Speaker 1: This isn't with credit cards in Fresno. Yeah, first credit card,
Speaker 1: they said to Fresno. I was thinking about this.
Speaker 2: I don't know if there are still test markets, because
Speaker 2: everyone knows everything happening all the time. But in the
Speaker 2: day you would go to try things out in Peoria
Speaker 2: or Columbus, Ohio, whatever it was. It was a place
Speaker 2: where new products would emerge and they would see how
Speaker 2: the regular folk liked it before they.
Speaker 1: Moved it to the big leagues. So what happens.
Speaker 2: People loved it, loved the can, It stayed cold, it's
Speaker 2: easy to stack, and this is key. You didn't have
Speaker 2: to pay a deposit on it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the old school bottle. This was true in
Speaker 1: Mexico when I was a kid. If you bought beer
Speaker 1: in Mexico when I was a kid, it came in
Speaker 1: these really thick bottles, and you paid a deposit that
Speaker 1: was on the order of as much as the beery,
Speaker 1: and you would take the bottles back to that beer
Speaker 1: shop like that was a huge percentage of the price,
Speaker 1: so much that you would always bring them back to
Speaker 1: that chop to get your deposit.
Speaker 2: Now you want beer, you buy the can, get the
Speaker 2: little church key which they sometimes gave away, you drink it,
Speaker 2: and then you just throw the can out the window.
Speaker 2: Perfect problem America. Right, Krueger sales went up. The beer
Speaker 2: company went up five hundred and fifty percent one hundred
Speaker 2: and eighty thousand cans a day. Other brewers jump in
Speaker 2: continental can. You'll remember that the tart rival. They jump
Speaker 2: in with another technical innovation that did not survive, a
Speaker 2: beer can with a cone on top so that brewers
Speaker 2: could use the same bottle caps. So it's essentially a
Speaker 2: metal bottle that you could run through the machines and
Speaker 2: put the caps on.
Speaker 1: I wonder why that didn't survive, because that seems easier
Speaker 1: to drink out of than the church Key style.
Speaker 2: Probably just more expensive.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and I guess you can't stack them to
Speaker 1: your earlier point.
Speaker 2: And of course it would be the nineteen sixties, after
Speaker 2: the can had turned aluminum, that they would figure out
Speaker 2: how to put an opener into the can itself.
Speaker 1: This was the deadly version, right, the version that I
Speaker 1: still remember occasionally seeing when I was a kid, Takata beer.
Speaker 1: I lived in southern California, and Takata beer still had
Speaker 1: that old nineteen sixties style where there's a little ring
Speaker 1: and you put your finger thering and you pull it
Speaker 1: and what you get off of the top of the
Speaker 1: can is this razor sharp piece of metal that is
Speaker 1: a weapon, essentially, and that's how you open the can,
Speaker 1: and it seems manifestly a bad idea in the way
Speaker 1: a lot of things from that era do now. Many
Speaker 1: people must have truly hurt themselves on these razor sharp
Speaker 1: things that came off the top of cans.
Speaker 2: I'm a little older than you, and when I was
Speaker 2: growing up, the gutters of the city were filled with
Speaker 2: these little cantops, these little pieces of metal that you've
Speaker 2: pulled off. I remember my mother warning me when we
Speaker 2: went to the beach, because obviously people woul drink beer
Speaker 2: at the beach, they would toss these little pieces of
Speaker 2: metal and you would step on them in the beach
Speaker 2: famous Jimmy Buffett song stepped on.
Speaker 1: A pop top.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, yeah, yeah yeah. This was like a
Speaker 2: danger of the time. It gets worse because you knew
Speaker 2: this was happening. You didn't want to litter, So you
Speaker 2: pull off this little piece of metal, and what would
Speaker 2: a lot of people do with it? They'd put it
Speaker 2: inside the can and then carefully drink around it. There was,
Speaker 2: I swear to God, all these news stories about people
Speaker 2: and kids accidentally drinking the polltop. In fact, there was
Speaker 2: an article in Pediatric emergency Care called Swallowed can tab?
Speaker 2: Is it still stuck in the esophagus?
Speaker 1: I hope not? Or do you hope?
Speaker 2: So? No?
Speaker 1: You hope not? Right? What do you want to have?
Speaker 1: You to know?
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy four a doctor who swallowed one began
Speaker 2: a crusade against them. And this is actually how we
Speaker 2: get the tab that we have today.
Speaker 1: I mean, the thing we have now is genius and
Speaker 1: I actually don't know how we got it. Are you
Speaker 1: about to tell me? I am.
Speaker 2: The solution came from an engineer at Reynold's Metal, so
Speaker 2: they'd been working on this for a while. Danielle Kudzick.
Speaker 2: He says it came to him one night when he
Speaker 2: was watching.
Speaker 1: TV and he had just swallowed a poll tab. I
Speaker 1: have an idea. Why don't you?
Speaker 2: Read from his patent application?
Speaker 1: The opening construction of the invention requires a tab which
Speaker 1: must be stiff against transverse bending, and yet flexible enough
Speaker 1: and tough enough at the connection between the tab and
Speaker 1: wall to permit lifting and retracting the tab without causing
Speaker 1: a fatigue crack at the connection. This is not easy.
Speaker 2: I have thought about this a lot. It's called the
Speaker 2: stay tab, and I've been watching slow motion videos of
Speaker 2: the opening.
Speaker 1: They're all over YouTube. You should really watch it.
Speaker 2: This is an amazing piece of engineering and it actually
Speaker 2: works in two steps. Okay, so the first step is
Speaker 2: it opens. It acts as a sort of like what
Speaker 2: they call like a lever, like a wheelbarrow, where the
Speaker 2: full crum's at the end, and so it opens a
Speaker 2: tiny little hole in the top and it releases the pressure.
Speaker 2: Now at that point, the way this is designed, now
Speaker 2: it's a lever with the full crumb at the little rivet.
Speaker 2: So now that it's like opened a little bit, it
Speaker 2: acts in a different way to open the top in
Speaker 2: a sort of circular way.
Speaker 1: It's so clever. I want to take a moment to
Speaker 1: appreciate how much cleverness there is in the world. We
Speaker 1: are surrounded by cleverness like this that in most cases
Speaker 1: is opaque to us. In this case, it's right in
Speaker 1: front of me. It has been my whole life, and
Speaker 1: I sort of got that it was clever, but until
Speaker 1: you just explained it to me, I never understood how
Speaker 1: subtle and clever it is.
Speaker 2: It's even better than that, because it's all parts of
Speaker 2: the can went through this process. The aluminium in a
Speaker 2: beer can is so thin that it would easily collapse
Speaker 2: except for the pressure that it's under. So the pressure
Speaker 2: is the thing that is making a can incredibly strong.
Speaker 2: You could stand on it and then when you drink it,
Speaker 2: you can crush it. Amazing. Or if you take the
Speaker 2: cans with the vegetables, where's my other can here? Oh,
Speaker 2: they put the ridges on the can. They put the
Speaker 2: ridges on the can so that it doesn't collapse, but
Speaker 2: also so that if the contents expand a little bit
Speaker 2: under heat, there's a little bit of give in the can.
Speaker 1: Incredible.
Speaker 2: I never knew the age of the industrial can company
Speaker 2: peaked in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties. Weirdly enough,
Speaker 2: when Andy Warhol decides to paint those Campbell soup cans
Speaker 2: like as the emblem of modern culture, Sure, all these
Speaker 2: other things will get invented.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: You obviously had refrigeration, frozen food, TV dinners, you had cartons,
Speaker 2: reseealable pouches like you just didn't need to eat meat
Speaker 2: from a can anymore. And you know it's interesting the can,
Speaker 2: as this business history arc, it starts out as such
Speaker 2: an amazing insight, right, an amazing invention that wins a
Speaker 2: prize it's incredibly profitable. At first, it brings in competitors,
Speaker 2: it gets cheaper and cheaper, and then it just becomes
Speaker 2: a commodity. No one ever thinks about it. A can
Speaker 2: like sure, like a half trillion cans are produced every year.
Speaker 2: Half trillion, right, beverage cans, but also the vegetable cans, right,
Speaker 2: half a trilli five hundred billion, Yes, mostly beverage in
Speaker 2: a billion a day. Incredible, ye, incredible, tiny little margins
Speaker 2: on each one. Somebody's making some money. But this is
Speaker 2: not the business that you know, you want to be
Speaker 2: in or have your kids be in. It's just a
Speaker 2: normal commodity business that's out there, and the consumer just
Speaker 2: never thinks about it. You look at the label, what
Speaker 2: you want to eat? You open it up or the
Speaker 2: stuff out, throw the can away. The can is invisible.
Speaker 2: The can is invisible. The great can companies, the American Can,
Speaker 2: Continental Can, they don't exist anymore, or not in their
Speaker 2: their former glory. In nineteen eighty seven, what was left
Speaker 2: of Continental Can became part of the United States Can Company,
Speaker 2: a subsidiary of Inter American Packaging. Okay, American Can had
Speaker 2: an even sadder end in the nineteen eighties, Norman Pel's
Speaker 2: hedge fun guy. He starts rolling up packaging companies. He
Speaker 2: buys a American Cans factory operations and National Can another competitor,
Speaker 2: and that leaves American Can with no cans. America Can
Speaker 2: still exists as a sort of conglomerate. They have these
Speaker 2: other businesses they went into in the vinyl and all
Speaker 2: of this, but they don't have any cans. They have
Speaker 2: no can factories. They renamed themselves America Can't. Oh that's good,
Speaker 2: that's great.
Speaker 1: Uh. No, Primerica so different. America Primerica is the perfect
Speaker 1: late twentieth century company. What do they even do? What
Speaker 1: is Primerica Financial Services?
Speaker 2: Yes, USA, they bought Smith Barney, they became a part
Speaker 2: of City Group. It is perfect, from the candy stores
Speaker 2: of France to being part of a giant financial company.
Speaker 2: I still have this dream that like in the vault
Speaker 2: of the City Group building here in Manhattan, maybe in
Speaker 2: the basement, there's a vault and some banker goes down
Speaker 2: there looking for old mortgage documents or something, and sorting
Speaker 2: through the piles of documents. You know, there's stacks of
Speaker 2: money in the corner, and there underneath the documents is
Speaker 2: a single rusted can. It's veal, veal and gravy, and
Speaker 2: it still tastes great.
Speaker 1: Please email us or leave a comment below. You can
Speaker 1: tell us what you want to hear on the show.
Speaker 1: You can also tell us what is the oldest can
Speaker 1: of food you have in your house? Let me ask you,
Speaker 1: Robert Smith, what's the oldest can of food you have
Speaker 1: in your house?
Speaker 2: I've been thinking about this. The oldest can is from
Speaker 2: about fifteen years ago. It is a canned ham, and
Speaker 2: there's no way I'm ever going to eat it unless
Speaker 2: things get really bad, because like old ham is better
Speaker 2: than no ham at all.
Speaker 1: I also have something fifteen years old. It's from when
Speaker 1: my first daughter was born and she's fifteen. It's a
Speaker 1: can of freeze dried milk, which I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: it's still good.
Speaker 2: Was it the financial crisis that Panick does? So write
Speaker 2: us with your oldest can, send us a picture if
Speaker 2: you like. We are Business History at Pushkin dot fm, or.
Speaker 1: Leave your answer in the comments. If you're watching on YouTube,
Speaker 1: our show today is edited by our showrunner Ryan dilley Man,
Speaker 1: who loves a canna baked beans. Do you love a
Speaker 1: can of bake beans, he gets generic beans. Our engineer
Speaker 1: is Sarah Bruguer and our producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang.
Speaker 1: And I am Jacob Goldstein. I'm Robert Smith. He is
Speaker 1: a business history show, but the history of business. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.