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