It's in a Can!

While Borden was finding ways to condense milk, others were finding ways to can food for year round use.  Canning was actually invented by a Frenchman, Nichols Appert, a chef and winemaker.  He invented the cooking and sealing process in 19th century Europe.  It took just a few improvements to bring that process into the 20th century canning industry.

In the 1840s Americans were canning corn, tomatoes, peas and fish for travel to the West.  In Baltimore, oyster, crabs and fish canning was still very primitive and sometimes whole seasons were lost to mistakes.  The canning process with boiling water took six hours to complete so that only 3,000 cans a day could be produced.  The demand far outweighed the means to produce enough to meet those demands. 

The Civil War took over Borden's condensed milk for the Union Army, but more food in cans was needed.  A faster process had to be found.  It was discovered that if calcium chloride was added to the water the temperature for boiling could be raised from 212 degrees to 240 degrees.  Issac Solomon, of Baltimore, cut his processing time from six hours to one-half hour using this idea.

During the war, soldiers had their first taste of canned food.  Word spread across the country, but the canning industry was basically located near the ocean.  The production increased, but large scale canning required large scale containers.  The original Appert process used glass jars, but from Europe came another invention, the tin can. The cans were made by hand, and tinsmiths could craft a mere 60 a day. 

Americans took the tin can idea and ran with it in the early 19th century, making machines that could turn our thousands of cans a day.  With tops and bottoms  that could be soldered on, it seemed like the answer to American's demand for canned food.  In 1880 a single machine could turn out 1500 cans a day.

Tinsmiths, however, saw their jobs being eliminated and began a campaign to discredit machine-made cans as causing health problems.  They claimed that the solder that was used was poisonous. For a time, the public refused to buy machine-made canned food.  But by the 1920s more than a billion and a half pounds of tin plate was being made into cans.  The tin can began to play a new leading role in every American kitchen...

Next time...Spam (well almost)
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On Sept 3, 1862, President Lincoln proclaims an official Thanksgiving holiday.  The 4th Thursday on November was designated as an official U.S holiday, referring back to George Washington as President called for a "day of public Thanksgiving and prayer."  The 4th Thursday holiday remained until 1939 when President Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the 3rd Thursday on November in order to let shoppers and merchants more time to get ready for Christmas.