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Jacob Goldstein (3:00)

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Robert Smith (3:02)

What is this, your first date?

Liberty Mutual Advertiser (3:03)

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Jacob Goldstein (3:10)

Yeah, the bird looks out of your

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Robert Smith (3:15)

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Robert Smith (3:45)

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. And it has a polar expedition trapped in ice. And it is all this entire story packed into this little guy right here.

Jacob Goldstein (4:11)

A can.

Robert Smith (4:12)

A tin can. The tin can is so ubiquitous, so simple, you never think about it. And yet I have thought a lot about 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.

Jacob Goldstein (4:51)

I'm Jacob Goldstein. And this is Business History, a show about the history of business.

Robert Smith (4:56)

Today on the show, not one, not two, but three stories about cans. The can spans 200 years, and I brought along the perfect can for each act. 1. 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 drank it.

Jacob Goldstein (5:37)

Sure.

Robert Smith (5:38)

Let's metaphorically open can number one. Napoleon babycorn and the military culinary complex. So back in the 1790s, Napoleon Bonaparte had a problem invading Russia. Not yet. Not yet. It's before that. His problem was. 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.

Jacob Goldstein (6:14)

I would think it would be the directorette, but apparently it's not the directore, Le Directoire.

Robert Smith (6:18)

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 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, doesn't taste great, right. Once in a while. But if you think six months on beef jerky and pickles, it's bad.

Jacob Goldstein (6:59)

You're not going to be in fighting shape.

Robert Smith (7:01)

Bad for the digestion. And that's what Napoleon realized, was that this wasn't just a logistical problem. This was a morale problem, especially if they're French. They're very demanding about this thing, right? Oh, they had this thing called hardtack. Hardtack is a cracker, thick flour 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 1795, the French government, urged on by Napoleon, decides to do something. The government offers a prize, 12,000 francs, small fortune at the time, for anyone who could come up with a way to preserve large quantities of food.

Jacob Goldstein (7:52)

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? You could figure out latitude by the stars. But longitude was hard. And the British, I guess, early in the 1700s 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 U.S. funded by the U.S. military, basically the U.S. government in the early 21st 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.

Robert Smith (9:01)

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 prize was 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 or someone who worked with the government. It comes from this unlikely hero. His name is Nicolas Francois Appert. Not a biologist, not a chemist. He's a chef, perfect parfait, technically a candy maker, right. He candies, fruits and jams. He's sort of famous in Paris. By all accounts a very jovial guy. Right. He's a candy maker. He's the candyman. 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 1795, Appert 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.

Jacob Goldstein (10:16)

They know bacteria exist, but they don't know germs cause disease. They don't know what's going on.

Robert Smith (10:21)

Yeah, Louis Pasteur hadn't even been born yet, right? He's going to come in 50, 60 years later. So in his candy shop, a pair's 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 in France. They're just lying around. But he's like, and I guess he's

Jacob Goldstein (10:39)

thinking like wine gets preserved. Champagne is preserved when it's in the bottle.

Robert Smith (10:44)

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 there would be, like, meat slurry on the ceiling because his bottles had exploded. And then he has 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 gonna essentially take my jar, fill it up to the very top with meat, seal 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 10 years. 10 years. 10 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.

Jacob Goldstein (12:03)

It's hard to iterate. You can't get that many iterations in a year. Yeah, yeah.

Robert Smith (12:08)

And. And so he figures out that, like, essentially, if you don't boil it enough, it's gonna 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 it appetizing? And it seems to be working at this point, 10 years later. But he has to test it. The most extreme test you can have for a can of food. In 1806, he goes to the French navy with an experiment. He packs 18 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 voila. Increable. 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 1809, the Society of Encouragement gathers. They eat his summer peas in the middle of winter, and they declare Appert the winner. Napoleon personally approves the prize payment, but there is a catch. Appert had a dream of becoming very rich on his discovery. He's not a scientist. He's a businessman. He runs a shop. Right. He had already started to sell glass preserved foods at Maison d', Appert, 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.

Jacob Goldstein (14:19)

That's what the money is for. Yeah, that's what the prize is for. They're buying it from him.

Robert Smith (14:23)

They do give him a choice, and a pair says, fine, I will take the money. And he wrote a book which you can read to this day. I, like, 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.

Jacob Goldstein (14:57)

It's a canning cookbook.

Robert Smith (14:58)

It's an exact canning cookbook. Here, read a little bit about the summer peas.

Jacob Goldstein (15:02)

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.

Robert Smith (15:10)

Yeah, it depends on the weather.

Jacob Goldstein (15:11)

I love that. Well, this is 10 years of experimentation talking.

Robert Smith (15:15)

This guy knows. Right. And so at this point, like, Appert is pretty famous in France. He publishes this book. Napoleon now has his wagons filled with canned peas. They call it Food a la Appert. So Appert 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 Nicolas Appert. After the break, the military weapon of preserved food leaks to France's enemies. It's jars versus tins on the battlefield.

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Liberty Mutual Advertiser (18:23)

and Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

Jacob Goldstein (18:33)

Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird.

Robert Smith (18:35)

What is this, your first date?

Liberty Mutual Advertiser (18:36)

Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

Jacob Goldstein (18:43)

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways.

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Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty

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Jacob Goldstein (19:33)

Okay, we're back from the break. It is time now for the story of can number two.

Robert Smith (19:38)

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 on 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 patent 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, Nicolas Appert. 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 Durand.

Jacob Goldstein (20:39)

So is he like a 19th century patent troll, just piling up intellectual property? Does he start suing people?

Robert Smith (20:45)

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. It does not say who the unnamed foreigner is, but at this point, England and 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 Nicolas Appert? 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 1000 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 had developed the first machinery to make paper. I know people had handmade paper, right? And he's the one that like, said, no, you can have giant machines to make paper.

Jacob Goldstein (21:52)

Seems remarkably late, but I guess not. Cause the Industrial Revolution had just come along, right? Everything was handmade until basically then.

Robert Smith (21:58)

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 at 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.

Jacob Goldstein (22:38)

This is an important idea. You hear it all the time now from people starting companies. This idea that we think about, the, the breakthrough, the prototype. But in fact, going from the prototype, which is sort of where France 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.

Robert Smith (23:07)

Yeah. And in fact, we think about patents, right. As this protection for the inventor. But it's more than that. Like patents are a way for someone to have a protection while they do what you're talking about, while they perfect the technology and make it actually happen.

Jacob Goldstein (23:22)

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.

Robert Smith (23:37)

Yeah. Coca Cola didn't patent the precise instructions famous for Coca Cola.

Jacob Goldstein (23:41)

So the patent is a trade off. You get to own the intellectual property for a fixed amount of time. And then everybody knows.

Robert Smith (23:47)

Now Brian Duncan has to actually make this happen at scale. They decide they're gonna 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 Donkin Partners, Gamble and Hall, I believe it was Duncan Gamble and Hall or Duncan hall and Gamble, something like that, they take this suspicious patent 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, it makes it strong, it's cheap. Right. But you have this non reactive tin coating so that everything doesn't taste like iron. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so in 1812, 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.

Jacob Goldstein (25:00)

What do they look like?

Robert Smith (25:01)

They are 4 to 20 pounds a piece. They have thick soldered seams of lead. They're about the size of a paint can. And Duncan can make six of them per hour.

Jacob Goldstein (25:12)

Technology, I mean, it's, it's not going to feed the world yet.

Robert Smith (25:17)

It's going to get better, right? But Duncan is already thinking like a marketer. So as soon as he's got this giant kettlebell filled with meat, he sends it off to the Duke of Wellington and the Royal family. You know, you got to 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, and they love it. They love it. The Royal family's 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, Nicolas Appert. Legend. He tried to stay in the canning business. He built a factory in the town of Massy, outside Paris in France. He was making a go at marketing the technology. He was even experimenting with square cans.

Jacob Goldstein (26:23)

Oh, la la.

Robert Smith (26:24)

I know. Easier to stack, easier to ship.

Jacob Goldstein (26:27)

Ikea. I feel like IKEA should be making square cans. Flat pack cans.

Robert Smith (26:31)

It has more weak points, I know, but, but, you know, a pair is like trying to make this happen. But in 1814, 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 changed 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 1841. He was poor. He was buried in a pauper's grave. But we hope he's perfectly preserved. So Duncan's already thinking bigger than Nicolas Hepper, who's still over in France. And he realizes that, 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 Duncan'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, like, 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 hustle the ship captains to take some aboard, right? And he's like, when you're in the latitudes in the South Sea, you can bring a little bit of British meat with you. Duggan's company also sells the cans to what I consider the influencer of the 1800s. I am referring, of course, to the explorer. Oh, you know, with the. With the hat, the pith helmet, and the little. And the. And the khakis. Right now at this point, explorers are really starting to make progress in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Jacob Goldstein (29:00)

Not so much the pith helmet and khaki.

Robert Smith (29:03)

I picture them up there, right? No, no, they have the fur covered in the fur.

Jacob Goldstein (29:07)

Yeah.

Robert Smith (29:07)

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 influencer. These people were famous, and they would be out on the ice for several years. You wouldn't know what's gonna 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 Donkey and his company send their tinned veal stew to one of the most famous explorers of the time, Sir Joseph Banks, he had sailed 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. And this man, new discoveries, he knew discoveries.

Jacob Goldstein (29:56)

It is a real breakthrough. We're kind of making fun of it, but it's real.

Robert Smith (29:59)

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.

Jacob Goldstein (30:14)

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, cause you wouldn't eat fresh food all winter. So that by the time spring came, everybody would be kind of sick.

Robert Smith (30:35)

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 tin. William Perry is in the Arctic on his ship, HMS Fury. Love those names, HMS Fury and as often happen, maybe happen every time, they get trapped in the ice floes, right? The ice starts to crush the ship and they decide they have to abandon ship, go over, 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 them 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 gets 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 this. Because they're heavy, they take one of these cans back to London to show everyone the can saved our lives. And you can still see the can at the Science Museum in London.

Jacob Goldstein (31:59)

Is the meat still good?

Robert Smith (32:01)

Great question. In the 1930s, so this is like 100 years after it was canned, right? In the 1930s, scientists open it for analysis. To quote them, it was in perfect condition.

Jacob Goldstein (32:15)

Did they eat it?

Robert Smith (32:17)

They did not eat it. They reportedly fed it to Laboratory mice and a cat, all of which survived. Okay, yay.

Jacob Goldstein (32:26)

Until the message was eaten by the cat.

Robert Smith (32:28)

That does happen. They can't. The scientists can't prevent nature. Right? So Dankin, 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 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.

Jacob Goldstein (33:09)

Especially industrial food.

Robert Smith (33:11)

That's another level of trust required, which really didn't exist. Right. So 1852. Unfortunately for the can industry, the newspapers are filled with the great can scandal.

Jacob Goldstein (33:23)

Putting the can back into the scandal.

Robert Smith (33:25)

The S. Candle scandal. Right. A group of meat inspectors were opening cans bound for the Royal Navy. First can rotted, second can spoiled. It wasn't until the 19th 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 possibly find into these cans? Jacob, I want you to read from the newspaper coverage at the time.

Jacob Goldstein (34:11)

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.

Robert Smith (34:28)

And those weren't even on the. On the paper. On the outside of the can't even

Jacob Goldstein (34:31)

say garbage or putridity. On the list of ingredients, apparently they

Robert Smith (34:36)

even found a dog's tongue. Oh. They traced the problem back to Romania or Moldova, depending on which source 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, testimonials. Can pain. No, 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 fairs and expos. There's stunts like they had this public dinner prepared solely from canned meats that only cost a penny for you to come and eat. Yeah, I know, right? And as we talked about last week in our show about the grocery chain A and P, this is the bir of the brand. They're really starting to signal there are no dog tongues in this can.

Jacob Goldstein (35:41)

Well, a brand is truly valuable in this context.

Robert Smith (35:45)

Yeah.

Jacob Goldstein (35:45)

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.

Robert Smith (36:12)

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.

Jacob Goldstein (36:24)

The Virginia Slims of cans.

Robert Smith (36:26)

Exactly. For men. Jack Tar Brand and Sailors Savories.

Apple Card Advertiser (36:34)

Oh, manly canly.

Robert Smith (36:36)

Yeah. Go down to the pub and have some sealers. Ses. And perhaps most importantly of all, in the marketing of the can, they developed the can opener.

Jacob Goldstein (36:48)

Wait, it's been decades. I didn't even think of the can opener. What were they doing before this? How did you open a can before the can opener?

Robert Smith (36:55)

50 years since the first trip.

Jacob Goldstein (36:57)

How did you open a can for 50 years?

Robert Smith (37:00)

So it boggles the mind. On some of the cans, they had instructions which were, get a hammer and a chisel and just like, donk, donk, donk, dunk, dunk, dunk to open the can.

Jacob Goldstein (37:13)

I am aghast.

Robert Smith (37:16)

It does.

Jacob Goldstein (37:16)

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 gonna be invented, they're like, how did you go so long without the thing to use the thing?

Robert Smith (37:31)

What would it be?

Jacob Goldstein (37:31)

I don't know.

Robert Smith (37:32)

You know, I was thinking about all the cords and everything, and I know they're starting to solve that with the just placing something down and having it charged.

Jacob Goldstein (37:39)

I have this dream of where you're just in an electric field where your thing 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?

Robert Smith (37:52)

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 1800s. 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.

Jacob Goldstein (38:17)

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's gonna think I would take the time.

Robert Smith (38:25)

My hammer is way over there. My chisel. Who has my chise? The first can opener was developed by Ezra Warner, and I saw a picture of it. It looks like basically a piece of metal with a little hook on it. It looks a little bit like the kind of can openers you get at a camping store.

Jacob Goldstein (38:44)

Those are terrible can openers, where you have to kind of hook it. Every time. There is no wiggle.

Robert Smith (38:48)

Hook it.

Jacob Goldstein (38:48)

You're sawing the can and all the sharp edges.

Robert Smith (38:51)

Oh, so sharp. So once you do this, it's not just that the edge is sharp, but it's jagged and sharp.

Jacob Goldstein (38:58)

It's extremely hard to open a can open. I would ra. They use a hammer and chisel.

Robert Smith (39:01)

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.

Jacob Goldstein (39:11)

Oh, genius.

Robert Smith (39:12)

Yeah, I'm having peas tonight. The rotary design didn't come until 1870,

Jacob Goldstein (39:16)

and it's such a beautiful tool.

Robert Smith (39:19)

So good.

Jacob Goldstein (39:19)

It has the two little gears and the handle. I love a can opener.

Robert Smith (39:24)

By the end of the 1800s, 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, you know, 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.

Jacob Goldstein (40:01)

I thought it was the can opener.

Robert Smith (40:03)

No, the stuff inside the condensed milk made by Borden in 1856. 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

Jacob Goldstein (40:19)

condensed milk, because, again, refrigeration, cold Chains still not a thing. If you live in a city,

Apple Card Advertiser (40:26)

it's

Jacob Goldstein (40:26)

hard to get milk. They used to have, I think it was cows in Central park in Manhattan.

Robert Smith (40:32)

For the milk.

Jacob Goldstein (40:33)

For the milk, if I recall correctly. Like they would give it to the children or something.

Robert Smith (40:37)

Campbell's Soup, 1895.

Jacob Goldstein (40:40)

Uh huh.

Robert Smith (40:41)

Same here. Our can of Heinz Baked Beans. It's a US company, but a year later they debut it in the uk and for reasons I will never understand, the British decide to eat it for breakfast with sausage and tomatoes.

Jacob Goldstein (40:55)

Seems incredible.

Robert Smith (40:56)

It's a whole. It's a whole thing, right? Full English. We'll be back in a minute with one more can.

Jacob Goldstein (41:24)

Robert Smith. It is time for our story to arrive in 20th century America, USA.

Robert Smith (41:31)

Development of the aluminum beer can. The silver bullet on the corporate battlefield.

Jacob Goldstein (41:39)

See what you did there.

Robert Smith (41:40)

By the 20th century, food cans looked 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 1800s 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.

Jacob Goldstein (42:16)

And just a thousand miles away.

Robert Smith (42:18)

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

Jacob Goldstein (42:35)

and you have an economy of scale at some margin emerging for food.

Robert Smith (42:40)

So as the scale grows, it is perhaps inevitable that a behemoth will emerge on March 20, 1901. It's kind of amazing this happened on one day. A bunch of rich people finally pull off their plan to combine 90% of America's tin can manufacturers into one giant. Do they call it Canco? They do not. They call it the American Can Company.

Jacob Goldstein (43:08)

I love those turn of the 20th century names. You just say what the company does. U.S. steel American Can Company. I mean, American was right there. 100 years later, 100%, they would have called it American. Who can you can American. Thank you for calling it The American Can Company.

Robert Smith (43:27)

123 factories from Brooklyn to Seattle. And even in the emerging age of monopolies, this one was huge. People called it the Tin Can Trust.

Jacob Goldstein (43:36)

Yes, this was the trust era. And weirdly, even though antitrust laws had been Passed a few decades before this. This was this era when they were essentially not enforced. Was this a J.P. morgan move?

Robert Smith (43:48)

This sounds extremely J.P. morgan, J.P. morgan wannabes. But it was a dream team of capitalists. You had William the Judge Moore, he was an actual judge at some point who created trusts like the National Biscuit Company, Nabisco and Diamond Match still exists.

Jacob Goldstein (44:05)

Yeah, there's some Match King story that somebody told me to do. Put it on the list.

Robert Smith (44:10)

On the list you had Daniel the Czar Reed. I don't know why it was called that. He was the steel baron. William Leeds, who was the tin plate king. William Tin Plate Leeds, Tinny. And someone who actually knew how to make food in a can.

Jacob Goldstein (44:25)

Helpful.

Robert Smith (44:25)

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 want it to close on this one date.

Jacob Goldstein (44:38)

Tanufacturers. Can't stop, won't stop, keep going.

Robert Smith (44:42)

The team already controlled much of the tin supply. So it was, you know, a carrot stick situation with 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 was promise that they could not re enter the can business for 15 years.

Jacob Goldstein (45:09)

It's so anti competitive.

Robert Smith (45:11)

123 factories. They did some calculations afterwards and, 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.

Jacob Goldstein (45:21)

But then they would have had to compete.

Robert Smith (45:23)

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. 70% of the factories were just like, you're out of business, close them down, fire everybody and then jack up prices.

Jacob Goldstein (45:41)

What do you do? You suppress supply and you raise prices.

Robert Smith (45:44)

Book. We've talked about monopolies that are they really. Monopoly. This was a monopoly.

Jacob Goldstein (45:48)

They're leaning into it. They're the guy with the top hat on the board game.

Robert Smith (45:52)

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, raised prices. But at that point now it is much more profitable to get into the can business.

Jacob Goldstein (46:08)

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.

Robert Smith (46:32)

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 them 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 contract, 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.

Jacob Goldstein (47:16)

Could have gone with Cantonal. Keep going.

Robert Smith (47:18)

By 1905, it was American canned 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 fisticuffs.

Jacob Goldstein (47:44)

Presumably, that's good for consumers. I mean, two doesn't seem like enough to me.

Apple Card Advertiser (47:49)

Two.

Jacob Goldstein (47:49)

I feel like you could still have 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.

Robert Smith (48:01)

It's a duopoly. There's two big ones, but there's lots of little ones.

Jacob Goldstein (48:03)

Yeah.

Robert Smith (48:04)

And in fact, 10 years later, the US government, slow as they are, like, huh? Can Monopoly. There's one thing we've learned in the show. If there's one thing we've learned in this show, it's that the government is so slow to respond to what's going on in competition. Right. It takes them 10 years to get all their briefs together. So this goes before a judge and it's against American Can. It has nothing to do with Continental Can. Clearly, American can acted like the Mafia. They intentionally tried to dominate the industry. Screw the little guy. But the judge determines they didn't really pull it off. He said that the current state of competition with the new entrance and the Continental can. He said it was like basically fine. He decides not to take a hammer and chisel to the company.

Jacob Goldstein (48:49)

Well done.

Robert Smith (48:49)

He wrote that he was reluctant to destroy so finely adjusted an industrial machine. I'm fine. You think they bribed him?

Jacob Goldstein (48:59)

I don't know. There was a dude named the judge who started the company. I'm just saying.

Robert Smith (49:05)

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 wanna 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 that oxygen better.

Jacob Goldstein (49:35)

Presumably the fact that it's harder to break a can matters. Country's getting bigger. You're transporting beer more.

Robert Smith (49:41)

Yeah, 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 weakened cans apart. It was sort of a yeast fueled explosive device. Apparently the pressure in a beer can is twice that of a car tire. Who knew? Who knew? American Cans started to work on this in 1909. They wouldn't solve it till after prohibition. They were secretly working on it in 1935. The answer was something they called the keg liner. Each tin distant for beer was lined with a form of plastic. 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 vinylite. Plastic. Vinyl plastic was eventually used in another famous product.

Jacob Goldstein (50:39)

The siding on my house.

Robert Smith (50:41)

That too. But the vinyl record.

Jacob Goldstein (50:43)

Oh yeah, we're fine. Vinyl.

Robert Smith (50:45)

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 Kruger Beer Company of Newark, New Jersey to release the first canned beer. American can offered to put in the canning equipment for free. And Kruger would only have to pay if it was a success. And the very first can of beer, it looked just like a vegetable can. Steel and tin sold individually. And American can was thinking about this. Cause 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.

Jacob Goldstein (51:36)

We used to do this for canned orange juice when we went 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.

Robert Smith (51:48)

I guess they didn't know if any of this was gonna work, so they sent the first batch to Richmond, Virginia, figuring out, well, if it's a flop in Richmond, no one's going to hear about it in New York City. This is.

Jacob Goldstein (51:58)

They did that with credit cards in Fresno. Yeah, the first credit card they sent to Fresno.

Robert Smith (52:02)

I was thinking about this. I don't know if there are still test markets because everyone knows everything happening interesting all the time. Interesting. 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.

Jacob Goldstein (52:20)

So what happened?

Robert Smith (52:21)

People loved it. People 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.

Jacob Goldstein (52:30)

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 beer.

Robert Smith (52:43)

Yeah.

Jacob Goldstein (52:43)

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 shop to get your deposit.

Robert Smith (52:52)

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. No problem, America, right? Kruger Sales went up. The beer company went up 550%. 180,000 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 was essentially a metal bottle that you could run through the machines and put the caps on.

Jacob Goldstein (53:31)

I wonder why that didn't survive, because that seems easier to drink out of than the church Key style.

Robert Smith (53:36)

Probably just more expensive.

Apple Card Advertiser (53:38)

Oh, yeah.

Jacob Goldstein (53:38)

And I guess you can't stack them to your earlier point.

Robert Smith (53:41)

And of course, it would be the 1960s, after the can had turned aluminum, that they would figure out how to put an opener into the can itself.

Jacob Goldstein (53:52)

This was the deadly version, right? The version that I still remember occasionally seeing when I was a kid. Tecate Beer. I lived in Southern California and Tecate Beer still had that old 1960s style warehouse. There's a little ring, and you put your finger in the ring 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.

Robert Smith (54:28)

I'm a little older than you, and when I was growing up, the gutters of the city were filled with these little can tops, 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 would drink beer at the beach. They would toss these little pieces of metal and you would step on them on the beach. Famous Jimmy Buffett song. Stepped on a pop top. Oh, didn't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was like a danger of the time. It gets worse because you knew this was happening. You didn't want a 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 pull top. In fact, there was an article in Pediatric Emergency Care called Swallowed Can Tab. Is it still stuck in the esophagus?

Jacob Goldstein (55:30)

I hope not. Or do you hope so? No, you hope not. Right. What do you want to have?

Robert Smith (55:34)

I don't know. In 1974, a doctor who swallowed one began a crusade against them. And this is actually how we get the tab that we have today.

Jacob Goldstein (55:43)

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?

Robert Smith (55:48)

I am. The solution came from an engineer at Reynolds Metals. So they'd been working on this for a while. Daniel Kudzik. He says it came to him one night when he was watching TV and

Jacob Goldstein (55:59)

he had just swallowed a pull tab.

Robert Smith (56:01)

I have an idea. Why don't you read from his patent Application.

Jacob Goldstein (56:06)

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.

Robert Smith (56:27)

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 fulcrum'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 fulcrum 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.

Jacob Goldstein (57:13)

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. 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.

Robert Smith (57:37)

It's even better than that because it's all parts of the can went through this process. The aluminum 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.

Jacob Goldstein (58:14)

I never knew.

Robert Smith (58:15)

The age of the industrial can company peaked in the 1950s and the 1960s. 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, resealable pouches. Like, you just didn't need to eat meat from a can any anymore. And 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. Mostly beverage cans, but also the vegetable cans, right? Right. Half a trillion. 500 billion, yes, mostly beverages.

Jacob Goldstein (59:11)

More than a billion a day.

Robert Smith (59:13)

Incredible. 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, pour 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 former glory. In 1987, 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 1980s, Norman Pels, hedge fund guy, he starts rolling up packaging companies. He buys American Cans, factory operations and national can, another competitor. And that leaves American can with no cans. American Cans still exists as a sort of conglomerate. They have these other businesses they went into and the vinyl and all of this, but they don't have any cans. They have no can factories. They rename themselves Americant. Oh, that's good. That's great. No, Primerica. So disappointed.

Jacob Goldstein (60:30)

Primerica. Primerica is the perfect late 20th century company. What do they even do? What is Primerica?

Robert Smith (60:35)

Financial Services. Yes, yes.

Jacob Goldstein (60:38)

Usa.

Robert Smith (60:39)

They bought Smith Barney. They became a part of Citigroup. 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 Citigroup building here in Manhattan, maybe in the basement, there's a vault and. And some banker goes down there looking for old mortgage documents or something, and he's 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.

Jacob Goldstein (61:17)

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?

Robert Smith (61:28)

I've been thinking about this. The oldest can is from about 15 years ago. It is a canned ham and there's no way I'm ever gonna eat it unless things get really bad. Cause like old ham is better than no ham at all.

Jacob Goldstein (61:41)

I also have something 15 years old. It's from when my first daughter was born and she's 15. It's a can of freeze dried milk which I'm not sure if it's still good.

Robert Smith (61:52)

Was it the financial crisis that panicked us? So write us with your oldest can. Send us a picture if you like. We are business historyUshkin FM.

Jacob Goldstein (62:01)

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 can of baked beans. Do you love a can of baked beans?

Robert Smith (62:11)

He gets generic beans.

Jacob Goldstein (62:12)

Our engineer is Sarah Bruguer and our producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang. And I am Jacob Goldstein.

Robert Smith (62:18)

I'm Robert Smith.

Jacob Goldstein (62:19)

This is Business History show about the history of business.

Robert Smith (62:22)

Thanks for listening.