History of the canned food
Canning is a method of preserving food in which the food is processed and sealed in an airtight container.
The canning process is a product of the Napoleonic wars. Malnutrition was rampant among the 18th century French army.
Since Napoleon prepared for his Russian campaign, he searched for a new and better means of preserving food for his troops and offered a prize of 12,000 francs to anyone who could find one. Nicolas Appert, a Parisian candy maker, was awarded the prize in 1809. Tinned Food Canning started in jars.
The process was invented in France in 1795 by
Nicholas Appert, known also as the father of the tin a chef. He was a seller of cakes. After some years of experimentations, Appert registered his invention and winned the prize in 1809.
Canned meats and vegetables in jars sealed with pitch and by 1804 he opened his first vacuum-packing plant. The house of Appert was the first factory of tins in the world.
On 1810, Pierre Durand, french entrepeuneur, patented the use of tin-coated iron cans instead of bottles, and by 1820 he was supplying canned food to the Royal Navy in large quantities.
He had the patent from the King Giorgio III of England for his idea about the canning of food "in glass, pottery, aluminium and other metals". The patent of Durand was based on 15 years of experimentations of Appert who developed the idea of preserve the food in bottles.
Durand developed the idea ofAppert e done a further step forward, replacing the fragile glass bottles with cylindrical tins in aluminium, so giving the idea to two english men, Bryan Donkin e John Hall, starting with a factory of preserves e during 1813 they opened the first commercial canning factory in England working for the english army.
Donkin had by now become a partner in John Hall's firm and had become interested in the problem of canning food in metal containers. After various experiments, he acquired Philippe de Girard's patent in 1812 for the sum of £1000 and in association with Hall and Gamble he set up a canning factory in Bermondsey, the first cannery to use tinned iron containers. Donkin applied to the British Admiralty for a test of his product and the first sizable orders were placed in 1814 with the firm of Donkin, Hall and Gamble for meat preserved in tinned iron canisters. The firm of Donkin, Hall and Gamble was later merged into Crosse & Blackwells.
In 1846, Henry Evans invents a machine that can manufacture tin cans at a rate of sixty per hour. An significant increase over the previous rate of only six per hour.
A number of inventions and improvements followed, and by the 1860's, the time it took to process food in a can had been reduced from six hours to 30 minutes. Canned foods were soon commonplace. Tin-coated steel is used today.
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