How it began
Nicolas Appert, a confectioner and chef in Paris, began experimenting with ways to preserve food in 1795, the year the French government offered a prize of 12,000 francs for a method to store food safely for its armies. He succeeded with soups, vegetables, juices, dairy products, jams, and syrups. In 1804 his establishment at Massy, near Paris, became the first food bottling factory in the world. In 1810 he received the prize and published his method, as the award required.
Before it existed
Food could be dried, smoked, fermented, or pickled, but none of these methods was certain to be safe and they did not preserve flavor. French and English armies lived on salted meat and hardtack. It is believed that heating food in sealed jars was already done in some households, but Appert was the first to do it on an industrial scale.
How it works
Appert placed food in glass jars, at first champagne bottles, closed them with cork and sealing wax, wrapped them in canvas, and heated them in boiling water. As the containers cool, a vacuum seal forms that keeps other microorganisms out. He concluded that the two most important factors were complete deprivation of contact with outside air and the application of heat in a water bath. Appert could never explain why his method worked. His reasoning centered on removing air from food. It was more than 50 years before Louis Pasteur's research revealed the link between microorganisms and food spoilage.
How it spread
About 1806 the French Navy successfully tried Appert's principles on a wide range of foods, including meat, vegetables, fruit, and milk. His 1810 book was titled The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years. In the same year the Englishman Peter Durand received a patent for the tin can, refining the idea. In 2013 the Can Manufacturers Institute estimated that the United States and Europe went through 40 billion cans a year.
