The Inconvenient Way Canned Food Used To Be Opened

Most kitchens today are filled with all sorts of devices that make our lives easier — and we too often take them for granted. Air fryers and microwaves are typical recipients of praise when we look around and appreciate how convenient it is to live in our times, but less conspicuous gadgets like the humble can opener deserve recognition as well. Before it existed, folks were left with a much more primal method of opening their canned goods.

Canned food started gaining popularity during the 1840s, but back then, cans were generally produced using wrought iron lined with tin. Because they were so solid and bulky, the can openers of today wouldn't stand a chance of penetrating the cans of yesteryear, even if they had been invented at the time. To open up a can of food, you instead had to reach for a hammer and chisel, pounding away at the iron until the contents were revealed.

That obviously wasn't a convenient way to obtain some salty canned soup, but more user-friendly options were on the horizon. When manufacturers stopped using wrought iron for canned goods, new possibilities emerged for easy to access the inside.

Just as the practice of manufacturing beverage containers with pull tabs went by the wayside with the invention of the stay-on tab, the hammer and chisel method of opening cans was replaced once those vessels were fashioned more economically. Ezra J. Warner patented the first can opener in 1858 when cans were starting to be produced using thinner steel. However, his invention wasn't like the can openers we use now. It was essentially a blade that folks would use saw into the lid, leaving behind an ugly, potentially sharp edge.

The design was used by the U.S. Army during the American Civil War, but consumers weren't thrilled about the device as the jagged edge left by the first can opener was less than ideal. Through human ingenuity, it was soon replaced by something more akin to the can openers of today that used a rotary cutter. By the 1920s, Charles Arthur Bunker invented the contemporary toothed-wheel-crank design. He is the person you can thank the next time you open up some flavorful canned veggies with ease.