The Can Came Almost Fifty Years Before the Can Opener

In the 1820s, a sailor on a British Arctic expedition could pick up a tin of roast veal and find the opening instructions printed right on it. Cut around the top near the outer edge, they said, with a hammer and chisel.

That was the can opener. A hammer and a chisel. If you were a soldier, a bayonet. If you were unlucky, a rock.

Peter Durand patented the tin can in England in 1810. A dedicated can opener didn't get an American patent until 1858. For almost fifty years, people opened their dinner the way you'd break into a safe.

Hold that gap in your head, because it's how ordinary things actually arrive. One man has the idea. A second man makes it work. Somebody after him makes it cheap enough that you never think about it again. Your kitchen drawer, your garage and your coat closet are full of things that needed all three. The second guy almost never gets the statue.

A can built like a cannonball

The gap wasn't laziness. Early cans were thick, heavy wrought iron, made for navies and armies on long voyages. Nobody imagined a family opening one at the kitchen table. When manufacturers moved to thinner steel in the middle of the century, a hand tool finally made sense.

Ezra Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut, patented his in 1858. It looked like a bayonet that had a disagreement with a sickle. You jabbed the point into the lid and sawed your way around, which is about as safe as it sounds. Union troops used it in the Civil War, and plenty of men must have finished a meal with a bandaged thumb.

Then William Lyman, also of Connecticut, patented a better idea in 1870: a cutting wheel that rolled around the rim. It still asked a lot of you. You had to punch a spike through the center of the lid to anchor the thing before you could start turning.

The fix that finished the job came in 1925, when the Star Can Opener Company of San Francisco added a serrated wheel that gripped the rim while the blade cut. Look at the manual opener in your drawer. That's the 1925 design, more or less untouched for a hundred years.

And then there's the P-38. In 1942, the Army's Subsistence Research Laboratory in Chicago developed a folding opener about an inch and a half long to go with C-rations. Men threaded it onto their dog-tag chains. A lot of them never took it off. Ask an old soldier if he still has his and watch his hand go to his key ring. The popular story says it's called the P-38 because it took 38 punctures to open a ration can. Nobody's ever proven that, but nobody's been able to kill it either.

A cloth machine meets the grass

Before 1830, a lawn was cut by a man with a scythe or kept down by sheep. A good scythe man went out early, while the dew stiffened the blades and made a clean cut possible. It was skilled work, and a short lawn was something only an estate could afford.

Edwin Budding was an engineer in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in the English wool country. In a local mill he watched a machine that used blades mounted on a spinning cylinder to shear the fuzz off woolen cloth and leave it smooth. He looked at it and thought about grass.

He patented his mower in 1830 with a partner, John Ferrabee, and by 1832 Ransomes of Ipswich was building them under license. The patent made a cheerful pitch to country gentlemen, who would supposedly find running the machine themselves "an amusing, useful and healthy exercise." Any man who's mowed in August will agree with one of those three words.

The early machines were cast iron and brutally heavy. Bigger models needed a second man pulling at the front, and the largest needed a horse, which wore leather boots so its hooves wouldn't tear up the turf. Gasoline mowers came along in the early 1900s. After World War II, the power rotary mower followed millions of families into new suburbs, and the lawn stopped being an aristocrat's luxury. It became the Saturday chore of the guy who'd just bought his first house on a GI loan.

That's a real democratic achievement, and it started with a man who paid attention in somebody else's factory.

The widower who wouldn't let it pop open

Whitcomb Judson of Chicago patented a "clasp locker" in 1893, a chain of hooks and eyes meant to replace the tedious work of buttoning high boots. It was clever, and it didn't work. It jammed. Worse, it sprang open on its own, and a fastener you can't trust is worse than no fastener at all.

Judson's company kept trying, and in 1906 it hired a young Swedish-born electrical engineer named Gideon Sundback. He married Elvira Aronson, the daughter of the plant manager. In 1911 she died. Sundback buried himself in the problem that had beaten everybody else.

By 1913 he had it. He dropped the hooks entirely and designed rows of small interlocking teeth, each with a tiny cup on one side and a scoop on the other, packed about ten to the inch and pressed together by a slider. It held. His patent for the "separable fastener" was granted in 1917.

And then he did the part that history tends to skip. He designed the machine to manufacture it. A fastener you can only make by hand is a curiosity. One you can make by the mile is an industry. That's the difference between an invention and a thing you own.

Even then, it took years. Early buyers used it on items like money belts. In 1923, B.F. Goodrich put the fasteners on rubber galoshes and named them for the sound they made: zipper. Clothing makers held out until the 1930s, and Sundback's company eventually took the name Talon. Robert Friedel's book Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty (1994) tells the whole slow, stubborn story, and it's worth your time if you like this sort of thing.

Be the second guy

Every one of these stories has the same hinge. Durand's can was useless without Warner, and Warner's knife was dangerous without Lyman and Star. Judson's idea was a nuisance until Sundback. Budding took a cloth-mill machine and pointed it at a lawn. The Wright brothers did a version of this with flight. Gliders already existed, but they solved control when the experts were looking elsewhere.

You'll inherit half-working things your whole life. A process at work, a house somebody else wired, a family business, a church fundraiser, a youth team with no equipment list. The lazy move is to complain about whoever came before you. The useful move is Sundback's.

• Find the jam. Judson's fastener didn't need a new concept. It needed to stop popping open. Name the single failure and fix that first.
• Fix how it gets made, not just the thing. Sundback's machine mattered as much as his teeth. If your solution only works when you personally do it, you haven't finished.
• Steal from the next room. Budding's breakthrough was in a textile mill. The answer to your problem is often sitting in another trade.
• Hand it back better. That's the old code for a borrowed truck, and it holds for a borrowed idea. Lyman didn't throw out Warner's blade. He put it on a wheel.

One more thing you can do tonight. Give your kid a manual can opener and a can of beans and let them work it. Then tell them it took the country almost fifty years to come up with what they're holding. It's a better lesson in patience than a lecture, and you get dinner out of it.

The men who built your ordinary Tuesday weren't all geniuses. A lot of them were just the second guy, the one who refused to accept "almost works."

The first man gets the patent. The second man gets your Tuesday.