The first beverage to be presented in canned form was beer. Bottles of beer were popular, but had their liabilities; they could break, they were heavy and they were offered early in the twentieth century on a return-for-deposit system, which generated additional costs.
Beer bottlers began to explore cans in the late 1920s, but faced a technical challenge: beer is highly reactive with metal, quickly undergoing chemical changes upon contact with it and acquiring a foul taste and smell.
In 1935, Krueger’s Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale became the first ever beverages sold in cans.
In the late 1950s, two major developments changed the design of beverage cans. Ermal Fraze of Dayton, Ohio, developed the first version of the pop-top cans. His idea was to attach a tab that could be used to open cans without a church key.
Other major development was Kaiser Aluminum Company developed an aluminium can. In 1959 the Coors introduced the first all-aluminum beverage can and launched a recycling program, offering a penny for every returned can.
Historically, single steel sheets or continues steel strip were passed through a flux to remove the oxide barrier and thence into a bath of molten tin and the surplus tin was wiped off by pads on exit.
The first successful mass of produced can as a three –piece can in which the body was formed by rolling a tin -coated steel blank into a ribbed cylinder with an overlap side-seam sealed by a lead-tin soldered joint. The circular base was clinch-sealed to the cylinder and the top was also clinch-sealed to it, after filling the can.
History of beverage can
