Hacker News Reader

Comment by jscheel | Hacker News Reader

My grandpa designed the bottom of modern beverage cans. The reason for that shape is two-fold. First, the bulge is for pressure resistance. Second, the rest of the design was created specifically for the optimal application of the epoxy spray that prevents your drink from developing a metallic taste. Unfortunately, he didn't patent his work and Anheuser Busch ultimately took his idea for themselves. Never prevented them from being his client though, for other seamless can tooling work.

View on HN

If your grandfather is still with us, please can you persuade him to share his story with the world "the man who designed the beer can" has got to be one of my must reads :-)

Edit: of course if he no longer is, my condolences, but please tell us what you can remember.

Seconded; please share the story, or if your grandfather feels like it, maybe do an AMA on Reddit. That will be one hell of an amazing read! :).

I'll ask him and see if he's up for it.

I'm in the process of recording my grandpa talking about his life. He actually doesn't say much about the bottom of the can. Basically that he went back to his shop and sketched out some ideas based on the technical specs he knew they needed, and just kept building prototypes until it worked. I'm going to try and get him to tell me more about it this weekend. Here's a short recording of him talking about a fix he did for the military: https://soundcloud.com/jscheel/frank-scheel-ammunition-work

Does anyone remember when beverage cans used to be so thick that it was considered an exercise of manliness to be able to crush a can--particularly a beer can--with one hand?

I had always wondered what the key innovation was that allowed aluminum cans to be made so thin. Based on a TV episode of "How It's Made", I think the key idea was to develop machinery that could delicately stretch and extrude aluminum without tearing it.[1][2][3]

Amusingly, there seems to be 3 versions of the same video with different voices saying the same words:

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4EzU8792e0 Original female Canadian narrator

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7Y0zAzoggY Male American narrator

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4TVDSWuR5E Male British narrator

Koreans still make cans that thick. Every time I buy korean soft drink I'm amazed by its can toughness.

It is a pity that your grandpa didn't write this article. No offence to the author however there is no substitute for industry experience.

My father sold tooling for making cans and there were many small but important innovations that came along. It wasn't as if someone sat down and designed the finished thing, innovations came along and the likes of your grandpa and my father made things happen. Sometimes it would be a slither of steel that would be saved per can, other times it would be innovations that would go nowhere - anyone remember transparent pet-plastic cans? No...!

In introducing a change, an incremental change there is no way that the whole production line is going to be upgraded/altered, as in everything else connected to a conveyor belt.

The modern ring-pull tops were obviously a huge part of this story of innovation, as was being able to extrude the base and sides of a can out of a disk. However, the real innovation behind these processes is to have some type of press and tooling that can make these wonderful and intricate shapes in as few steps as possible. That is when you have a business case, and that technology - real technology - is a long way from the 'easy' stuff presented in this article.

Related to alcohol beverages is the story of the Guinness widget:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_(beer)

The Wikipedia article just explains a little bit, however the small bit of plastic in beer cans took decades to get right and the investment level was considerable, even for a brewer the size of Guinness. Combined with the technology that goes into the can, a beer can is quite a technical wonder.

Hehe, he was also part of the group that worked on the extrusion process for Reynolds. He owned a company in Minnesota and there were hired to come in and work on it with them. He's got a lot of great process stories like this. I've actually been recording him talking about his life recently. Here's a passage about a tooling innovation he came up with for the Twin Cities Arsenal during the Vietnam War: https://soundcloud.com/jscheel/frank-scheel-ammunition-work

As someone who has on multiple occasions left a case of beer in a car during a Montana winter, I thank your grandfather for making the cans bulge but not explode when frozen :)

The bottom of a modern beverage can has a glowing blue ring that you can see only under UV light (aka black light). I've seen this on Coke, Sprite, and other soft drink cans.

The bottoms of the cans are coated with a varnish to make them slide easily on conveyor belts and in vending machines. It's the varnish that glows.

Awesome!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com