November 2006 - A Brief History of the Beverage Can Body

A Brief History of the
Beverage Can Body

The first steel beverage can was introduced in Richmond, Virginia on January 24, 1935 by the Krueger Brewing Company.  The early 3-piece steel cans weighed nearly 4 ounces, and had a flat top that required a “church key” for opening (shown left).  Cone-top steel beer cans appeared in 1935 and remained in production until about 1960.  By the early 1950’s, the brewing industry was becoming concerned about the growing cost of tinplate (tin-coated steel), prompting Kaiser Aluminum to establish a container R&D facility in Chicago to develop an aluminum can.  They adapted the "draw and iron" process of Swiss inventor Jakob Keller to produce D&I aluminum cans, and began shipping 8 oz beer cans in 1958.

In 1954, the Adolph Coors Co. joined forces with Beatrice Foods Co. to found Aluminum International, Inc. to develop an economic process for manufacturing aluminum cans for their products.  Their first 8 oz cans were first marketed 1958 by Beatrice Food’s Hawaii Brewing Corp. for their Primo beer, and Coors beer followed in 1959.  Coors headed up the R&D efforts, and they developed a method of continuously casting aluminum and rolling it to about 1/8” thickness, then blanking circular slugs that were the diameter of the can.  These slugs were fed into a customized German-made impact extrusion press that punched out 3600 7-ounce flat-bottom can bodies an hour.  This early technique for making D&I cans was slow and plagued with tooling problems, and could only make a 7 oz. can with a base that was thicker than necessary (.03”) to withstand the internal forces.

The Reynolds Metals Company had initiated its own R&D program, and in 1963 pioneered the production method for economically producing 12 oz aluminum cans that is used today.  Coors and Kaiser Aluminum soon followed.  Edward G. Maeder and Guido Kraus of Reynolds filed a patent for the bodymaker machine for forming these cans in June of 1963 (shown below).  The first 12 oz cans were sold by the Hamms Brewery in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1964, and Coca-Cola and Pepsi began using these cans by 1967.  In the early 1970s, Alcoa introduced its Featherlite can that was drawn from light gauge H-19 aluminum stock and was 20% lighter than the (then) average aluminum can.

The design breakthrough that made the 12 oz D&I can practical was the ability to iron the sidewalls to about .005 (5-thousandths) thick (about the thickness of a magazine cover), while leaving the base of the can thicker and adding a bottom dome that acted like an arch to strengthen the can body.  There are hundreds of patents related to the development of the D&I bodymaker focusing on specific mechanical features and processes.  Early Coors 12 oz cans were produced on bodymakers made by Ragsdale Brothers of Englewood, Colorado, and Elpidifor Paramonoff filed a patent in 1970 for Standun Inc. of Compton, California for a D&I bodymaker (shown below).

Stolle CMD is proud to continue the Ragsdale and Standun legacy of innvoation and quality by offering the fastest and most accurate D&I bodymakers available today.

If you would like to comment on or add information to this issue of the Stoll-E-News, please contact:

Gus Reall, President of Stolle CMD
gus.reall@stollemachinery.com