Author: Purple Brolly

Northumberland-born Bryan Donkin (1768-1855) was an extraordinarily creative engineer whose inventions included the world’s first commercial canning process. This was operated in a small factory in London from 1813, next-door to his paper-making factory. He ran both of these enterprises with partners John Hall and John Gamble and their company would later merge with food producers Crosse & Blackwell Ltd.

Peter Durand (1766-1822) of London had patented a method for preserving food by heating it in tin cans, rather than the glass jars used in a similar French idea. Donkin purchased Durand’s patent for £1,000 and developed it over the next two years before production began. Compared to today’s output of millions of cans per day, the initial six cans per hour were ‘baby-steps’ and as the cans were made from tin-plated iron soldered with lead, they were also much heavier. Nevertheless, royalty, the military, explorers and eventually the public, were delighted with this ingenious aid to a healthier and more varied diet.

Meanwhile, both Durand and Thomas Kensett (1786-1829) from Middlesex had separately taken the invention to the USA, where machinery modifications sped up the process enormously. Robert Yeates, also from Middlesex, patented the first can opener in 1855, removing the need for hammer and chisel!

(Image of vintage tinned food at a historic British base in Antarctica: Serge Ouachée at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The London Underground, or ‘the Tube’, was the world’s first subterranean railway network and without it and its 270 stations, London would be engulfed by cars and extra roads. Of its 253 miles, 45% are below ground, as much as 221ft. down. During WW2, Tube stations doubled up as air raid shelters and even housed makeshift factories for the manufacture of aircraft components.

It opened in 1863 with the Metropolitan line. The trains were steam-powered and had three classes of carriage. In 1890 the first electric railway was introduced as more lines were added. In 1900 the Central line was the first to lie entirely underground. The whole system was unified in the early 1900s and the flat rate fare was launched. The Art Deco design of stations and signs became the corporate style and journey time was cut by installing a driver’s cab at each end of the train.

Inevitably, tunnel construction disturbed cemeteries and goodness-knows-what-else from centuries past. This, along with disused stations and the many suicides committed on Tube tracks, has led to numerous accounts of ghostly sightings and strange noises! These generally occur when the almost 4 million passengers per day have left and the Tube is shut, 12am-5am, for maintenance and cleaning.

(Top image: Rossographer at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)