Meat Preserving: Heat Processing Introduced (continued)

In the decade 1869-79 the Australian meat preserving industry exported some 65,000 tons of preserved meats to England, and 19,300 tons in 1871-2. This trade was stimulated by the demand for meat resulting from the shortage induced by the cattle plague in England and was aided by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 and the virtual lack of competition from the Americas until late in the decade. Unfortunately, the initial impetus could not be maintained and most of the small enterprises quickly disappeared.[32] Why? There were several reasons. Once the familiar butchers' meat became freely available again there was resistance to canned meat, which was essentially a new product and which was unattractive because of the heavy over-cooking inevitably associated with the technology of the time. In addition, in the second half of the 1870s, competition from America became severe and when payment for product was delayed the smaller under-capitalized companies, with all their money tied up in property and plant, simply failed. The Sydney Meat Preserving Company survived because it did not have to make a profit. The Melbourne company had Ritchie, probably the most able technologist of them all and well aware of the American threat. It could be said that his premature death doomed his company but it is by no means certain that it would have survived had Ritchie lived. Australian meat canning did continue and was stimulated again by the South African war, but the technology changed and the modern canning industry is a twentieth century phenomenon.

As has been shown, canning came to Australia with the express purpose of providing an export outlet for excess meat. Inevitably, other products, in this case jams and fruits, also were packed in cans. For many decades vegetables were not and the main reason almost certainly was the lack of the concentrated sources of supply required to sustain a cannery. This began to change in the 1920s but before that happened the technology of can making itself changed significantly overseas.

The hot-dipped tinplate (steel coated with tin) from which the nineteenth century tinsmiths hand cut cans for food use carried 6 to 8 lb of tin per basis box of 110-18 lb of tinplate. Cutting and working it called for strength as well as skill. By the twentieth century the tin content was down to less than 2 lb and modern electrolytic plate uses only about 1/4 lb per basis box. The base plate is much thinner too, and therefore the tinplate is more amenable to machine forming and closing. Australian produced tinplate dates only from 1957.

Reference has already been made to the mechanical aids introduced to facilitate the tinsmiths' work, but the drive towards mechanizing can production gathered way as the nineteenth century ended. John Heine provides an example of Australian innovation and invention in this field.[33] A Devonian, he came to Sydney in 1882 and at once began to make small pieces of equipment for food processing. About 1900 he perfected an automatic body-forming and side soldering machine for making food cans and supplied the Sydney Jam Company. A number of improvements followed and by 1907, when his famous Model 4G which for twenty years dominated can-making in Australia first appeared, he was a leader in the manufacture of canning and canmaking equipment.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering