Storing food in containers is a habit no other primate shares
People have been carrying and storing things in vessels for 100,000 years at the very least, perhaps for millions. The first were probably natural objects such as hollow gourds, used to keep food longer, carry it and guard it from animals. Researchers describe food storage as a wholly new behaviour, unseen in any other primate.
Gourd vessels are still part of traditional life in places such as the Tharu communities of South Asia and native Hawaii. As people developed new materials and methods of manufacture, containers changed with them. The Phoenicians made some of the earliest glass bottles; translucent and transparent examples from the first millennium BC, found on Cyprus and Rhodes, measure three to six inches long and probably held perfume. The Romans learned glassmaking from them and left behind many fine, mostly small, bottles.
Canning grew out of a Napoleonic-era experiment. The French inventor Nicolas Appert had preserved food in glass jars, and in 1810 his compatriot Philippe de Girard went to London and patented a tin can process through the merchant Peter Durand. Durand never canned food himself but sold the patent in 1812 to Bryan Donkin and John Hall, who improved it and set up the first cannery run as a business anywhere, on Southwark Park Road in London. By 1813 they were supplying tinned food to the Royal Navy.
Large-scale freight lagged behind. Well into the twentieth century goods travelled in wooden crates that leaked or broke, and customs inspectors had to cope with endless sizes and shapes. The standardised steel shipping container of the 1950s solved both problems and quickly took over world trade; cargo capacity is still measured in twenty-foot equivalent units. Late in the century, computer-aided design allowed highly specialised containers and labels that fit oddly shaped packaging.
Packaging engineers judge a container on more than protection from shock and moisture. A good one opens and closes easily, lets contents go in and out without fuss, offers clear places for labels, stacks efficiently and can be recycled at the end of its life.
Source: Container
