by Tom Standage
The man who eventually claimed the prize was not a scientist but a cook. Nicolas Appert was born in Châlons-sur-Marne, on the edge of France’s Champagne region, in 1749. His father was a hotelier, and he became an accomplished chef, serving in the kitchens of various noblemen before setting up as a confectioner in Paris in 1781. In this line of work he was necessarily aware of the use of sugar to preserve fruit, and he wondered whether it could be used to preserve other foods. As his interest in food preservation grew he began to experiment with storing food in sealed champagne bottles. In 1795 he moved to the village of Ivry-sur-Seine, where he began to offer preserved foods for sale, and in 1804 he set up a small factory. By this time some of his preserved food had been tested by the French navy, which was impressed by its quality. “The broth in bottles was good, the broth with boiled beef in another bottle very good as well, but a little weak; the beef itself was very edible,” its report concluded. “The beans and green peas, both with and without meat, have all the freshness and flavor of freshly picked vegetables.”
Appert later described his method as follows. “First, enclose the substances you wish to preserve in bottles or jars; second, close the openings of your vessels with the greatest care, for success depends principally on the seal; third, submit the substances, thus enclosed, to the action of boiling water in a bain-marie . . . fourth, remove the bottles from the bain-marie at the appropriate time.” He listed the times necessary to boil different foods, typically several hours. Appert was not familiar with the earlier work of Boyle, Papin, and others; he had devised his method solely by experiment and had no idea why it worked. It was not until the 1860s that Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, finally determined that decomposition was caused by microbes that could be killed by applying heat. That is why Papin’s technique, which involved heating, had worked; but most of the time he had not heated his food samples enough to kill off the microbes. Appert’s long process of trial and error had revealed that heat had to be applied for several hours in most cases, and that some foods needed to be heated for longer than others. “The application of fire in a manner variously adapted to various substances, after having with the utmost care and as completely as possible, deprived them of all contact with the air, effects a perfect preservation of those same productions, with all their natural qualities,” he concluded.
Word of Appert’s products spread and they went on sale as luxury items in Paris; his factory was soon employing forty women to prepare food, put it into bottles wrapped in cloth bags in case of breakage, and then boil the bottles in vast cauldrons. Meanwhile military trials continued, and in 1809 Appert was invited to demonstrate his method to a government committee. He prepared several bottles of food as the officials watched, and a month later they returned to taste the contents, which were found to be in excellent condition. Appert was duly awarded the prize of twelve thousand francs on the condition that he publish the details of his method in full, so that it could be widely adopted throughout France. Appert agreed, and his book, The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years, appeared in 1810. In accepting the government prize, Appert agreed not to patent his method in France.
Within three months of his book’s publication, however, a businessman in London, Peter Durand, had been granted an English patent for a preservation technique that was essentially identical to Appert’s. Durand sold the patent to an engineer named Bryan Donkin for one thousand pounds, and Donkin set up a company in conjunction with two partners involved in an iron works. Instead of preserving food in bottles, Donkin’s firm used canisters made of tin-coated iron, known today as tin cans. Durand admitted that the technique was “an invention communicated to me by a certain foreigner,” and it has long been assumed that he simply stole Appert’s idea. More recent research has indicated, however, that Durand may in fact have been acting on Appert’s behalf in England, and arranged to patent his invention and sell the rights. Appert even visited London in 1814, probably to collect his share of the proceeds from Durand. By this time the Royal Navy had tested the new canned food, and samples had even been presented to the royal family. But Appert came away from London empty-handed. His English partners appear to have cut him out of the deal; he could hardly expose them, since he had been trying to profit by selling his invention to an enemy nation.
Appert concentrated instead on refining his process and supplying the French army and navy. He embraced the use of tin cans for military supplies, but he continued to sell food in glass bottles to civilian customers. One French explorer, who took Appert’s canned food on a three-year voyage, declared that the invention had “completely resolved the problem of feeding sailors.” Canned food had obvious military advantages. It allowed large numbers of rations to be prepared and stockpiled in advance, stored for long periods, and transported to combatants without the risk of spoiling. Canning could smooth over seasonal variations in the availability of food, allowing campaigns to continue through the winter. The new technology was adopted very quickly: Some of the soldiers on the battlefield at Waterloo in 1815, the scene of Napoleon’s final defeat, carried canned rations. Canned meat fed English and French troops in the Crimean War, and tinned meat, milk, and vegetables were supplied to Union soldiers in the American Civil War. Soldiers have carried canned rations of various kinds ever since. The early cans had to be opened with a hammer and chisel, or using a bayonet. The first can openers appeared only in the 1860s, when canned food started to become popular among civilians.
As far as the civilian population was concerned, canned food was still a novelty or luxury item. At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, the company founded by Bryan Donkin some four decades earlier displayed “canisters of preserved fresh beef, mutton and veal; of fresh milk, cream and custards; of fresh carrots, green peas, turnips, beetroots, stewed mushrooms and other vegetables; of fresh salmon, codfish, oysters, haddock and other fish . . . Preserved hams for use in India, China, etc . . . all preserved by the same process . . . The whole preserved so as to keep in any climate, and for an unlimited length of time.” Expensive preserved foods, including truffles and artichokes, were also exhibited by Appert’s company, now run by his nephew.
But canned foods did not remain luxuries for much longer. Strong military demand prompted inventors to devise new machinery to automate the process of sealing cans, and it was found that adding calcium chloride to the water in which they were treated raised its boiling point and reduced the boiling time required. As volumes increased and prices fell, canned food became more widely affordable. In America, the production of canned food went from five million cans a year to thirty million between 1860 and 1870; in Britain, an outbreak of cattle disease in the 1860s prompted people to turn to canned meat from Australia and South America. Appert died in 1841 at the age of ninety-one, but his method of preserving food, heat-treated in a sealed container, and inspired by the supply difficulties of the French Revolutionary army, is still in use today.
“FORAGE LIBERALLY”
Canned food was one of two inventions that transformed military logistics during the nineteenth century. The second was mechanized transport, in the form of the railway and the steam locomotive, which could move troops, food, and ammunition from one place to another at unprecedented speed. This meant an army could be resupplied easily—provided it did not stray far from a railway line. The impact of this new development became apparent during the American Civil War, a transitional conflict in which old and new approaches to logistics appeared side by side.
When the war began in 1861 there were thirty thousand miles of railway track in America, more than in the rest of the world combined. More than two thirds of this track was in the more industrialized northern states of the Union, giving the North a clear advantage in supplying its troops. The Union’s strategy was to blockade the breakaway southern states of the Confederacy in an effort to cause food shortages and economic collapse. A blockade of southern ports was imposed in 1861, and the Union then s
et about seizing control of the Mississippi River and disrupting the southern rail networks, in order to hinder the distribution of food and supplies. Between 1861 and 1863 the prices of some basic foodstuffs increased sevenfold, causing riots in several southern cities in which angry mobs attacked grocery stores and warehouses. With many basic foodstuffs unavailable, various ingenious substitutes were devised, and both soldiers and civilians resorted to eating anything they could lay their hands on. One Confederate soldier wrote to his wife in 1862: “We have lived some days on raw, baked and roasted apples, sometimes on green corn and sometimes nothing.”
By the time Ulysses S. Grant was put in charge of all Union forces in 1864, the Confederacy had suffered several significant defeats and the blockade was causing severe food shortages. Grant devised a two-pronged plan to end the war: a large Union force would take on the main Confederate army commanded by Robert E. Lee, and smaller Union forces would meanwhile undermine morale in the South by attacking agricultural regions and cutting railway links to further aggravate the shortages. Accordingly, Union forces attacked the agriculturally rich Shenandoah Valley, an important source of supplies to the Confederate forces, and conducted a scorched-earth campaign, destroying crops, barns, and mills. But it is the campaigns undertaken by William Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas that highlight how much the field of military logistics had changed—and how much it had not.
Sherman was under instructions from Grant “to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” After stockpiling supplies in Nashville, Tennessee, Sherman began the march south toward Atlanta, Georgia, in May 1864, following the line of the railway so that food, fodder, and ammunition could be delivered to his army by train. Special teams of engineers repaired the track as the retreating Confederate army attempted to sabotage it. As he moved south through Georgia, Sherman established new bases in Marietta and Allatoona, supplied by railway from Nashville which lay farther up the the line. In July he informed Grant that “we have been wonderfully supplied in provisions and ammunition; not a day has a regiment been without bread and essentials. Forage has been the hardest, and we have cleaned the country in a breadth of thirty miles of grain and grass. Now the corn is getting a size which makes a good fodder, and the railroad has brought us grain to the extent of four pounds per animal per day.”
The age-old difficulty of finding enough fodder for animals remained, but when it came to food and ammunition, Sherman’s army was exploiting a state-of-the-art logistics system. Delivering supplies from the rear by rail was a far faster and more reliable alternative to the supply wagons, shuttling between the army and its nearest supply depot, that soldiers had depended on for centuries. Sherman’s men only needed to carry a few days’ worth of supplies to sustain them between rail deliveries. The rail link also meant that ammunition could be delivered in large quantities; Sherman’s army was consuming hundreds of thousands of rounds per day as it fought its way toward Atlanta. Military logistics was starting to shift toward providing supplies for machines, rather than for men and animals.
Having arrived in the vicinity of Atlanta, Sherman concentrated his efforts on seizing control of the converging railway tracks that connected the city to the rest of the Confederacy. He was prepared to mount a long siege, since he was confident of being able to supply his troops by rail from the north. But as things turned out, he captured the railway lines within a few weeks and the Confederate army abandoned Atlanta. Sherman occupied the city and planned the next stage in his campaign, known as the “March to the Sea.” By contrast with the modernity of his advance on Atlanta, this was to be a rather more old-fashioned stratagem. The plan was to cut loose from the formal supply system and march three hundred miles through Georgia to Savannah, on the Atlantic coast, destroying as much agricultural and economic infrastructure as possible along the way. The army would then head north through the Carolinas to prevent reinforcements reaching Lee’s army, which was besieged at Petersburg, Virginia. Sherman’s troops would carry some rations with them, but they would live off the land as much as possible, destroying what they could not eat. This, one of the last and most effective campaigns of the Civil War, is a striking (some would say infamous) example of the use of food as a weapon. Sherman issued a special field order:
The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. To this end, each brigade commander will organize a good and sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather, near the route traveled, corn or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables, corn-meal, or what ever is needed by the command, aiming at all times to keep in the wagons at least ten days’ provisions for the command and three days’ forage. Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass, but during a halt or a camp they may be permitted to gather turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables, and to drive in stock of their camp. To regular foraging parties must be instructed the gathering of provisions and forage at any distance from the road traveled.
The march began in November, just after the harvest, so the barns were full of grain, fodder, and cotton. Each brigade sent out a foraging party of “bummers” who would set out on foot and return with wagons of food, driving cattle in front of them. Sherman’s troops fanned out and devastated the country, helping themselves to fresh mutton, bacon, turkeys, chickens, cornmeal, and sweet potatoes, among other things. As well as taking the supplies they needed to subsist, the Union soldiers killed pigs, sheep, and poultry and burned and looted many houses, despite their orders to the contrary. They were instructed to destroy mills, barns, and cotton gins only if they encountered any resistance. Sherman recalled in his memoirs that the foraging became general plunder, and was not limited to formal foraging parties as he had ordered: “A soldier passed me with a ham on his musket, a jug of sorghum—molasses—under his arm and a big piece of honey in his hand, from which he was eating and, catching my eye he remarked in a low voice to a comrade, ‘Forage liberally on the country.’ ” Sherman claimed to disapprove of such lawlessness, but it was entirely in keeping with his boast to Grant that he would “make Georgia howl.”
As well as plundering and destroying farms and mills, the Union solders tore up railway tracks whenever they encountered them and devised elaborate tricks to ensure that they could not be repaired, such as heating and warping the rails and wrapping them around the trunks of trees. This inflicted hardship not just on the people of Georgia, but also on the Confederate armies who relied on their produce, since supplies could no longer be delivered by rail. Sherman’s army also damaged the southern economy by liberating black slaves, thousands of whom followed the army as it marched.
Sherman’s march spread fear and confusion, not least because his destination was unclear. By the time it became clear that he was heading for Savannah, the Confederate armies were unable to concentrate their forces to stop him. The Union soldiers met little resistance, and attempts by the authorities to organize a scorched-earth defense (“Remove your negroes, horses, cattle, and provisions from Sherman’s army and burn what you cannot carry away”) failed; morale had collapsed, and with it confidence in the government. On his arrival in Savannah, Sherman reported that “we have consumed the corn and fodder in the region of country thirty miles on either side of a line from Atlanta to Savannah as also the sweet potatoes, cattle, hogs, sheep and poultry, and have carried away more than 10,000 horses and mules as well as a countless number of their slaves. I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia and its military resources at $100,000,000; at least $20,000,000 of which has inured to our advantage and the remainder is simple waste and destruction.”
More was to come. Sherman then continued his destructive march northward through the Carolinas in the spring of 1865, leaving a trail of destruction forty miles wide. “Sherman’s campaign has produced bad effect on our people,” conceded Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Lee
reported an “alarming frequency of desertions” from his Confederate army, chiefly due to the “insufficiency of food and non-payment of the troops.” Lee realized his position was untenable and surrendered, and the rest of the Confederate forces soon followed, ending the war.
FOOD FOR MACHINES
The American Civil War encapsulated the shift from the Napoleonic era of warfare to the industrialized warfare of the twentieth century. As Sherman’s men advanced through Georgia, living off the land as armies had done for thousands of years, the opposing armies of Grant and Lee were engaged in trench warfare around Petersburg, their zigzag fortifications prefiguring the elaborate ditches and tunnels that would scar the fields of France during the First World War. The emergence of trench warfare was a consequence of improvements in the range, power, and accuracy of firearms and artillery that were not matched by corresponding improvements in mobility. Armies had unprecedented firepower at their disposal—provided they did not move. For most of history, an army that stayed still risked starvation, unless it could be supplied by sea. But the advent of canned food and railways meant that soldiers could be fed all year round, and for as long as necessary, as they stayed put in their trenches.
Even so, for most of the First World War the new logistics coexisted with the old. Ammunition and food for the front were delivered by rail; but the only way to carry supplies over the last few miles from the railhead to the front line was by using horse-drawn wagons. Accordingly, enormous quantities of fodder also had to be sent by rail, and an ancient logistical constraint survived into the twentieth century: Fodder was the largest category of cargo unloaded at French ports for the British army during the war. The stalemate of trench warfare ended only with the development of the tank, which coupled greater firepower with mobility and heralded a new era of motorized warfare in which fuel and ammunition, to feed vehicles and weapons, displaced food for men and animals as the most important fuel of war.