The beer is cold and nobody brought the opener

I packed the cooler for six clients and not one of them can get a can open. — Fishing guide, 1950

Ermal Fraze forgot the opener at a picnic and opened a can on his car. Afterward he set out to make a can that carried its own opener, a pull-off tab on the lid. Before that you needed a church key, a small metal tool that punched a hole in the top. He sold the design to the Aluminum Company of America, and Iron City beer was the first to put it on its cans. Smart man. A can should carry its own opener.

What it broke: the first tabs came off the can completely, so they littered streets and beaches; the tab on today's can stays attached.

The full file

Fraze had the idea about 1959, and the cans were in stores by 1962, but he didn't get his patent until 1967. The lid was scored, with a rivet pushed up out of the lid's own metal to hold the tab. It worked well enough that the industry mostly switched within a few years. It also had sharp edges, and early drinkers complained about cut lips and noses.

Nobody planned for the part after the beer. Hundreds of millions of cans a year meant billions of loose tabs, and they turned up in sand and grass. People cut bare feet on them. People swallowed them.

The fix came from Daniel Cudzik, an engineer at Reynolds Metals, who filed in 1975. His patent says plainly that a tab thrown away carelessly is litter and a hazard to bare feet. His version pushes a scored panel into the can and stays riveted to the lid. Recyclers liked it, too, since the metal comes back with the can. Fraze patented a push-in tab of his own in 1977, but Cudzik's is the one on your can.

From picnic to a tab that stays put took about fifteen years. Slow, but it held.

Relates to No. 03200.