Scottish innovation III

In the first half of the 1800's, ambitious young John West left his native Scotland to immigrate to Canada, where he married and started a family. When the California gold rush reached a fever pitch, he left his family behind to seek his fortune in the gold fields, along with thousands of other hopefuls. The venture didn't pan out like he had hoped, and he resettled his family in Oregon, where he built and operated sawmills. He wasn't the first to preserve food in cans but it was the invention of an automated can-filling machine that brought him his greatest fortune. By 1873, his cannery was packing 22,000 cases of canned salmon a year and exporting it all over the globe. West's brand label for canned foods lives on today as John West Foods of Liverpool, England, which markets canned fish, fruit, vegetables, and meat all over the world.

I wonder if he would be flabbergasted if he could see this or hear about his modern day company's woes with conservation groups about their tuna fishing methods.

Still, imagine life without food in cans. It's hard, isn't it? What would all those cowboys have done without baked beans? Or the soldiers, caught up in war? Or those dooms dayers that hoard canned food for after the end of the world?

Unrelated: it has been and will continue to be too fricking hot in the city for man, beast or plant, unless you can sit in the shade, not move and dunk into some cool water every now and then.