Fun fact: I am a sucker for old-fashioned cream soda. Frosty-blue, orange, raspberry, pink—you name it, I’ll drink it. There’s something about the old-timey, medicinal sweetness of the beverage that has had me hooked since childhood.
While cracking open a bottle of the bubbly goodness for one of my own kids, I was struck by the humble miracle of the cream soda’s bottle top. It’s the size of a quarter and lighter than a penny, flimsy and forgettable. Its inventor meant for his creation to be tossed in the trash without a nanosecond’s thought. Yet after 122 years in existence, the disposable bottle cap still endures. The invention of this mundane metal top has revolutionized, rescued, and inspired multiple industries in America and around the world—from beverages, bottle-making, and bottle openers, to the Gillette razor, pharmaceuticals, aerosols (including the containers for Pledge furniture spray and Lysol disinfectant), and processed foods spanning Cadbury chocolates to Spam.
“Crown caps”—the same ones you flip off your Coca-Cola and Coors Light bottles today—were the brainchild of William Painter. Born in 1838, he was the son of a Quaker preacher and the eldest of seven children. This irrepressible tinkerpreneur, who loved chess and practical jokes, grew up poor on a Maryland homestead farm. He told friends and colleagues that his boyhood aspiration always and ever had been to “make something.” Once he started, he never gave up. And once he succeeded, he never let up. The genius of Painter’s success could be summarized in a single directive: Invent something “which everybody needs, better and more cheaply provided than ever before.” Competition in the manufacture of the best and cheapest necessities was fierce in the Age of Progress. The quest for the perfect bottle closure was crowded. Winning the war of the bottle tops would be Painter’s crowning glory. But not without a lifetime of hard work and a significant amount of heartburn first.
The story of how William Painter’s bottle caps became a multi-billion-dollar business begins in, of all places, an asparagus patch. Pastor Edward Painter issued an early work challenge to one of his daughters and his resourceful young son William: “My son, if thee and thy sister will thresh that asparagus and get the seeds all ready to sell, I’ll give thee what it amounts to.”
To retrieve and prepare the seeds, the Painter children cut off the ferny tops of the asparagus plants after their berries turned bright red in the fall. Hung upside down for perhaps a week, the foliage and the berries dried out. Pulled from the stems, the berries were then soaked in water for a few hours. After soaking them, the children broke open the berries and painstakingly separated ripe seeds from the plant pulp. The seeds were then dried thoroughly for another week and occasionally stirred to prevent sticking. Finally, the siblings packed the seeds in envelopes or sealed glass containers for sale.
William made an honest dollar for his labor. He learned the values of long-term planning, patience, and follow-through. With the earnings he reaped, he invested not in childhood trifles, but in basic carpentry tools. Instead of pining for toys that his parents could not afford, he made them himself. In his memoir, Painter’s son Orrin described playing with one of the amusing contrivances that highlighted his father’s mischievous side. It was “a little windmill which contained flour, and which, when blown, instead of operating the windmill, would throw flour upon the one blowing it.” Another was a pinky finger ring “attached to a cylinder containing water, held unseen, in the hand, which was discharged by a piston operated by the thumb, upon unsuspecting observers.” Painter would have loved the Whoopee Cushion (invented about twenty years after he died).
Young William’s formal education ended at high school graduation. Painter’s father, a pastor-turned-physician who served on an Indian reservation in Omaha, Nebraska, “had not the means to send him to college.” Instead, he read voraciously, constantly exercised his God-given tinkering faculties to the fullest, and honed both his mechanical and business sense on the job. Son Orrin joked that Painter earned his degree from the “University of Hard Knocks.” He was, in modern parlance, a lifelong learner.
In 1855, at the age of seventeen, Painter began an apprenticeship in the Wilmington, Delaware–based patent leather manufacturing shop of Pyle, Wilson & Pyle (later the C. and J. Pyle Company). The Pyles were relatives from his father’s side. During his five-year stint, Painter invented a machine for softening leather. It caught the eye of the shop foreman, who reportedly appropriated the device (along with the financial rewards) as his own.
Other inventors might have allowed themselves to be permanently embittered and crippled by such intellectual thievery and indignity. Painter was undeterred. He learned the value of intellectual property rights the hard way, but the earlier the better. Among his most trusted colleagues after striking out on his own was patent lawyer William C. Wood, “a staunch and devoted friend” who worked with Painter to protect his myriad inventions from 1874 until his death in 1906. “When his leather-softening machine was literally filched from him,” another business colleague recalled, Painter “didn’t become discouraged; he simply profited by that experience. Nobody should ever get the best of him again by putting clothes on the children of his brain and endowing them with his or her name.” That fertile brain was just warming up.
Painter patented many useful and profitable things before turning his attention to soda bottles and caps. He invented a fare box (for collecting bus or train tickets), several pumps and valves for emptying cesspools, lamp burners, a counterfeit coin detector, a sheet roofing machine, transit tanks, a fountain pitcher, a safety ejection seat for passenger trains, and an electric railway. That last innovation “came to him in a dream,” his son Orrin recounted, probably after dozing off late into the night while catching up on the latest issue of one of his favorite publications: Scientific American or the Patent Office Gazette.
When family members cleaned up after their workaholic patriarch, they’d find his latest inventive schemes doodled in the margins of the magazines. To the irritation of the household washwoman, Painter also had a peculiar habit of scribbling memos to himself on his own shirt cuffs. (Painter would surely have been an enthusiastic user of Post-it notes, invented by 3M engineers in the 1970s.) Sometimes, when epiphanies struck, Painter would grab a piece of chalk, drop to his hands and knees, and draw designs on his shop floor. Then he would rise, dust off his pants, and walk on, oblivious of everything and everyone around him. Absorbed in inventive thought, even after a long day’s work, he’d walk several blocks past his downtown Baltimore mansion on Calvert Street before realizing he had missed it.
But the man with eighty-five patents to his name was no flaky mad scientist with his head stuck in the clouds. Practicality, profit potential, and persistence were the keys to his success. It’s no surprise the down-to-earth inventor would find his greatest entrepreneurial triumph in little bits of crimped metal used to solve a most prosaic problem: how to keep popular bubbly beverages fresh, clean, and sealed airtight.
Got indigestion? Americans looking to cure their stomach ailments or quench their thirst have mixed homemade drinks made of sassafras, elderberry, vanilla, and other roots and herbs since the country’s founding. Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book of 1846 shared several folksy recipes for her popular “effervescing fruit drinks” and soda powders. In case you had a hankering for sarsaparilla mead (and a spare pound of Spanish sarsaparilla lying around), Miss Beecher prescribed:
One pound of Spanish sarsaparilla.
Boil it in four gallons of water five hours, and add enough water to have two gallons.
Add sixteen pounds of sugar, and ten ounces of tartaric acid.
The Martha Stewart of her time, Miss Beecher quoted the advice of a presumably reputable doctor vouching for these good things: “Water charged with carbonic acid forms a cool and refreshing beverage. It acts as a diaphoretic and a diuretic (i.e., to promote perspiration and the healthful action of the kidneys), and is a most valuable agent for checking nausea and vomiting.”
Several inventors, including John Mathews and his namesake son, quickly went to work manufacturing commercial soda fountain equipment. By the late 1880s, the market for carbonated drinks in the U.S. was bubbling frothily. Most of the familiar soda brands we still buy now got their start as patent medicine cure-alls. Pharmacist Charles Hires sold a woodsy medicinal syrup he marketed as “root beer” at the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition. Around 1885, pharmacist Charles Alderton created an energy tonic called the “Waco” in Waco, Texas, which was later dubbed “Dr Pepper.” Pharmacist John Pemberton famously introduced Coca-Cola to customers at an Atlanta, Georgia, drugstore in 1886.
The origins of these bubbly beverages actually can be traced back much further. Mother Nature, of course, manufactured the original soft drink: mineral water from natural springs. The Paris-based Compagnie de Limonadiers served up a lemonade-flavored syrupy beverage in the seventeenth century. A British pharmacology professor had traced the first documented mention of “soda water” across the pond to 1798. This reference described an “aciduous soda water . . . prepared and sold in London by a Mr Schweppe.” Yep, that’s the same Schweppe whose name you still see on your ginger ale can. Investigators in the U.K. discovered a glass soda water bottle at the site of the wreck of the Royal George, a British ship that sank near Portsmouth, Massachusetts, in 1782. And nearly two decades before that, British scientist Joseph Priestley had announced his method of “impregnating water with fixed air” to help cure or prevent scurvy on long voyages.
Illustrating just how thoroughly soft drinks had already saturated American culture, Thomas Jefferson’s nineteenth-century biographer, Jason Parton, paid tribute to Jefferson’s good friend Priestley this way: “His invention of soda water is why Americans should join in the scheme to honor his memory. He not only did all he could to assist the birth of the nation, but he invented the national beverage.” But how best to cap and preserve America’s favorite drinks? Priestley advised that the containers for carbonated concoctions should be stored upside down, “well corked, and cemented.” Others advised laying the bottles, made with rounded bottoms, on their sides. One problem: Corks dry up and shrink, leading to leakage and defizzing. Moreover, storing bottles sideways and upside-down was impractical for grocers and merchants. Rubber and metal stoppers, for their part, affected the taste of their bottles’ contents and raised hygiene concerns. Wire rusted after prolonged contact with the beverage; dirt accumulated around bottle mouths in the spaces and grooves left by rubber stoppers that did not completely seal a bottle top.
Enter American thinkers and tinkerers thirsting for success. Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of problem-solvers flooded the U.S. Patent Office with bottle closure contraptions made of cork, glass, wire, ceramic, loops, gaskets, thread finishes, levers, and bails, or some clunky combination thereof. All were designed to be reusable, and it was the custom to plug the stoppers into the bore of the bottle neck. Among the most notable: the “Lightning” stopper for beer bottles (also used on wide-mouth fruit jars); the Codd’s Ball stopper, which featured an internal marble stuffed into the bottle bore; the Matthews gravitating stopper; and the Hutchinson spring stopper, made of a rubber gasket held between two metal plates attached to a wire spring loop. Before William Painter came along, the U.S. Patent Office had approved an estimated fifteen hundred bottle stopper patents.
Painter became preoccupied with building a better, cheaper bottle stopper while working as a mechanical engineer for Baltimore’s Murrill & Keizer machine shop. He immersed himself in every aspect of bottle-sealing, with a focus on sodas, beers, and malted beverages. After much experimentation, he unveiled his first attempt: a wire-retaining stopper known as the “Triumph.” Ever the tinkerer, Painter received a patent for his next improvement, dubbed the “bottle seal” or “Baltimore loop seal,” in September 1885.
In introducing the new innovation, Painter identified the fundamental deficiencies of bottle closures then on the market:
“Stoppers have heretofore been made secure against internal pressure in one of two ways—by mechanical means exterior to the bottle, as by using a tie-wire, also by special stopper-fasteners, which have been made in large variety; or by placing the stopper inside the bottle and so arranging it that the stopper is forced against a seat or packing by the pressure within.
The first of these methods is objectionable because of the expense, and in some cases the inconvenience of its use and liability of accidental opening. The second is so for the same reasons, and for the additional one that the presence of the stopper inside of the bottle is an obstruction to ready and effectual cleansing both of the bottle and stopper. Stoppers secured by external fastenings are retained solely by the power of the device to overcome the internal pressure. Those within the bottle are retained because they present a solid mass too large to pass through the bottle-neck. In neither case referred to does the lateral expansion of the stopper itself against the interior of the bottle-mouth enter as an element of its action in resisting internal pressure, as it does with stoppers made according to my method.”
Painter’s loop seal consisted of a flat rubber disk with a convex-shaped bottom. This stopper, fitted into a grooved bottle-mouth (“reverse taper”), formed an “inverted arch” that resisted the internal pressure of carbonation. The seal was tight and leak-proof; the liquid was protected from contamination or obstructions. The “loop” on the device was formed with small wire at the top of the rubber disk; a simple hook or other pointed implement could be used to remove the stopper from the bottle. Most important, the closures (for either carbonated or fermented, “still” drinks) could be manufactured cheaply and economically. In a novel advancement, the loop seals could be thrown away after one use. Painter’s Triumph stoppers sold at $3.50 per gross (twelve dozen); the Bottle Seal sold at twenty-five cents per gross.
With business partner Samuel Cook, Painter formed the Bottle Seal Company to manufacture the disposable disks. The firm acquired the U.S. and Canadian rights to the bottle seal patent and established a factory adjoining the Brush Electric Light Company’s plant on East Monument Street in Baltimore. Cook contracted with Painter and Lewis Keizer in 1889 to buy the foreign rights to the bottle seal. He went on to helm the company’s European offices, manufacturing facilities, and sales in Germany, England, and France.
Among the early and enthusiastic adopters of the single-use loop seal: the makers of a New England soft drink called “Moxie.” Its creator, homeopathic physician Augustin Thompson, originally marketed Moxie as “nerve food.” He described the bitter-tasting elixir as a cure for “paralysis, softening of the brain, and mental imbecility.” Essentially the godfather of today’s energy drinks, this health-and-vigor beverage gave rise to the familiar expression, “You’ve got a lot of Moxie.” Thompson trademarked his product the same year the loop seal was patented. It remains the official beverage of the state of Maine today.
Painter’s company provided bottle manufacturers with the tools they needed to modify their containers for the loop seal disks. An ad for the breakthrough stopper published in an 1886 edition of the National Bottlers’ Gazette summed up the selling points in five words: “Pure, clean, neat, tight, cheap.” The loop seal was true to the Painter imperative: Invent something “which everybody needs, better and more cheaply provided than ever before.” The indefatigable inventor could have quit while he was ahead. But the all-consuming challenge of the tinkerpreneur beckoned:
Could it be made even better and cheaper?
Never in his wildest dreams or sleepless nights could William Painter have imagined how spectacularly the results of his constant fiddling and retooling would turn out.
Business was booming for the Bottle Seal Company at the turn of the nineteenth century. Barely out of his teens, William’s son Orrin was dispatched by his father to buy barrels to hold the seals and to deliver groove-making devices to glass manufacturers around Baltimore. “We first sold them by weight and then by measure, knowing their weight and bulk by the gross,” Orrin recalled. Painter’s managers reported that it was a large and profitable venture, paying satisfactory dividends to shareholders. The firm’s innovations would spell profits and success for countless other businesses, too—and at just the right time for the glass industry.
In 1888, artisan/industrialist Edward Libbey moved his family’s New England Glass Works to Toledo, Ohio, where new sources of cheap natural gas beckoned. He was joined by West Virginia–born glassblower-turned-prolific inventor Michael Owens, who would soon invent the revolutionary automatic glass bottle-making machine; found or cofound nine companies with Libbey’s support; and successfully file a total of forty-nine patents. By 1900, Painter’s company would be supplying stoppers for Owens bottles. The two enterprises dominated their respective markets and forever changed the beverage industry. I couldn’t find any records showing that these three remarkable dynamos—Painter, Owens, and Libbey—had ever met. But their separate pursuits of self-interest and mechanical superiority brought them together in the marketplace. These men of progress were bound by the same wide-ranging creativity, commitment to intellectual property rights, and relentless drive of their era’s successful tinkerpreneurs.
Naturally, Painter was not satisfied with the loop seal. While on a rare family vacation in Narragansett, Rhode Island, he conceived the idea for a metal, corrugated cap lined with a cork disk that “crowned” a bottle’s mouth. Made of pressed tinplate, the original closures featured twenty-one crimpings (later increased to twenty-four). The single-use cap created a gas-tight seal through exterior contact only; the cork kept the liquid separated from the metal. Painter confided in his oldest son that the improvement “would revolutionize all then existing methods of bottling” and swore him to secrecy. In February 1892, after much experimentation, Painter obtained three historic patents for his new bottle-sealing system. The first application disclosed and claimed the novel, throwaway bottle-sealing device; the second added more in-depth information about the sealing disk’s composition and locking mechanisms; and the third further detailed the use of cork and other composite disk materials with various protected coatings.
In a culture where everything from diapers to utensils to contact lenses to cameras is disposable, the idea of throwaway bottle caps seems wholly unremarkable. But in the late 1800s, it was as exotic as 3-D printed food or mind-controlled robotic limbs. Painter spelled out the radical notion of intentional disposability: “I have devised metallic sealing-caps embodying certain novel characteristics which render them highly effective and so inexpensive as to warrant throwing them away after a single use thereof, even when forcible displacement, as in opening bottles, has resulted in no material injury to the caps.”
The hard-working Painter gave notice that he would soon be filing a new patent for an accompanying bottle opener as part of his system. He also painstakingly explained the evolution of his precedent-setting manufacturing principles, while outlining the obstacles and challenges he faced every step of the way:
So far as my knowledge extends, I am the first to seal bottles by means of sealing-disks each compressed into close solid contact with the lip of the bottle and maintained in that condition by means of a flanged metallic sealing-cap, the flange of which is bent or crimped into locking contact (while the disk is under pressure) with an appropriate annular locking-shoulder on the head of the bottle.
Through trial and error, the cap evolved:
Considerable manual force must be applied for detaching the caps from the bottles, and therefore in the early stages of my invention the use of loops of some kind or of equivalent holes in the tops of the caps was deemed essential, and the caps had wide or deep pendent flanges and they contained sealing-disks of considerable bulk or thickness. . . . Contingencies led, after much devising and experimenting, to the production of a cap without a loop or hole in its top, a thinner disk, and consequently narrower flanges, thus substantially reducing the cost of the sealing device.
The transformed cap required a transformed bottle lip and edge, to which a bottle opener or other sharp tool or utensil could be applied:
These improved caps having in themselves no special provision—such as loops or openings in their tops—for detaching them from bottles led to my further devising a novel method of their combination with the bottle, in accordance with which the pendent edge of the flange below the bent portion is so far projected from the adjacent surface of the bottle-head as to afford an engaging-shoulder, to which a bottle-opener could be readily applied.
Son Orrin, who served and signed as a witness for his father’s ground-breaking patents, drew up a crown logo. The family dubbed Painter’s new brainchild the “crown cap.” Joseph O’Brien, editor of Invention magazine, marveled at the deceptively mundane device. The name was fitting, he noted, as the “metal cap crowns the bottle neck to hold the sealing disk compressed against the bottle mouth; its crimped flange presents an appearance resembling that of a crown; and the invention crowned one of the most troublesome inventive problems with a success which is simply dazzling.”
Later in 1892, the inventor and his business associates formed the Crown Cork & Seal Company in Baltimore. The new firm acquired all the domestic manufacturing rights for both the loop seal and crown cap. Business partner Samuel Cook organized the Crown Cork Company Limited to acquire syndicate rights for all countries outside the United States and Canada. European water, soda, and beer bottlers including Apollinaris Company in Germany and Schweppes in London quickly signed up; interest and factories spread to France, Japan, and Brazil.
As promised, Painter delivered his “capped bottle opener” two years after the introduction of the crown cap. Resembling a church key, the handy metal lifter engaged the side of the cap and popped it off with fulcrum power. Here’s how Painter described it to the Patent Office:
My bottle opener essentially embodies a handle, having at one end thereof, a cap centering gage, and also a cap engaging lip, and however these three elements may be formed and combined, the centering gage should also afford a fulcrum . . . so that when the opener is applied to a capped bottle, the gage will . . . enable the handle to serve as a lever for removing the cap from the bottle.
Phew. That’s a mouthful for a simple function that seems almost reflexive now. But many had tried and failed before Painter showed the way. On New Year’s Eve 1894, Painter and Cook’s colleagues in Britain toasted the firm’s founders in verse:
Let us hope in the year Ninety-five
Ev’ry country, city, and town
Will abolish both wire and cork
And use the American “Crown.”
By 1897, the company employed some two hundred people directly and fueled another one thousand jobs in the related production of rubber, cork, tin, and other materials. At the end of that fiscal year, Crown Cork & Seal had sold more than a whopping 280 million combined crown caps and loop seals. That’s close to a million pieces for every actual working day in the year. The next year, Painter introduced a foot-powered machine for filling bottles with syrup and sealing them with the crown cap. The cast-iron contraption replaced the old, time-consuming method that involved separate processes for adding syrup to the bottom of a bottle, then moving the bottle to another station for adding carbonated water, and then shifting the bottle to yet another machine for capping.
An appreciative John T. Hawkins, who worked for Painter as a leading machinist, wrote in the Baltimore Journal of Commerce that his boss was the “epitome of restless energy and indomitable perseverance” whose genius “largely consists in taking infinite pains.” His mind was never at rest. Discouragement, to Painter, was an “unknown sensation.” While some accounts describe the crown cap as an immediate success, it took considerable outreach, education, skill, and reinforcement to bring about Painter’s revolution. Some bottlers clung to old methods and equipment. Bottles needed to be redesigned with a new recessed neck tip on which the crown cap gripped. As “proof of concept,” to borrow modern start-up language, Painter convinced a Baltimore brewer to send a cargo of crown-capped beer to South America and bring it back. After forty days, the ship and the cargo returned. Crown Cork & Seal threw a welcome back party and invited Charm City reporters to witness the taste tests. It was a frothy success.
To spread the word, Crown Cork & Seal needed a dedicated sales force and marketing team that shared the inventor’s tireless spirit. He wisely surrounded himself with both mechanical movers and entrepreneurial shakers. One of the charismatic men he recruited would go on to establish his own multibillion-dollar empire. His name is known the world over: Gillette.
Just as King Gillette’s disposable razor business was taking off, William Painter fell deathly ill. He passed away in July 1906 at Johns Hopkins University in his beloved Baltimore. Painter’s last words came from John 14:6: “I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life.” He was a godly, humble man who gave it his all. Though none of his own children followed in his entrepreneurial footsteps, son Orrin assisted Crown Cork & Seal in its nascent days as an illustrator and marketer. He also paid lasting tribute to his father in vivid family memoirs. Painter’s spirit lived on in a generation of countless employees, most prominently King Gillette, who benefited from his wise counsel and warm mentorship.
Most important for the future of Painter’s company, his success attracted another boundary-pushing tinkerpreneur with the vision and drive to bring Crown Cork & Seal into modernity.
The singular obsession of early-twentieth-century businessman Charles McManus was also a decades-long obsession of one of America’s most entrepreneurial founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. Their shared passion? Cork! For Jefferson, it was a matter of both intense personal interest and national pride. He was a fanatical wine connoisseur who had toured European vineyards and evangelized his countrymen about the superiority of fine wines. He practiced what he preached: At Monticello, Jefferson built two of his own vineyards. The nation’s “first viticulturalist” not only conducted numerous grape-cultivating experiments, he also planted several cork oak trees and tried to produce his own corks.
Jefferson didn’t have much luck at cork cultivation at Monticello. But nearly a century later, cork trees took root in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina.
The bulk of the nation’s cork supply, however, continued to be imported from abroad. In addition to wine and beverage bottle closures, American manufacturers used cork for insulation, gaskets, automotive parts, shoes, and flotation devices. Demand was plentiful. William Painter’s first generation of crown caps alone used thin, compressed layers of natural cork to produce millions of bottle toppers. His patents proposed the use of other composite materials. Could his crown-cap liners be made even more efficiently?
Painter may not have lived to find out the answer, but Crown Cork & Seal did.
In a small New York factory, husband and wife Charles and Eva McManus worked together to devise a new method for processing cork. They manufactured an apparatus for making composition cork sheets. The McManus family formed the New Process Cork Company and patented a synthetic cork product dubbed “Nepro.” These particle cork liners could be made even thinner than current natural cork ones. Nepro saved money by allowing crown caps to be made shallower and with less tin metal. In good times and bad, every penny counted.
After William Painter’s death in 1906, one of his sons-in-law took over the business and almost ran it into the ground. Painter’s original crown cap patents expired in 1911; Prohibition nearly destroyed the bottling industry. Crown Cork & Seal wisely shifted its manufacturing focus away from beer to soft drinks, but the company needed a leader. McManus, a Baltimore native with a mission, moved back home from New York. He bought shares in Crown Cork, merged it with New Process Cork Company, and injected new energy into the fizzy biz.
After the New Process/Crown Cork merger, McManus continued to invent and patent dozens of improvements in cork and bottle-cap manufacturing. He bought up cork companies on both coasts and built export facilities in Europe and North Africa. To weather the Great Depression, Crown Cork diversified to include cork for car mats; tin cans for coffee, tea, biscuits, and pharmaceuticals; Mason jar caps; and post-Prohibition beer cans. By 1937, the company was producing more than 103 million bottle tops a day. The firm also manufactured metal parts for ammunition, antiaircraft guns, fighter plane fairings, and an award-winning gas mask canister.
During World War II, America’s dependency on foreign cork became a national security issue. Thomas Jefferson’s zeal for planting cork oak trees domestically looked all the more prescient. The nation’s military used cork—60 percent of it imported from abroad—to make washers, oil seals, insulation for planes and rockets, and other critical components. Several suspicious fires in Baltimore and New York just before and then during the war raised the ominous specter of sabotage. Spurred by current events and commercial concerns, Crown Cork & Seal spearheaded the patriotic McManus Cork Oak Project to plant cork seedlings across America and “to add to the natural resources of our country and to provide in the United States a source for at least a part of the nation’s cork requirement.” About a dozen states joined the effort, but McManus died of a heart attack in the summer of 1946, before the project bore any real fruit. Or rather, cork.
McManus successfully consolidated Crown’s operations and boosted sales to $11 million. His able and dedicated sons, Charles Jr. and Walter, took over the company after his death. Another practical-minded Crown Cork executive, blacksmith’s son John Connelly, helmed the company from the transformative 1960s through the 1980s. He slashed unprofitable lines of business, kept overhead low, and kept the company out of debt. Meanwhile, Crown Cork pioneered the aerosol can, adopted pull-tab pop tops, and expanded into household markets. Composite cork gave way to polyvinyl chloride. Foreign markets for the company’s packaging solutions boomed.
In 1992, Crown Cork & Seal celebrated its centennial anniversary. Two years later, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated William Painter’s crown cap and crown soda machine “international historic mechanical engineering landmarks.” The two inventions were “the foundation of today’s vast bottling industry,” the professional group declared. A few of the original crown soda machines still exist today and can be found at the company’s Baltimore machinery division offices. There, Painter’s successors now manufacture high-speed stainless-steel bottle- and can-filling machines that can fill two thousand cans or twelve hundred bottles per minute. The company is now an astonishing $9 billion global packaging empire. Crown manufactures one out of every five beverage containers in the world, and one out of every three food cans across North America and Europe.
Patient. Resourceful. Nurturing. Meticulous. William Painter absorbed his first entrepreneurial lessons as a boy harvesting asparagus seeds. By nature, he tinkered tirelessly and bequeathed a legacy of constant innovation to his company’s successors. And from his early encounter with the intellectual property thief who stole his leather-softening device, he learned to vigilantly protect his patent rights. His life was a “great lesson in rational achievement,” Crown Cork’s London manager William A. Lewis wrote in tribute in 1901. “Mr. Painter never began any invention that he didn’t finish, never devised anything that wasn’t of practical use, and never created any appliance but has been of benefit to his race and has reflected pecuniary advantages to himself.”
Painter’s contemporaries in business, engineering, and the law fully appreciated what so many take for granted today. As a 1901 court decision upholding Painter’s patent rights concluded: “The protection and hope of profit held out by our patent laws inspires that stimulating energy which leads to experiment, invention, and all the resulting benefits. A refusal of that protection in a proper case will deaden and destroy it.” The ruling recognized the vital contributions not just of William Painter, but of all humble engineers and mechanics toiling away quietly in their garages and workshops in pursuit of the faster, cheaper, and ever better:
Painter’s invention is not one of those great epoch-marking discoveries like that of printing or the steam-engine or the electric telegraph, which opened to their inventors the portals of the Pantheon of the immortals. For such as these the love of fame and the glory of being benefactors of human kind served alike as motive and reward; but to the patient laborer in the workshop and factory the incentive of fame and glory is absent.
For the stimulus of the rewards offered by our patent laws is needed to encourage by the hope of profit that zealous eagerness to improve processes, to remedy defects in machinery, to invent new methods and appliances for saving labor and cheapening production in the numberless articles that are in daily use. It is this stimulus that has made the American mechanic the most alert, observant, and studious of any in the world, and it is the indefinite multiplication of these small inventions and improvements that has wrought an industrial revolution and brought his country to the forefront of the world’s commerce.
Spectacular feats of invention such as the telegraph or airplane may garner the greatest fame and biggest headlines. But it’s the innumerable and cumulative multitude of modest, profit-driven undertakings that drive an Age of Progress. One man’s successful innovation begets more successful innovation. The pioneer tinkerpreneur’s economical and effective design inspired and unleashed an entire new industry of bottle opener manufacturers, who added everything from corkscrews and folding knives to can openers and “Prest-O-Lite” valve openers to ornate handles and wall mounts. One hundred twenty years later, in 2012, a group of young men named their company—which manufactures titanium sunglasses with bottle openers built into the sides—after William Painter. They explained that Painter inspired them to be “passionate about living life with a creative twist and creating products that challenge conventional thought.”
The life and legacy of William Painter show:
From tiny bottle caps, mighty economies and myriad other businesses grow.