On this day in 1825, the issued its first patent for a system to "preserve animal substances in tin". Ezra Dagget and his nephew Thomas Kensett, the patent holders, had been canning salmon, oysters and lobsters out of their seafood processing factory in New York City since 1819.
Tin cans had been put into use for preserving food since 1813, but their use had largely been limited to specialized environments and circumstances like military expeditions and arctic exploration, rather than commercial use.
About 150 years later, canned foods had become commonplace staples on grocery store shelves, and Pacific Coast Canned Pear Service hired the magician Steffan Soule and the industrial film production companies of Evans/Kraft and Northstar Productions to promote canned Bartlett pears grown in the United States in the ca. 1975 industrial film "The Magic of Pears".
The film is part of Hagley Library's Sponsored and industrial motion picture film collection (Accession 2018.222), an artificial collection compiled by curators that includes single motion picture films or small sets of films acquired via purchase or donation. The collection is comprised of sponsored films produced for businesses (industrial films) and those produced for organizations promoting business interests.
To view this film and others from the collection online now in our Digital Archives, just click here, and - presto! - through the magic of the internet, you're there.