Early canmaking techniques star on TV

As part of a television series broadcast by the BBC in the UK, tinplate cans have been made using techniques almost identical to those employed by the world’s first canmaking factory in the 1820s, with the help of The Canmaker magazine.

The series, ‘The Boat that Guy Built’, rebuilds a canal boat, and in the process highlights British inventions of the industrial revolution.

One project was to make a can of beans, in which presenter Guy Martin fabricates a soldered tinplate can similar to those made by Bryan Donkin’s company, which was set up in Bermondsey, South London, in 1812.