The Bottle Cap Made Him Rich. Then He Told an Employee to Invent Something People Throw Away.

US468258 was granted to William Painter on February 2, 1892. The title is "Bottle-Sealing Device." It is the crown cork — the fluted metal cap on a glass bottle — and it solved a problem that had frustrated the drinks industry for decades.

Carbonated beverages are under pressure, and pressure wants out. Nineteenth-century closures were all compromises: cork stoppers that let gas escape and sometimes shot out, elaborate wire-and-porcelain swing tops that were expensive and had to be cleaned and reused, and internal glass marbles held shut by the carbonation itself. All were costly, inconsistent, or both.

Painter's cap has twenty-one flutes crimped down over the lip of the bottle, with a soft liner inside — originally cork — pressed against the glass to form the seal. The pressure inside the bottle actually helps hold the seal tight.

The unusual part

The design decision that mattered most was not mechanical. It was economic, and at the time it was close to heretical.

Painter deliberately made the cap destroyed by use. Opening it deforms the metal so it cannot be resealed. In an era when bottlers carefully collected, washed, and reused their closures, he proposed a closure so cheap that throwing it away was the correct thing to do.

The bottlers resisted. Painter had to demonstrate that the total cost of a single-use cap beat the cost of collecting, sanitizing, and re-fitting reusable closures — and he had to invent an opener, and get one into people's hands, to make the system work at all.

He won the argument. Crown Cork & Seal became a large and durable company, and the crown cap is still, more than a century later, the standard closure on beer bottles worldwide, essentially unchanged.

The advice

Painter's second contribution to industrial history was a sentence.

Among his employees was a traveling salesman named King Camp Gillette, who wanted badly to invent something and could not decide what. Painter, by Gillette's own account, told him to invent something that would be used once, thrown away, and bought again — the insight that had made the crown cap work.

Gillette spent years turning that over before landing on the object where it applied most obviously: the razor blade. Straight razors were expensive and had to be stropped and honed constantly. A cheap stamped steel blade, too thin to sharpen, sold in packs and discarded when dull, fit Painter's principle exactly.

That became the disposable safety razor, and with it the business model — sell the handle cheap, sell the blades forever — that now underpins printers and ink, consoles and games, coffee machines and pods.

Painter died in 1906. His patent is on a bottle cap. His actual legacy is the idea that the most profitable products are the ones you buy again next week.

See the original

The full text and figures of US468258 are on patents.us.