Nicolas Appert was born the November 17th 1749 with Châlons-in-Champagne, in the Marne, and he died on June 1st 1841 with Massy. He is the first to develop a method of conservation of food by sterilizing them by heat in hermetic containers (bottles out of glass then metal boxes in Fer-blanc). He created the first factory of Conserve S in the World.
Biography
Ninth child of a couple of landlords of Châlons, Nicolas Appert familiarizes himself as of his youth with the trades of cook and confectioner, and with the modes of conservation of the foodstuffs. After having spent 10 years to Germany, with the castle of Karlsberg de Christian IV (1722 - † 1775) Palatine duke of the Double-decker, it settles in Paris in 1784 and opens a shop of confectioner, the Fame , with 47 rue des Lombards. In this shop of retailer, after a few years, he becomes wholesaler, employs six employees, and has correspondents in Rouen and Marseilles. After being itself committed in the revolutionary action (as of 1789, and until in 1794 - it spends 3 months in prison then), it will direct its work towards the solutions to bring to the weaknesses means of conservation of the time.
Taking into account several criteria (modification of the taste, high costs and poor food values of the products salted, dried, smoked and crystallized), it develops the process which makes possible the setting in Conserve (called Appertisation) of food in 1795, that is to say 60 years earlier than Louis Pasteur and the Pasteurization.
Installed with Ivry-sur-Seine, Nicolas Appert improves his discovery and, after many pressures near the admirals, manages to provide the marine finally French. In 1802, Appert creates with Massy the first preserve factory in the world, where it employs ten, then about fifty workers.
In answer to request of Napoleon Bonaparte, which offers a strong reward to that which would develop a method of conservation of food for its armies, it accepts, in 1810, to drop its method in the public domain by publishing art to preserve during several years all the animal substances or vegetable , a premium of 12.000 francs is then allocated to him.
As of this moment, its method of conservation is seen copied by the British. The latter do not pour any financial equalization of course to him, and are satisfied to honor it with the title symbolic system with benefactor with humanity . Using the technique of Pierre Durand, the British Bryan Donkin and John Hall replace the bottles of glass by boxes in Fer-blanc. Those, much more resistant, especially make it possible to contain larger volumes, but have the disadvantage of being able to only open very with difficulty (the crimped box and the Ouvre-boîtes will only arrive much later).
The decline of the imperial marine of Napoleon after the demolished of Trafalgar and the continental Blocus drastiquement reduces the demand for preserves for the voyages to the long course and the wars. The competition of the British, supported by an access to a tinplate of better quality and less expensive, ends up ruining Appert.
Old of quatre-vingt-onze years, and without money to offir a burial, Appert dies on June 1st, 1841 with Massy, where its body is deposited in the common grave.
Work of Nicolas Appert and the Canning
The Appertisation can be defined as a process of conservation which consists in sterilizing by the heat of the perishable goods in hermetic containers (metal boxes, bottles…).
Canning (or sterilization) consists in subjecting to a food a sufficiently intense heat treatment to ensure its long-term stability, with the room temperature of the place of its storage. This heat treatment destroyed or inactive all the Micro-organism S and Enzyme S likely to deteriorate the product, or to make it unsuitable to consumption. It is carried out at a temperature equal or higher than 100 °C, for one variable length of time according to the nature and the quantity of product to be treated. Actually, during the food sterilization under the conditions of temperature and duration applied, the destruction of the germs cannot be total if one wants as much as possible to preserve organoleptic qualities of this food. Alive or revivifiable micro-organisms can remain. For this reason, the heat treatment of “sterilization” aims, in practice, at obtaining a product which must remain stable during a long conservation (from 5 to 6 months, even more), i.e. free from germ S likely to develop to with it and there to cause deteriorations. Among these germs, only nonthe Pathogènes possibly remains, more heat-resisting S of them being destroyed for combinations much lower times/temperature.
The technique of canning implies the use of tight containers which prevent the recontamination of the food product after the heat treatment, and ensure the formation of a partial vacuum (vacuum) which reduces the presence of oxygen inside the container, called in the current language “preserves”.
The Procédé of Nicolas Appert consisted in filling at short-nap cloth-edge of the bottles, hermetically to close them with cork stoppers then to make them heat with the Bain-marie. These bottles were the same ones as those which were intended for champagne. Because their glass was thicker, they resisted much better the interior pressure induced by the increase in heat caused by the bath-marie.
Before the arrival of Louis Pasteur, the scientific company had not been able besides to determine which heating or maintenance in vase hermetically closed was responsible for the conservation. This method of conservation, in addition to the fact that it respected the taste of food, protected of good part their contribution nutritional, of which that of the Vitamine C, thus avoiding the Scorbut which made many victims among the sailors who undertook voyages several months.
For the anecdote, it is in Appert that one owes the soup tablet, the processes of clarification of fermented drinks, and first “pasteurized milk” (two weeks of conservation in full summer!)… thirty years before the birth of Pasteur.
| Random links: | Kingdom of Kent | Fountains (Saône-et-Loire) | François Labonté | Holmes Rand | Nikolaï Maslov |