An Illustrated History of the American Beer Can

Some of the information I've discovered since putting this site together contradicts what I've believed for years. It contradicts what most collectors have believed for years. Here is some of that information, and where I learned it:

1. The "Keglined" trademark was never registered:

Bottom line: the term "Keglined" was a trademark, but it was a trademark that was never registered with the US Government.

There is a difference between "to trademark" and "to register a trademark." The term "to trademark" means to make up a brand name, logo, or picture, and associate it with a product. Sticking a doodle on your product, adding a made-up word to your product's name, or even shouting an artificial word (like "keglined") over the airwaves is the act of trademarking. If I sell a product, and during a live radio ad for it I blurt out -- off the top of my head -- "It's 'Willa-manilla-teriffic'", then guess what? I've just trademarked the term Willa-manilla-terrific.

Whether or not I ever bother to file an official registration for my trademark with the US Govt is another story.

Trademarks are logos, slogans, terms, etc. that companies come up with to attach to their products - such as "Have a Coke and Smile," "The King of Beers" or "Keglined." The moment a company makes up a word or term for their product, it has trademarked that term.

SO, the very first time the American Can Company publicly associated the term "Keglined" with their product, they trademarked "KEGLINED."

Now, keep in mind the term "Keglined" was never registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office. There are some early cans bearing the term "registered," but it quickly (and obviously) disappears within the same year; the minimum time a Trademark is good is ten years. So canners mistakenly claimed the "Keglined" Trademark had been registered with the US Government, but soon thereafter corrected this mistake and removed the word "Registered" from their cans.

It is a fact that many trademarks are never registered. The only thing registration accomplishes is to constitute an 'official' record of your ownership of the trademark; comes in handy in court. But if it's a popular, well-known trademark -- one everyone knows about -- then proving you made it up (and therefore "own" it) in court will be a cinch. Filing an official record of ownership of a well-known trademark with the US Govt is seen by many as a waste of time and money.

I've owned keglined.com since January 2001, and for months, in an attempt to ensure I wasn't illegally using the term, I made very thorough searches into this matter. Though initially my goal was making sure I wasn't impinging on a registered trademark, I soon realized the term had never been officially registered. The trademark Keglined was never registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Yes, I'm obsessing. But here's why I think this is important to beer can historians:

Someone, decades ago, went on record specifically citing September 25, 1934 as the date "Keglined" was trademarked. I'm betting whoever it was understood the difference between "to trademark" and "to register a trademark." If I'm right, then that person was telling us, "the first time the word 'Keglined' was introduced to the public was on September 25, 1934."

Unfortunately, since then, the commonly-held misunderstanding of trademarks has worked its way into our hobby; a commonly-held belief about the world's first beer cans is wrong. Even in Lilek's book the two concepts (trademark vs registering a trademark) are confused - this was a huge disappointment for me. Under the Krueger's Special Beer can depicted on page 470 the book states the can was made "Circa: Late 1933," but then states the the term "Keglined" was not trademarked "until 25 September 1934." These claims are mutually exclusive; they cannot both be true.

If the Krueger's Special Beer can, and its attached "Keglined" logo -- as depicted on page 470 of Lilek's work -- first appeared in public in 1933, then that was when "Keglined" was trademarked. Maybe Lilek should create a second Supplement and include a 1933 Krueger's Special can without the logo, and a September 1934 can including the logo.

(Incidentally, I've found a few newspaper articles from mid-1934 indicating Krueger's Special was tested in Farrell, Pennsylvania at that time - maybe this was the second Special can design... the first to introduce the "Keglined" logo to the public.)

We know a Krueger's Special can appeared in a 1933 article, and so either it did not contain the term "keglined" as digitally recreated for the Lilek book, or the 25 September 1934 date is incorrect.

Let me get just one more kick on this dead horse: what I'm after is the source quoting that exact date (25 September 1934) as the date "Keglined" was trademarked. If there is no reputable source, then the most likely scenario is this: at some point in the 70s or 80s the 25 September 1934 date was proclaimed by an "expert" beer can collector, and then through repetition and over time became beer can "gospel" (so much of which, I'm learning, is incorrect). If, on the other hand, the 25 September 1934 date is accurate -- say, from a 1930's brewer-related journal, for instance -- then the digital recreations of that elusive 1933 can have been inaccurate (in addition to the incorrect font used for the word "Special").

I would love to know what source lists 25 September 1934 as the date "Keglined" was trademarked. If you know, e-mail me please.

2. The Heekin Can-o-Draft contained 248 ounces, not 252 ounces:

To the best of my knowledge, nothing on the Heekin Can-o-Draft mentions ounces or "oz." Hell, I even picked up a copy of the 1936 Popular Science Monthly (shown in the 2001 US Beer Cans book), and learned, sadly, the image and brief paragraph shown in the USBC is the all there is. I ran numerous searches through NewspaperArchive.com and found no additional information on the can. The patent I found on Google Patents does not allude to quantity.

The only specific indication of quantity I could find is the printing on the can - "each Can-o-Draft contains 1/16th barrel of draught beer," on one side, and "1/16th barrel" on the face. That's 248 ounces, not 252.

As confirmed through 1934 - 1939 brewer/brewery-related journals and periodicals, a barrel of beer contains exactly 31 gallons. One sixteenth of that amount is 248 ounces. One sixteenth of barrel of wine -- 31.5 gallons -- would be 252 ounces.

3. Crown Cork and Seal's first beer cans were not J Spouts, and were sold in 1936:

CCS began operating as Crown Can once it purchased the Acme Can Company in February 1936. While paying for Acme (CCS paid in installments until October 1936), they used both the term "Acme Can Co" and "Crown Can" in trade. Advertisements I located in October/November 1936 Fitchburg Massachusetts newspapers confirmed that Eblings Ale and Beer were already being sold in cans at that time. Those cans were the tall, slim, paper label cans (like USBC 160-23).

4. Near Beer?

Yes, that very first, elusive can we all dream about, Krueger's Special, was most probably full of near-beer. All 2,000 of 'em.

The brewer had sold Krueger's Special near-beer all throughout the 1920s, bragging about (though implicitly) its similarity to the real thing, and in 1933 sent its Special Beer to 500 families in order to conduct an opinion poll on the newfangled beer can's likability. I seriously doubt the brewer would have mailed alcohol to 500 families, especially so short a time after Repeal.

(More to come on this soon - lots of 1920s ads, etc.)

5. Dates:

Specifically, (a) "How do you get such exact dates?" and (b) "I think (some brand) beer can was filled before the date you've listed."

If I have reliable evidence of an exact date, I'll list it. On Trademark registrations, for instance, businesses are required to list the date a trademark was first used. Pabst's "Tapacan" registration and Anheuser-Busch's Eagle Claw drawing registration are two good examples. We can tell from these documents the exact dates when Pabst put "Tapacan" on their cans and when the first Budweiser can was sold. Patent application and grant dates are easy - they're listed on the patents themselves (viewable for free on Google Patents). Newspaper stories are another reliable source of an exact date, especially when numerous stories from the same day (but different papers) talk of an event. Chances are that event occurred on the day prior to its news release.

As far as U Permit Numbers go -- in a few cases, like Coors, the beer was canned within a couple weeks of a U Permit Number issue, but in most cases the period between U Permit Number issue and the canning itself was a month or longer.

I'll post more explanation as questions arrive...