THE CAN THAT CAN

You may already know the basic history of the jerrycan: that the Germans invented this famous container during World War II, and that ‘Jerry’ was British slang for a German soldier.

But the whole story is even more interesting…

Back in the day, oil and fuel were sold to the public in square tin cans (shown top left here), the kind that co-ops and wholesalers still use today to hold cooking oil and paraffin. But during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, supported by Nazi Germany, they discovered that the soldered seams of these tin cans were prone to bursting open when treated roughly by careless soldiers.

Another kind of fuel container, one that resembled a sort of triangular briefcase (second from the top), was designed in 1928 by Vinzenz Grünvogel from the German engineering firm Eisenwerk Müller & Co. AG in Schwelm, Westphalia. It performed markedly better than the standard square tin cans that the army relied upon.

Grünvogel’s design impressed the German, also known as the 20 ℓ jerrycan (shown third from the top).