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A beverage can is a metal container designed to hold a fixed portion of liquid such as carbonated soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, fruit juices, teas, herbal teas, energy drinks, etc. Beverage cans are made of aluminium (75% of worldwide production)〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Canmaker FAQ )〕 or tin-plated steel (25% worldwide production). Worldwide production for all beverage cans is approximately 370 billion cans per year worldwide.〔 == History == Beginning in the 1930s, after an established history of success with storing food, metal cans were used to store beverages. The first beer was available in cans beginning in 1935 in Richmond, Virginia. Not long after that, sodas, with their higher acidity and somewhat higher pressures, were available in cans. The key development for storing beverages in cans was the interior liner, typically plastic or sometimes a waxy substance, that helped to keep the product's flavor from being ruined by a chemical reaction with the metal. Another major factor for the timing was the end of Prohibition in the United States at the end of 1933. Canned beverages were factory-sealed and required a special opener tool in order to consume the contents. Cans were typically formed as cylinders, having a flat top and bottom. They required a can piercer, colloquially known as a "church key", that latched onto the top rim for leverage; lifting the handle would force the sharp tip through the top of the can, cutting a triangular hole. A smaller second hole was usually punched at the opposite side of the top to admit air while pouring, allowing the liquid to flow freely. In the mid-1930s, some cans were developed with caps so that they could be opened and poured more like a bottle. These were called "cone tops", as their tops had a conical taper up to the smaller diameter of the cap. Cone top cans were sealed by the same crimped caps that were put on bottles, and could be opened with the same bottle-opener tool. There were three types of conetops: ''high profile'', ''low profile'', and ''j-spout''. The low profile and j-spout were the earliest, dating from about 1935. The "crowntainer" was a different type of can that was drawn steel with a bottom cap. These were developed by Crown Cork & Seal (now known as Crown Holdings, Inc.), a leading beverage packaging and beverage can producer. Various breweries used crowntainers and conetops until the late 1950s, but many breweries kept using the simple cylindrical cans. The popularity of canned beverages was slow to catch on, as the metallic taste was difficult to overcome with the interior liner not perfected, especially with more acidic sodas. Cans had two advantages over glass bottles. First for the distributors, flat-top cans were more compact for transportation and storage and weighed less than bottles. Second for consumers, they did not require the deposit typically paid for bottles, as they were discarded after use. Glass bottles deposits were reimbursed after consumers returned the empties back to the store. By the time the United States entered World War II, cans had gained only about ten percent of the beverage container market. And this was drastically reduced during the war to accommodate strategic needs for metal. In 1959, Ermal Fraze devised a can-opening method that would come to dominate the canned beverage market. His invention was the "pull-tab". This eliminated the need for a separate opener tool by attaching an aluminium pull-ring lever with a rivet to a pre-scored wedge-shaped tab section of the can top. The ring was riveted to the center of the top, which created an elongated opening large enough that one hole simultaneously served to let the beverage flow out while air flowed in. Pull-tab cans, or the discarded tabs from them, were also called "pop-tops" colloquially. Into the 1970s, the pull-tab was widely popular, but its popularity came with a significant problem, as people would frequently discard the pull-tabs on the ground as litter, or drop them into the can and risk choking on them. These problems were both addressed by the invention of the "push-tab". Used primarily on Coors Beer cans in the mid-1970s, the push-tab was a raised circular scored area used in place of the pull-tab. It needed no ring to pull up. Instead, the raised aluminium blister was pushed down into the can, with a small unscored piece that kept the tab connected after being pushed inside. Push-tabs never gained wide popularity because while they had solved the litter problem of the pull-tab, they created a safety hazard where the person's finger upon pushing the tab into the can was immediately exposed to the sharp edges of the opening. An unusual feature of the push-tab Coors Beer cans was that they had a second, smaller, push-tab at the top as an airflow vent — a convenience that was lost with the switch from can opener to pull-tab. The safety and litter problems were both eventually solved later in the 1970s with Daniel F. Cudzik's invention of the non-removing "Stay-Tab". The pull-ring was replaced with a stiff aluminium lever, and the removable tab was replaced with a pre-scored round tab that functioned similarly to the push-tab, but the raised blister was no longer needed, as the riveted lever would now do the job of pushing the tab open and into the interior of the can. In 2008, an aluminium version of the crowntainer design was adopted for packaging Coca-Cola's Caribou Coffee beverage. In 2004, Anheuser-Busch adopted an all-aluminium bottle for use with Budweiser and Bud Light beers. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Beverage can」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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