July 2022
Most glass beverage bottles nowadays are molded with screw threads so you can twist the metal cap off with your fingers. But some — particularly beer bottles — still come with metal caps crimped onto the top. Those caps have a name: they’re “crown corks.” They were invented in 1892 in Baltimore, and not only represented a new way to seal bottles, but were also the first widely successful product that you just threw away. the crown cork would generally get bent when taking it off, and couldn’t be reused. Even if you take one off very carefully, it’s nearly impossible to put it back on the bottle.
Crown corks were an immediate hit and led to the rise of the Crown Cork and Seal Company — which still exists. And speaking of disposable products, another one is the disposable razor blade, which was developed by King Gillette. He got the idea when he was employed by the Crown Cork and Seal Company as a salesman.
King Gillette had some unusual ideas for a rich industrialist — he thought all businesses should be consolidated into just one, which would be owned by the general public. He actually started that company, called the World Corporation, tried to hire Theodore Roosevelt to be the CEO, and offered him a salary of a million dollars (back when that was real money, too). That idea never went anywhere, but he had another idea that had an interesting offshoot: he thought everyone in the US should settle in one single huge city. It would be powered by electricity produced by Niagara Falls, and would be called “Metropolis.”
Gillette wrote several books trying to popularize his ideas, and since his portrait appeared on every package of “safety razor blades”, which were nationally popular, he sold quite a few books. So some of his ideas may have been floating around in the national imagination in the 1930s, when Superman comics appeared. Superman was based in Metropolis, which was located in New York state, within reach of electrical power from Niagara Falls.
As everyone knows, Superman has superhuman strength and so would be easily able to replace a used crown cork on a bottle, crimping it shut with his super Kryptonian fingers. Does Superman drink beer, by the way? Does it affect him? Does Superman even eat? Is there a bathroom in his Fortress of Solitude?
Anyway, “Crimp” comes from the Old English word “crump”, which meant to fold or bend. In the 1700s it mostly was used to refer to hair (“Would you like your hair crimped, sir?” — 1786), but by the 1800s it referred to attaching metal by folding it in a particular way: “The cylinders were crimped on to the bases of dummy Pettman’s percussion fuzes.” (1875). So the word was ready and waiting when crown corks came along.
Not having super Kryptonian fingers, most people need a tool to remove a crown cork from a bottle. The tool is prosaically called a “bottle opener”, but by the middle of the 20th century it was widely recognized as a “church key.” Nobody knows where the name originated, but the tool was often stamped or enameled with ornate logos and given away. It was an early form of “freebie advertising”, or “freebie marketing”, where you give away one thing (a bottle opener) to stimulate sales of your real products (bottles of beer).
One of the first and most successful practitioners of freebie marketing? King Gillette, who gave away the razors in order to sell the blades. But you know, there is one thing I’ve always wondered: does Superman need to shave? If he does…how does he do it? A regular disposable razor blade wouldn’t cut his super whiskers, would it?
