Consider the champagne bottle. In the late eighteenth century, it was a remarkably sophisticated piece of manufacturing: thick glass with a precisely tapered neck, made to withstand a liquid under extreme pressure without shattering.

Champagne makers had been solving one problem — how to keep wine stable and hold pressure. Nicolas Appert, a confectioner who had spent years in kitchens, looked at the same object and saw a different use. He had no scientific training, only an intimate familiarity with the problem of keeping food from rotting. So when the French government announced a prize of 12,000 francs in 1795 for a workable method of food preservation for its army, he set to work.

He took the bottle, filled it with food, sealed it against the air, and lowered it into boiling water. Months later, the contents would still be good.

It took him fourteen years of experimentation to refine and demonstrate the method. And he could not fully explain why it worked. That explanation would come decades later, from another Frenchman. But what mattered, for the moment, was that it did.

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Armies had always needed to deal with the question of how to properly feed soldiers. It was not a new problem in 1795, nor even a poorly understood one. The logistics of feeding men on campaign had settled into a harsh equilibrium. Soldiers carried what they could, and when their provisions ran out, they foraged — a polite word for taking food from whoever lived nearby, at gunpoint if necessary. Armies also relied on a system of pre-positioned supply depots along planned routes of march, stocked in advance. The system generally worked for smaller armies, which dominated warfare up to the eighteenth century.

That world began to change around 1792…

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