The first glass bottle packaging for milk was used in the 1870s. The first company to do so may have been the New York Dairy Company in 1877. The Express Dairy Companyin England began glass bottle production in 1880. In 1884, Hervey Thatcher, an American inventor from New York, invented a glass milk bottle, called ‘Thatcher’s Common Sense Milk Jar’, which was sealed with a waxed paper disk.
In 1863, French chemist and biologist Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization, a method of killing harmful bacteria in beverages and food products. He developed this method while on summer vacation in Arbois, to remedy the frequent acidity of the local wines. He found out experimentally that it is sufficient to heat a young wine to only about 50–60 °C (122–140 °F) for a brief time to kill the microbes, and that the wine could be nevertheless properly aged without sacrificing the final quality. In honor of Pasteur, the process became known as “pasteurization”. Pasteurization was originally used as a way of preventing wine and beer from souring. Commercial pasteurizing equipment was produced in Germany in the 1880s, and the process had been adopted in Copenhagen and Stockholm by 1885.
References:
- “The History Of Milk”,com. Retrieved August 13, 2010.
- Vallery-Radot, René (March 1, 2003).Life of Pasteur 1928. pp. 113–114. ISBN 978-0-7661-4352-4.
Photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/31/Milk_Bottles_of_the_Late_19th_century.jpg
