FRIEZE NEW YORK 2013
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TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2012
BEIJING DESIGN WEEK 2012
While the Allies of World War II certainly had the moral high ground over the Axis, it's almost embarassing to see how far the former was behind the latter in terms of industrial design. A good case in point is the object that today is known as the Jerrycan. ("Jerry" being Allied slang for "German." The can was originally called Wehrmachtkanister.)
Armies need fuel, among other fluids, and when war broke out in 1939 the Brits (and later Americans) were toting fuel in flimsy, flat-sided pressed steel containers like this:
The flat sides were all individually welded together at the edges--labor-intensive--and the decidedly un-ergonomic sharp-edged handle was a single piece of bent steel. You needed a wrench to attach and remove the cap, a funnel to fill the container and a spout to empty it. The containers held four Imperial gallons and tended to leak at the corners, where the welds would fail, and the containers became colloquially known as "flimsies."
In contrast, the Germans had fuel cans that looked and performed like they should be in the freaking MoMA.
The German design, which dated to the 1930s, was made from two pieces of pressed steel that slotted into each other and needed just a single weld around the "equator" where they met. The sides had indented ribs to add strength. The rounded corners meant no weak welds and hence no leaking.
The caps could be opened and closed by hand, no tools necessary, and the extended neck meant you could pour without a funnel in a pinch. Each can held an even 20 liters, making it easy to calculate bulk amounts (whereas the Brits had to multiply everything by four). There was even an airpipe leading to the air pocket above the spout and below the handles so that the contents would pour smoothly.
Most interesting of all are those handles, which are rounded, and of which there are three.
Why three? For two reasons: One, when a soldier placed two cans side-by-side, the handles on the edge of each can touched and could be used as a single big handle, meaning one person could carry four cans. Two, think about unloading a bunch of these off of a truck, how would you do it? The extra handles on the side meant it was easy to make a bucket brigade line of troops and neatly hand cans off to each other.
A German sympathizer to the Allied cause reportedly gave an American engineer the manufacturing specs of the Jerrycan as early as 1939, but when the plans were shown to the Allied brass, he was ignored. The higher-ups were not interested.
Allied troops on the ground, however, recognized the superior design of the cans and readily used captured Jerrycans. Later in the war the Allied brass would finally order that the Jerrycans be duplicated in five-gallon knock-offs. The Germans presumably had other things to worry about than intellectual property violations, and the Jerrycan became standard Allied kit. As you can see below, by 1944 they were cranking them out like Gucci purses on Canal Street.
via cambridge network, blind kat, olive drab and wikipedia
Comments
Nazi Germany, despite its terrible political and historical legacy, certainly was well ahead of its time technologically and in design. Their weapons, U-boats, and aircraft were all state-of-the-art amazing. They pioneered turbojet engines, had single flying wing stealth studied, and even guided missiles in development. It is of no surprise that both the West and Soviet Russia subsequently scrambled to capture and harness German scientists and engineers.
For more info and history:
http://histor.ws/bmwr12/eng/his-11.htm
interesting article...a good example of the famous "form follows function" philosophy.
Not true. Germans had some stuff good and some stuff bad.
For example the Germans were famous for over engineering.
This example is an exception.
Allies for example were much more advanced in Radar and Electronic warfare, Command and control, communications, motorization, while the German army was in majority still mostly horse driven. Allies were also much more advanced in industrialization, production, reliability and crucial for war teaching.
Soviets too, Germans for while couldn't do anything against T-34 tank.. Even Italians less industrialized, check for example X-Flotilla and their chariots submarines, the origins of current naval special forces.
Some countries are the best in some kind of stuff because Industry is too big field for a country to dominate it by itself and human creativity is distributed.
"fuel cans that looked and performed like they should be in the freaking MoMA."
It's not old enough to be in MoMA :p
This is insanely brilliant, I never thought that jerrycans hold this much of design and functional ingenuity if it wasn't for this article.
My mate's Dad who was a WWII involved in the intense days following the Allies as they started clearing German towns and villages remarked how they had:
US food, Italian leather jackets, German weaponry and so on - the remainder as supplied by the Brits. His favorite story was of an officer sent over to 'clean' them up - upon asking where they slept? 'Under the tanks was the reply' - and they pointed to a large German tank.
Awaking to screaming - as this new officer was getting crushed by the tank sinking during the night - he left covered in oil and dirt and the matter was closed.
Actually the Jerrycan is in the MoMA
Brilliant design & functionality; but hipstomp, I just don't understand the airpipe leading to the air pocket above the spout and below the handles so that the contents pour smoothly. How does that work & where is it visibly located ? I'm designing new containers for dispensing water & this information could be useful...
Gabriel:
I'm not sure where it's located but I suspect it is tack-welded on the inside prior to welding the halves together. It works on the same principle as any non-glugging dispenser does: If you have 1 gallon of water in a 1-gallon jug, there is essentially no air in the package. When you pour water out, the rigid container still holds 1 gallon - it's just that air takes its place. If air has no convenient conduit, vacuum will build up until the point where no product can be dispensed, air will sneak past the closure where liquid is coming out to replace the displaced liquid. If you provide a means for air to fill that empty spot, the liquid will pour smoothly. This can be done in basically 3 ways (name brands used for reference but there are plenty out there):
1. Route the air through the nozzle and into the can someplace, IE: a Blitz vented gas can nozzle
2. Route the air through the back of the package
IE: a Blitz gas can with secondary vent and screw cap
3. Replace the evacuated volume with ambient air by using an enclosed flexible container: IE: bag-in-box, or bag-in-bottle. Ring Can and Container uses this for cooking oil bottles, and some baby bottles use them too. When the product evacuates, the bag collapses, and the outer structure is merely a means to hold everything rigid (it's air permeable and oftentimes even open in a few places).
-a 12 year package designer and CPP