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The Brilliant Redesign of the Soda Can Tab

The Brilliant Redesign of the Soda Can Tab
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SEPT. 24 2012 3:44 AM

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The brilliant redesign of the soda can tab.

By Tom Vanderbilt

Coca-Cola ad from the 1970s

Courtesy Coca-Cola.

As a child of the 1970s, I have a distinct and curious memory about the landscapes I
inhabited: They glittered with glinting metal, not the gold of El Dorado but the effluvia of the
consumer society. I am talking about aluminum can tabs.

If, as the saying goes, we are never more than three (or five, or 10) feet from a spider, so too
did those little trinketsa sturdy ring pull attached to a curled, wedge-shaped tear strip, the
disposable remnant of the mechanism then used to open cans of beer or sodararely seem out
of range: Studding the dirt dugouts of Little League, clustered near the concrete parking stops
at convenience stores, sunk between seat cushions in cars, draped as a necklace around your
friends stoner older sister. When Matthew Broderick needed to hack the payphone in War
Games, his tool was right at his feet. The sand at Normandy is said to be 4 percent war
shrapnel. The beaches in Florida were easily that in soda shrapnel, a fact recorded by the
frustrated reactions of stooped snowbirds sweeping metal detectors. I blew out my flip flop,
noted Jimmy Buffett, in the song that begat a lifestyle, and stepped on a pop top. He was
not alone: In 1976, the New York Times, commenting on beach injuries at Rockaway, noted
that a large percentage were due to cuts inflicted by discarded pop tabs.

There was an inherent problem in multipart portable consumer packaging: What to do with
the sealing mechanism, once so vital and now so worthless (and dangerous), after you had
opened the can? Often, it seemed, the answer was to simply chuck it. Another solution was to
deposit the pulled tab in the can. While this may have been less environmentally injurious, it
was not without its dangers. As an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association
noted, at least seven children over a period of a little over three years had been treated for
complications of ingestion or aspiration of pull tabs from aluminum beverage cans. One
particularly pernicious problem is that aluminum often does not show up on X-rays; hence the
appearance, in journals like Pediatric Emergency Care, of such startling articles as:
Swallowed Coke Can Tab: Is it Still Stuck in the Esophagus?

Indeed, it was at a radiology conference in 1974 that a physician named Lee Rogerswho
had inadvertently swallowed a can tab during a basketball gamebroached the idea of the
can tab hazard to the medical community. And it was this single panel at a medical conference
that helped launch a revolution in the design of our aluminum cans. As described in the
American Journal of Roentgenology, Rogers presentation triggered a media crusade, with
more than 400 newspapers picking up the story. (Rogers, the AJR notes, also received
negative feedback from the beverage industry, which was not keen on coming up for a costly
replacement for an otherwise functional technology.) Aluminum pull-tabs are now common
elements of our environment and inevitable offenders as foreign bodies in the esophagus, the
Journal of Pediatrics sternly noted in 1978, sounding like a Red Scare-era FBI dossier.

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Can tabs were an ecological disgrace and a threat to children: Is there a more potent nexus for
citizen outrage? The hunt for a new and better design was on. But the irony is that the pull-
tab, unveiled just more than a decade before, had been hailed as a remarkable solution to an
age-old problem. As its inventor, an Ohio toolmaker named Ermal Fraze, put it, I personally
did not invent the easy-open can end. People have been working on that since 1800. What I
did was develop a method of attaching a tab on the can top.

Prior to Frazes invention, cans, both steel and aluminum, required a separate opener, the so-
called church key. As Henry Petroski notes in The Evolution of Useful Things, Fraze was at
a family picnic in 1956, where he found plenty of beer but no church key, and resorted to
opening a brew via a car bumper. After an insomniac night and a spell at his workbench,
Fraze had his concept. As Petroski describes, the actual engineeringgetting a top that was
easy enough to pull off but could withstand the force of the cans pressurewas tricky:
Some early pull tabs were being blown off prematurely so Fraze and other inventors came
up with schemes to direct benignly the first whoosh of escaping gas away from the tab itself.
But a decade later, the solution had become a problem, and the search for a better can closure
began. In the early 1970s, Coors came up with its environmental package, a curious two-
opening topthe first was a small pressure-release valve, the second was a larger aperture for
drinkingthat some readers may recall. Like Coors itself, which for a Midwesterner had a
certain exotic appeal, there was an intriguing novelty to the design of the press tab, as the
company called it; one that quickly lost appeal for drinkers (particularly those on the
downward slope of a six-pack) trying to puncture through, and then retract their fingers from,
the smaller, sharp-edged opening.

But Coors wasnt the only experimenter; as the website Rustycans.com notes: Crown, Cork,
and Seal tried a top that you pressed down then slid a tab to one side, pushing a hole into the
can top. Continentals Envir-o-can required the consumer to pull a metal strip from the top of
the can, revealing several small holes in the top from which to pour the beer.

Coca-Cola in 2011.
Photograph by Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images.

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The solution came from Daniel F. Cudzik, an engineer with Reynolds Metals, who for years
had been toiling away on what would what become known as the Sta-Tab. As Cudzik told
Studio 360, his search for a convenience top that was more practical and less prone to
litter came to fruition one night when he was in living room, half watching a movie. While
the idea might seem simple to a consumer raised on nothing but stay-on tabs, the design
required some elegant engineering (and some subsequent legal battles over alleged patent
infringements).

As Cudzik described the problem in his 1975 patent application: The opening construction of
the invention requires a tab which must be stiff against transverse bending and yet flexible
enough and tough enough at the connection between the tab end wall to permit lifting and
retracting the tab without causing a fatigue crack at the connection. As elegantly explained in
this video, the design operates both as a second class and as a first class lever at different
points in the can-opening processredirecting loads and shifting the fulcrumusing the
inherent pressure from the carbonated beverage in its favor.

When the Sta-Tab launched in 1975, on Falls City beer and, quickly, other beverages, there
was initial period of consumer testing and education (as soberly described by the New York
Times in 1976: New Yorkers are now faced with a new problem: how to open the new Stay-
On-Tabs on Coca-Cola cans currently being sold in New York). But the Sta-Tab was here to
stay.

From a waste point of view, the consequences were clear: Notes Petroski, this time in
Invention by Design: In the 16 years after Cudziks patent, the stay-on-tabs alone amounted
to over 4 million tons of aluminum that was recovered and recycled rather than discarded.
Curiously, the problem of ingested tabs has not gone away: In 2010, an article in Pediatric
Radiology identified 19 cases of accidental ingestion at a single childrens hospital (with the
majority radiographically invisible). Also still with us: can tab arts and crafts.

Cudzik said on Studio 360 that he thought can tab design had reached a point where I dont
believe therell be too many changes anymore. But is design ever done? A 2007 study that
looked at the ergonomics of can-tab pulling (using finite-element analysis to analyze the
deformation of the fingertip pulp), for example, suggested that a larger tab would reduce
discomfort. And theres always another basement tinkerer on the horizon. A Canadian golf
course groundskeeper, for instance, is making the rounds with a new smart tab, which
tackles the ergonomics problem with a tab that curves slightly upwards. The tab also spins
around to act as a kind of cover for the opening (to keep out debris and bees). Will it catch
on? Who knowsbut the work of design , as much as it is about eliminating obvious flaws, is
also about bringing to light the things we only realize are problems the very moment we no
longer have to live with them.

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