Can opener with serrated wheel

The can opener with serrated wheel emerged because William Lyman's 1870 rotating-wheel design had a fundamental problem: it couldn't grip the can firmly. The blade cut well enough, but the opener slipped and wobbled during operation. In 1925, the Star Can Opener Company of San Francisco added a second serrated wheel—the 'feed wheel'—that rode below the rim and squeezed the can edge between two wheels instead of one.

The adjacent possible aligned through decades of incremental frustration. Canned food had existed since 1810, but early cans required hammers and chisels to open. The first dedicated can openers appeared in the 1850s as crude cutting tools. Lyman's rotating wheel was a breakthrough: a sharp blade that circled the can's rim, slicing off the lid. But operating it required adjusting the length via a wingnut, and the initial piercing proved hazardous. The can could spin freely against the single blade.

The Star Can Opener Company's innovation seems trivial in retrospect: a second wheel to grip what the first wheel cut. But this combination created the design still used in handheld can openers today. By squeezing the rim between the cutting wheel above and the serrated feed wheel below, the Star maintained a firm and steady grip. The can rotated smoothly. The blade cut cleanly.

Historical priority remains disputed. Some sources trace the patent to 1920, not 1925. More significantly, Thomas H. Gilham of Cortes, Nevada patented a serrated second wheel in June 1888—nearly four decades earlier. Whether Gilham's patent influenced Star's design or whether the company independently reinvented the concept remains unclear. What matters is that Star commercialized and popularized the two-wheel design.

The can opener exemplifies how incremental innovation can achieve near-permanence. Millions of cans are still opened daily with essentially the same mechanism Star introduced a century ago. Electric can openers appeared in 1931. Pull-tab lids arrived in the 1960s. Yet the two-wheel manual opener persists in kitchen drawers worldwide—a design so well-matched to its function that a century of innovation has found nothing simpler.