Pasteur born after the Napoleonic Wars; was RE: OT? Global Warming
Jim McKenney (Mon, 09 Jan 2006 13:18:39 PST)

Ken Hixon wrote " In addition to Mark's comments about disease in Napoleon's
armies, feeding his armies was a tremendous problem, in a time
when preserving and transporting food was a huge problem. Napoleon
offered a huge reward for anyone who could help preserve food,
and Louis Pastuer won the award for the process now called pasteurization,
of heat treating food. Canning food as a means of preservation
is the result..."

That sounded a bit off to me - Pasteur was not active during the Napoleonic
wars. So I checked the wikipedia entry for canning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canning/

From this, I learned that canning was developed by a Frenchman named Nicolas
Francois Appert in the early nineteenth century. By 1810 a British worker
developed a process for using tin lined cans. Thus, canning was not the
result of Pasteur's work in developing the process now known as
pasteurization.

Napoleon I died in 1821, the year before Pasteur was born. In fact, it was
Napoleon III who, in the 1860s, asked Pasteur to investigate problems of
wine spoilage - these studies led to the development of Pasteurization.

Jim McKenney
Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, wine growing country if you
try.