Today in HistoryâJanuary 11: The Day Milk Got Contained
On this day in 1878 Alexander Campbell of the New York Dairy Company Ltd. pulled off something revolutionary: He delivered milk that was contained. There was no ladling, pouring, or siphoning into whatever tub, bucket, or pail was handy. This milk arrived in a clean, clear (this will matter later) glass pint bottle, sealed with a lid.
There was no going back.
The idea that dairy products needed to be kept cool was still relatively new. In the 1850s canned milk entered the market. This solved one problem (refrigeration) but created others (chemicals in milk reacted with metal, leading to corrosion and contamination).
By the mid-19th century, as the Industrial Revolution drew people to cities, milk became a mass commodity. If milk was not canned, it was delivered by a milkman on a cart.
It was transported dozens of miles and sourced from herds of thousands of cows, many dining on âdistillery slopââleftover mash from alcohol producers. No standards governed refrigeration, storage, or processing, and additives were sometimes mixed in to âenhanceâ milk (read: disguise spoilage). These âenhancementsâ included everything from plaster of paris to charcoal to eggs. The milk traveled in a large container, and customers filled their own vessels along the route. Cleanliness, then, depended on the consumer, the container, the ladle, the weather.
By the 1870s milk was reaching consumers in greater quantitiesâand it was often less safe.
A few dairy farmers in rural New York experimented with selling milk in glass jars. It didnât catch on; the glass lids proved too fragile for their gaskets. Then came the Warren Glass Works milk bottle, the one Campbell delivered. This is the bottle youâre probably picturing: upright with narrow shoulders, made of clear glass so the consumer could see the product inside. Empty bottles were collected the next day to be reused.
Cows that dined on slop sometimes produced blue milk.
A sealed bottle meant fewer hands touching the milk and fewer opportunities for contamination. But it didnât solve everything. Commercial pasteurization wasnât far off. Although Louis Pasteurâs early work focused on beer and wine, its application to milk proved transformative. Rates of diseases routinely transmitted through milk (typhoid, strep, tuberculosis) dropped, and infant mortality fell by half.
Within a few years (and even after pasteurization), glass bottles became the preferred delivery method. Milk still had a short shelf life, and refrigeration didnât exist, so daily deliveries like the one that began on this day almost 150 years ago kept your milk fresh.
- 32 gallons: Daily slop diet of one cow
- 17 years: How long a woman in Germany kept shedding typhoid
- 22: Average trips a typical 1900s-era glass milk bottle made before breaking or being lost
- 1785: Continental Congress reconvenes in New York City
- 1927: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is formed
- 1935: Amelia Earhart becomes the first to fly solo from Hawaii to California
