Hasta La Ideas

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.

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