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A church key or churchkey is a North American term for various kinds of
The term in the beverage-opening
Opening Instruction Cans
/ref>
File:- Coca-Cola - Old bottle opener -.jpg, Bottle opener
File:1940 - Daeufer Beer Bottle Opener - Allentown PA.jpg, Bottle opener with advertising text - sometimes given away by shops and beverage companies as promotions
File:Flaschenoeffner.jpg, Bottle opener with wooden handle
File:Combination can bottle opener.jpg, Combination can (left end) and bottle (right end) opener, very common variety for decade
File:Opening a Beer Can 1963.jpg, Opening a beer can with a "church key", 1963
World Wide Words
Food preparation utensils {{Bartending-stub
A church key or churchkey is a North American term for various kinds of bottle opener
A bottle opener is a device that enables the removal of metal bottle caps from glass bottles. More generally, it might be thought to include corkscrews used to remove cork or plastic stoppers from wine bottles.
A metal bottle cap is affixed ...
s and can opener
A can opener (North American and Australian English) or tin opener (British English) is a mechanical device used to open metal tin cans. Although preservation of food using tin cans had been practiced since at least 1772 in the Netherlands, the ...
s.
Etymology
The term in the beverage-opening sense
A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of Stimulus (physiology), stimuli. Although, in some cultures, five human senses were traditio ...
is apparently not an old one; Merriam-Webster finds written attestation only since the 1950s. Several etymological
Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. ...
themes exist. The main one is that the ends of some bottle openers resemble the heads of large keys such as have traditionally been used to lock and unlock church doors.
History
A church key initially referred to a simple hand-operated device for prying the cap off a glass bottle. Called a "crown cork
The crown cork (also known as a crown seal, crown cap or just a cap), the first form of bottle cap, was invented by William Painter in 1892 in Baltimore. The company making it was originally called the Bottle Seal Company, but it changed its na ...
" and later a “bottle cap”, this kind of closure was invented in 1892, with a patent awarded to William Painter. Two years later, Painter also received a patent on an opener, then called a "bottle cap lifter", to be used with the caps.
While there is no evidence that the opener was called a church key at that time, the shape and design of some of these openers did resemble a large simple key.
In 1935, beer cans with flat tops were marketed, and a device to puncture the lids was needed. The same term, ''church key'', came to be used for this new invention: made from a single piece of pressed metal, with a pointed end used for piercing cans—devised by D. F. Sampson and licensed by the American Can Company
The American Can Company was a manufacturer of tin cans. It was a member of the Tin Can Trust, that controlled a "large percentage of business in the United States in tin cans, containers, and packages of tin." American Can Company ranked 97th amo ...
, which depicted operating instructions on the cans, and typically gave away free "quick and easy" openers with cases of their canned beer./ref>
Gallery
See also
*Churchkey Can Company
The Churchkey Can Company was a brewery founded in 2012 by actor Adrian Grenier and former Nike Inc., Nike designer Justin Hawkins in Seattle, US. The brewery's name refers to its flagship beer, which must be opened using a can piercer, or "church ...
References
External links
World Wide Words
Food preparation utensils {{Bartending-stub