Further down, paraphrasing a thread,
> why is the dot spacing different on the left vs right can?
> When a product design like this gets licensed out to others in the same industry, they will often change the design slightly to make their version incompatible with other potential suppliers
> why want incompatibility?
> to enforce supplier loyalty
Related: The Engineer Guy’s “The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can” on YouTube https://youtu.be/hUhisi2FBuw
Whenever it’s about cans I can only recommend this video from the engineer guy [1]. He makes no videos anymore sadly.
xkcd "Work": https://xkcd.com/1741/
"Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work that went into the ordinary objects around me."
Remember when every other Quora answer felt like this? In retrospect maybe that was peak Web.
Very informative, like so many posts on the /r/whatisthisthing sub. It's awesome when random sources pop up, it's very rewarding!
I had a similar moment once (I'm a regular reader of the sub) when someone asked about about a balise [1] when I was at one of the primary manufacturers and operators of them, doing work on software handling logs from passages. :)
Also, of course whenever someone on here mentions Nagle's Algorithm [2] and gets fun feedback from a particular user, that's fun too! :)
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/yrijd9/wha...
Love the enthusiasm of the top answer! "Pop cans appeared in the 1990s; I was there and helped make it happen, bumps and all!"
Too bad the post is locked. shout out to Menomonee Falls in the 90s!
It's the pig's eyes of course!
the pull tab on the right has a divot in it where it makes contact with the can, and it concentrates more pressure at the point of contact to pop the seal.
That’s an attempt to mitigate cans where you’d pull the tab and the tab would just break off without opening the can. So the person who answered it’s usually because of the seal is right.
other half’s dad [retired from] Campbell in Ohio and isn’t an internet let alone a Reddit person, you’d never guess how much trivia there is about their #2 can. I’d have commented but a brand new account will probably be buried as spam … and the second answer is correct anyway.
Old Reddit vibes
Reminds me of something from a few months ago:
Someone on r/HomeNetworking cursed whoever invented the RJ45 connector, and in the comments, Richard Benett, vice-chair of the first IEEE 802.3 task group that wrote a standard around RJ-45-style connector, appears and offers to take the blame.
That led to this short documentary: "TWISTED: The dramatic history of twisted-pair Ethernet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8PP5IHsL8Y