Original photo by CS0523183/iStock
Inventor Ermal C. Fraze may not be a household name like Thomas Edison, but he helped create something we all use today: the pull tab that opens drink cans. Before these convenient pop-tops, people typically opened cans with a can opener or through brute force. That included Fraze himself, who forgot his church key — a small tool used to pierce metal lids — while on a family picnic in 1959. Though Fraze managed to open his beer by physically cracking the lid open against his car’s bumper, he remained frustrated by the need to carry a dedicated beverage-opening tool.
Fraze began brainstorming an all-in-one solution, devising a way to affix a tab to the top of a can with a rivet. His idea maintained the drink’s internal pressure while still making the beverage easy to open — a winning combination that inventors before him had failed to achieve. It was called the “zip-top,” and users could simply pull it off to open a can. In a 1963 interview with The New York Times, Fraze acknowledged that others before him had developed similar ideas but said he was first to “develop a method of attaching a tab on the can top.”
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factWhile it’s not the case in the U.S., many McDonald’s locations in Europe sell beer. The first Mickey D’s to do so was in Munich, Germany, which has been serving McBooze since 1971. The only non-European McDonald's locations that sell beer are in South Korea, where the practice was introduced in 2016.
Fraze obtained a patent for the tab in 1963, selling the rights to the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa). The invention proved highly popular: The Pittsburgh Brewing Company, which used cans supplied by Alcoa, saw sales of their Iron City beer spike 400% over the next six months. In 1976, Fraze’s idea was improved upon by engineer Daniel Cudzik, who patented the push-in, fold-back tab commonly used today. Unlike Fraze’s original idea — wherein the tab was physically torn off the can, leaving an opening to sip through — Cudzik’s tab simply punctured the lid while remaining affixed.
Numbers Don't Lie
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______ was the first company to sell beverages in 2-liter bottles.
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Pepsi was the first company to sell beverages in 2-liter bottles.
Czechia consumes the most beer per capita in the world.
While there are many countries whose locals have a reputation for partaking in a frosty beverage, nobody guzzles more beer than the Czechs. According to data compiled by the Japanese beer brand Kirin, people in Czechia consumed 148.8 liters, or 39.3 gallons, of beer per capita in 2024 (the most recent year for which their numbers were compiled). That marked the 32nd consecutive year Czechia topped the list.
In 2023, Czechia was followed by Lithuania at 110.6 liters per capita and Austria at 104.6 liters per capita. The United States ranked 29th — a drop from 26th the year before — as Americans consumed 65.4 liters per capita. Overall, global beer consumption totaled 194.12 million kiloliters in 2024, which is roughly equal to 547 billion standard 12-ounce bottles of beer.
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Inbox Studio, and previously contributed to television programs such as "Late Show With David Letterman" and "Impractical Jokers." Bennett is also a devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
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