1. General

1.1 Importance of tinplate

The popularity of tinplate has been undiminished for over five hundred years, thanks to a number of properties of this complex material consisting of a steel core (black iron) coated with tin. The first of these is its inalterability, from which it derives its name "white". This was all the more striking in past centuries when steel could not otherwise be prevented from rusting, giving it the name "black iron". The second was tin's ability to be assembled using soft solder, an operation made easy by tin's low melting point (232°C). Lastly, tin ions are non-toxic to humans: this opened up the huge field of food packaging for tinplate, already a packaging material, after Nicolas Appert's work under the First Empire established the possibility of preserving...