I recently read a historical fiction about the American Revolution.  The author was a fairly good writer in all aspects but one.  Although she got the big historical picture correct concerning battles and historical figures, she did not do her research well enough on the every day life style of the times.  Case in point, her heroine caught fireflies, put them into a glass canning jar, and watched them light up her room at night.

As I read this, the writer lost creditability with me.  Let me pause to state that I may be guilty of exactly the same type of blunder in my writing. (If you catch anything like this let me know so I won’t repeat the error!)  It is a dangerous pitfall for all writers of historical fiction. Granted, most readers will read right over the jar-firefly incident without notice. I happened to catch it instantly, probably because research for my Civil War series included the history of the canning jar.  I didn’t want my characters canning in Mason jars unless they were actually in use at the time.  In case you are interested in a  bit of trivia, here is what I learned:

In 1795 Napoleon Bonaparte offered money to anyone who discovered a new way to preserve food for his troops. In 1810, hoping for the reward, a man named Nicolas Appert invented a process that sealed food inside a jar through a system of heating and cooling with wax and wire lid, but the lid proved unreliable, and the jar was not the clear glass we know today.

In 1812 Thomas Kensett began a sealed canning factory in New York, originally using a type of glass jars but later the factory was converted to use of tin cans. In 1858 the Mason Jar made it’s first appearance, named for John Mason, the inventor of the patent for a glass jar sealed with a threaded zinc cap.  Although it was invented before the Civil War, it doesn’t seem to have been widely used for home canning in the South until after the war.