The highest-paying jobs, which included fishing and maintaining machinery, were reserved for whites, with Chinese relegated to the blood-splattered line and segregated “Chinatown” living quarters. During tour in 1899, author Rudyard Kipling described the canneries as having “slippery, bloodstained, scale-spangled, oily floors” with the most “murderous of machinery”.
Unappreciated as they were, however, Chinese workers soon showed their mettle. The best jobs available were as butchers, and skilled knife-wielding Chinese could within seconds remove the fins, head, tail and entrails with eight strokes, handling up to 2,000 salmon during a 10-hour shift.
In November 1910, the Pacific Fisherman magazine reported, “Chinese are at present such an important factor in the salmon packing industry – in fact, have been for many years – that when you speak of a cannery you think of yellow faces and ‘pigtails’.”
Canning became increasingly mechanised after 1870 as railcars rolled thousands of cans simultaneously into pressure ovens. Other machines sealed, vacuum packed, laminated and labelled cans, many with pretentious names such as Empire, Globe and Beacon, which featured the Statue of Liberty holding a salmon in her upraised green hand.
The one step that continued to resist automation was butchery, however, in part because fish do not come in standard sizes. But this was not for lack of trying. By 1901, more than 250 largely unworkable fish-cleaning devices had been patented.
Their skills allowed Chinese butchers – the line’s “aristocrats” – to demand better housing, food and pay, which galled the white cannery owners. By the late 1880s, Chinese butchers were making US$50 a month, twice what unskilled workers earned, according to a US Commission of Fish and Fisheries report at that time.
Even more problematic for owners was the bottleneck. As production soared – salmon canning was a US$99 million industry by 1899, making up 10 per cent of all US canned food behind only tomatoes and corn – Chinese butchers could not keep up, no matter their speed.
This was especially true during huge runs that forced owners to toss away mountains of rotting fish. During a single three-day period in August 1900, the Fairhaven cannery in Washington unloaded 232,000 salmon.
Until inventor Edmund A. Smith arrived on the scene, that is.
Born in 1870 on a farm in Canada’s Ontario province, Smith had enjoyed tinkering from boyhood, when he designed a threshing machine. On leaving home, he worked in a cookhouse, bought into a brickmaking operation and invented reinforced concrete piling for construction and a machine to print on pencils.
After a failed cannery investment, local cannery boss F.E. Barlow challenged him to stop messing about with pencils and make something useful: a salmon butchering machine. “None of them are any good. The man that gets up a good one will make a fortune,” Barlow told him, according to a report in the Pacific Fisherman in June 1909.
Smith took up the challenge, working for months in a Seattle waterfront shed drawing blueprints on tablecloths. Inspired after watching Chinese butchers slice from the tail forward, according to a 1969 account by his daughter, he awoke early one morning and, turning to his wife, Gertrude, exclaimed “Gert! I’ve got it!”