2400 BC: Archaeologists and anthropologists believe that the ancient Mesopotamians pickled.
850 BC: Aristotle praised the healing effects of cured cucumbers.
BC Continued: Roman emperors, among them Julius Caesar, fed pickles to their troops in the belief that they lent physical and spiritual strength.
900 The Dark Ages: Dill has been introduced to Western Europe from Sumatra.
15th Century: Pickles were brought to the New World by Christopher Columbus, who is known to have grown cucumbers for the purpose of pickling on the island of Haiti.
16th Century: Dutch fine food fanciers cultivated pickles as one of their prized delicacies. The area that is now New York City was home to the largest concentration of commercial picklers at the time.
17th Century: As early as 1606, pickles were being produced at home and commercially in Virginia.
18th Century: Napoleon valued pickles as a health asset for his armies, so much so that he offered the equivalent of $250,000 to anyone who could develop a way to preserve food safely. The man who won the prize in 1809 was a confectioner named Nicholas Appert, who figured out that if you removed the air from a bottle and boiled it, the food wouldn't spoil. He'd have to wait for Pasteur to describe why by making the bottle airtight, no microorganisms could enter, and by boiling it, any microorganisms that existed were killed. Known today as the “boiling water bath,” Appert's discovery was one of the most influential culinary contributions in history.
19th Century: 1858: John Mason designed and patented the first Mason jar. Made out of heavier weight glass than normal jars, these were developed to withstand the high temperatures necessary for processing pickles. When the patent expired in 1879, manufacturers of such jars continued to use the term “Mason” on their product. Lucius Styles Ball, who started the Ball Brothers Company in the early 1890s, was one such inventor. Alfred Bernardin invented the first metal tops to be used in commercial canning in 1881. These two companies joined forces as recently as 1993, to form the Alltrista Corporation, is the largest producer of Mason jars today.
20th Century 1985: Steven Trotter became the youngest man to conquer the crest of Niagara Falls in a pickle barrel actually, two plastic pickle barrels surrounded by rubber inner tubes.
21st Century: 5,200,000 pounds of pickles are consumed annually in the United States. That's nine pounds per person.