Knut Hovden


Knut Hovden was a Norwegian canner, innovator, and businessman.
A graduate from the Norwegian school of fisheries, Hovden started his career working for the pioneer canner Frank E. Booth in Monterey, California in 1905. In 1916 he started his own cannery, Hovden Canning Co, which became the most successful cannery in Monterey in the heyday of the sardine industry. Hovden also ran other canneries along the west coast and was widely recognised as the "King of Cannery Row".
Hovden modernized California`s sardine industry. His innovation pervaded every stage of the canning process, from live fish to tin of sardines. Hovden developed the first mechanical dryer on the west coast, eliminating the need to air-dry sardines, and the mechanical cooker, which used a chain-driven conveyor to move fish through vats of frying oil. In 1910 he introduced two soldering machines to seal the lids on the cans. By 1913 he and his brother, Ole Hovden, also began experimenting with a sardine cutting machine, which they perfected in 1918. Amongst Hovden's most influential innovation was also the fish hopper, a seabed connected to the canneries by underwater steel pipes, which literally sucked the sardines into the cannery for processing and storage. The innovation enabled the fishermen to unload the fish off shore.
Monterey Bay Aquarium is now on the site of Hovden's cannery. As a board member of the Pacific Grove Museum, Hovden was one of the first to champion the idea of an aquarium on the Monterey Peninsula already in the 1920s.