Steel Drum Manufacturing: Nellie Bly to ABB Robots

The blue or black 55-gallon drum is so common that few people ever ask who made it or how. Steel drum manufacturing ships oil, chemicals, paint and bitumen around the world, and the modern drum started in a New York factory run by a famous journalist. This post follows the container from wooden casks made by coopers to the steel barrel built at Nellie Bly's Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, and through the drums that fuelled the Second World War. Then it looks at how drums are made today, a large bitumen drum order placed in India in September 2026, and where ABB robots could weld, paint and stack drums in the future.

Blue and yellow steel fuel drums standing on wooden pallets in the snow. Photo: Trevor MacInnis / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

From coopers' casks to Nellie Bly's steel barrel

For thousands of years liquids travelled in wood. An Egyptian wall painting in the tomb of Hesy-Ra, from about 2600 BC, shows a wooden tub made of staves bound with wooden hoops. The craftsmen who made casks were called coopers, and their workshops were cooperages. Casks carried water, oil, wine and beer, and also gunpowder, nails and fish. In the 19th century iron hoops gradually replaced wooden ones because they were stronger and took up less space. The barrel also survived as a unit: a barrel of oil is still 42 US gallons, even though nobody ships oil in wooden barrels any more.

Men working with a barrel machine at Sweeney Cooperage in Vancouver, early 20th century. Photo: Vancouver Public Library via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions)

The steel drum came from an unusual boss. Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, better known as the journalist Nellie Bly, married the manufacturer Robert Seaman in 1895. As his health failed she left journalism and took over his Iron Clad Manufacturing Company in New York. Seaman died in 1904, and that same year Iron Clad began making the steel barrel that became the model for the 55-gallon drum still used across the United States. Bly is sometimes credited with the design, but the patents were registered to an Iron Clad employee, Henry Wehrhahn, who received two of them in December 1905.

Nellie Bly around 1889, years before she ran the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company. Photo: unknown photographer / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The design spread once trucks, cold-rolled steel, forming machines and welding were widely available. Use of 200-litre drums became widespread in World War II, when the Axis powers used them first and the Allies quickly copied them. In the Guadalcanal campaign the US Navy could not hold the sea long enough to unload aviation fuel for the aircraft ashore, so fast ships such as destroyers carried drums of gasoline to the island and pushed them over the side. Gasoline is lighter than water, so the drums floated, and Navy Seabees in small boats rounded them up.

British soldiers move drums of oil from a train to Army lorries at a railhead during the Second World War. Photo: Sgt. Midgley, No. 5 Army Film and Photo Unit / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Inside a modern drum line and the September 2026 order

The basic recipe has changed little. Steel drums are made from sheets of cold-rolled steel formed into a tube and welded along the side seam. The bottom head is attached permanently, and the top is either a fixed head or a removable lid sealed by a ring clamp. Rolled hoops stiffen the body so a full drum can be tipped and rolled. Many drums are just under 880 mm tall and 610 mm across, with a nominal 208 litres inside. Drums for dangerous goods have to pass UN-coordinated performance tests and carry embossed certification marks.

A closed-head steel drum with rolled hoops around its body. Photo: Meggar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Large buyers order drums in bulk and years ahead. In September 2026, East India Drums & Barrels Manufacturing disclosed an order worth ₹59.02 crore from Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL) to supply IS 3575 bitumen drums over two years, awarded through India's Government e-Marketplace. The filing did not give unit volumes, but an order of that value implies a long run of identical drums. Runs like that are the kind of work where automation tends to pay for itself, from feeding sheet and welding seams to painting and stacking the finished drums.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

ABB does not sell a drum line, and we found no published ABB drum project. Its robots do the same kinds of jobs in other industries. An IRB 6700 lifts and places heavy steel parts, so it could plausibly load sheets or move drum bodies between machines. The IRB 5500 paint robot is built to work in explosive paint booth air and could coat drum exteriors. A drum maker could build such a cell first in RobotStudio and check cycle times before buying hardware. All of this is a possible fit, based on what these robots already do elsewhere.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot, a design built to work in explosive paint booth air. Photo: ABB

What comes next for drum plants

The end of the line is the most obvious place for robots. Full or empty drums are heavy, round and awkward, and moving them by hand is tiring work. Palletizing robots such as the IRB 460 and IRB 660 already stack sacks, cases and crates in other industries, and with a suitable gripper they could plausibly stack drums onto pallets. Flexley Mover AMRs could then take the pallets to the warehouse. Our post on whisky barrel handling shows how robots cope with round, heavy containers that like to roll.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxes onto a pallet at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Smaller drum makers and reconditioners, who clean, repair and repaint used drums, work in shorter batches, and a collaborative arm may suit them better. ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package puts a cobot on a welding table that a welder can teach by moving the arm by hand, so it could plausibly handle small batches of fittings or repairs. Over the next few years, factories will also want more data from each drum, such as weld checks and leak test results, and robot controllers like OmniCore can pass that information on to plant systems.

ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package on a welding table. Photo: ABB

Several problems stand in the way. A full robot line is expensive for a plant that makes several drum sizes with open and closed heads and special coatings, and every changeover needs new grippers or programs. Dangerous goods rules mean any change to welding or sealing still has to pass certification tests. Plants also need people who can program and maintain robots, and many drum makers do not have them yet. Coopers still build wooden casks by hand for wine and whisky. In steel drum plants, robots will most likely arrive first in painting, handling and stacking.

A cooper builds an oak wine barrel at the Chateau Haut-Brion cooperage in Bordeaux, 2005. Photo: BillBl / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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