Coatings Experience The True Age of Painting

By Cynthia Challener

The paint and coatings industry formally began in the late 1860s with the first commercial sales of paints in reclosable metal cans. The introduction of this packaging tech­nology made it possible to manu­facture large quantities of paints and ship them to large numbers of different stores. Paint, of course had been used for thousands of years prior to this commercial de­velopment. In fact, the first paints were applied to cave walls as much as 30,000 years ago.

Many places across the world have been found to contain prehis­toric art, including paintings on cave walls, painted rocks, and carved and sculpted figurines. More than 200 cave sites have been iden­tified in southern France and north­ern Spain alone. Other sites across Europe and Africa have been identi­fied as well. Thousands of rock paintings have been discovered in northern Australia. Most experts be­lieve numerous other sites remain hidden, buried un­
der mountains of
earth or lying deep
beneath the sea.