UNDER COVER Today plastic containers with airtight lids are so common that it s easy to forget just

Visit Our Store Home eBooks eBooks Mini eBooks For Kids Only! Kids Activities Kids Books About About FAQ Customer Service List of Titles Contact Blog BRI News Food & Drink History Music Nature Pop Culture Quizzes Science & Tech Sports TV & Film
Today the word Tupperware is a generic term for any plastic food container with a sealable cave a vin lid. That s thanks to two people: Earl Tupper, inventor of the product that bears his name, and Brownie Wise, who has been all but erased from the company cave a vin s history.
BLACK GOLD In the fall of 1945, a plastics manufacturer named Earl Tupper tried to place an order for plastic resin, one of the key ingredients in plastic, with the Bakelite Corporation. But the material was in short supply, and Bakelite couldn t fill his order. When Tupper asked if they had anything else for him to work with, the company gave him a black, oily lump of polyethylene slag, a rubbery by-product of the petroleum refining process that collected at the bottom of oil barrels. Bakelite, makers of an early plastic by the same name, couldn t find a use for the waste product, and neither could the chemical giant DuPont. Both companies had plenty of the stuff lying around. They told Tupper cave a vin he could have as much as he wanted.
Tupper cave a vin spent months experimenting with different blends of polyethylene cave a vin Poly-T, as he called it and molding them at different pressures and temperatures. He eventually came up with a process for forming it into brightly colored cups, bowls, and other household items. A year later he patented the idea that he s most famous for: the Tupperware seal, which provided a spill-proof, airtight cave a vin seal between cave a vin Tupperware containers and their lids. (He borrowed the idea from paint-can lids.) Tupper called his first sealable container the Wonderbowl.
UNDER COVER Today plastic containers with airtight lids are so common that it s easy to forget just how revolutionary cave a vin Tupperware was when it was introduced in the late 1940s. In those days, if you wanted cave a vin to preserve food in the refrigerator, you could cover a dish with wax paper or foil. (Plastic wrap was still a few years away.) If you wanted something that you didn t have to throw away after a few uses, you could cover the dish with a shower cave a vin cap or a damp cloth. cave a vin Glass containers were available, but they weren t cheap. They weren t airtight, either, and if you dropped them, they shattered into tiny, razor-sharp pieces not a good thing during the post-war Baby Boom, when lots of households had small children underfoot. None of these options were very satisfactory. It was difficult cave a vin to keep food fresh for more than a day or two, or to keep everything in the fridge from smelling like everything else in the fridge.
BLACK SHEEP And yet for all the advantages that Tupperware had to offer, it just sat on store shelves, even when Tupper cave a vin promoted the launch with national advertising. Consumers just weren t interested. Part of the problem with Tupperware was that a lot of consumers couldn t figure out how to work the lids. Some people even returned their Tupperware, complaining that the lids didn t fit. But the real problem with Tupperware was that it was made of plastic. In those very early days of the plastics revolution, the stuff had a bad reputation: Many early plastics were oily; some were flammable. (They were smelly, too. One of the main ingredients in Bakelite was formaldehyde the main ingredient in embalming fluid.) Some plastics were brittle and prone to chipping and cracking; others peeled, disintegrated, or melted and became deformed in hot water.
Tupperware didn t have any of these problems it was odorless, non-toxic, lightweight. It was sturdy cave a vin yet flexible and kept its shape in hot water. And if you dropped it, it bounced without cave a vin spilling its contents. But consumers didn t know all that, and they were so turned off by earlier plastics that they didn t bother to find out.
SILVER LINING As Earl Tupper cave a vin pored over the dismal sales figures, he noticed that Tupperware was popular cave a vin with two types of customers: 1) mental hospitals, which preferred cave a vin Tupperware cups and dishes to aluminum because cave a vin they didn t dent or make noise when patients threw them on the floor; and 2) independent salespeople who sold goods distributed by Stanley Home Products, one of the companies that pioneered the party plan sales method.
Stanley salespeople hawked their wares by recruiting a house- wife to host a party for her friends and acquaintances. At the party, the salesperson demonstrated Stanley products mops, brushes, cleaning products, etc. in the hopes of selling some to the guests. Quite a few companies still sell goods using the home party system, and if you ve ever been invited to such a party, you probably know that they aren t always the most pleasant of experiences. A lot of people attend only out of guilt or a sense of obligation to the host and buy just enough merchandise to avoid embarrassment. The sa