Clear.
Includes a screw on Yorker spout.
Available in many sizes.
Versatile.
The History of Packaging
By Anonymous
What's a Boston Round, it's a package for holding a liquid! Have you ever
wondered about the development of packaging — no, well, here's a little FYI on
packaging. BTW (by the way) if you ever make big money on a quiz show with any
of these tidbits — well, you owe us!
Ps. if you
actually want to order Boston Rounds, like, right now — just go to the bottom
of the page. Thanks.
A brief sequence of the most important developments in packaging since year 1,000 is listed below:
1035 Paper recorded as being used for wrapping in Cairo.
1040 Movable type printing invented by Pi Cheng in China.
1100 Paper first arrived in Europe form China.
1250 Tinplate developed in Bohemia (to prevent armour from rusting).
1450 Guttenberg’s printing press.
1630 First recorded mention of ‘grocer’s paper bags’.
1700 First commercial glass factory (Egham, UK) produces 3 million bottles per year.
1750 Jute sacks in general use.
1794 Schweppes design the famous ‘lay down’ bottle for mineral waters, the idea being to keep the cork wet, and thus gas-tight.
1795 Napoleon offers prize for food preservation technique.
1806 Bryan Donkin patents machine for making paper in reel form.
1807 Humphrey Davy predicted the existence of a new metal and named it
aluminum.
1810 Hot canning system of food preservation patented.
1820 First food canning factory set up at Dartford, Kent.
1825 First carbon dioxide-pressurized dispensing container, the ‘Regency Portable Fountain’ devised by Charlie Plinth for soda water.
1825 Danish scientist Oersted produced the first tiny pellet of aluminum.
1850 Decorative fancy paperboard boxes in use.
1855 First commercially produced ingot of aluminum.
1855 Can-opener designed by Robert Yeates in the UK (the famous ‘bull’s head’ model followed ten years later in the USA).
1860 Parkes in the UK produced the first synthetic plastic ‘parkesine’.
1860 Paperboard tubes described.
1869 Celluloid invented in the USA as substitute for ivory for billiard boards.
1870 Folding cartons developed in the USA by bag-maker Robert Gair.
1871 Corrugated board patented by Jones in the USA (as a cushioning material).
1879 Margaret Knight patented the paper-bag making machine in the USA.
1880 Paperboard cartons first used on large scale by Kellogg in the USA.
1880 Fully automated can-making machinery developed (soldered tops).
1890 Cardboard boxes developed in the USA by Robert Gair.
1890 Paper-based pill boxes patented by Robinson in UK.
1903 Corrugated boxes first produced on a large scale.
1903 First fully automatic glass bottle-blowing machine, Toledo, USA.
1909 Bakelite invented by Belgian/American Leo Baekeland.
1911 Wax-coated liquid-tight cartons for milk described (first produced in USA in 1915).
1912 First aseptic food packaging system (for cream) described in Scandinavia.
1920 Staudinger in Germany produced the first artificial macromolecules (polymers).
1922 Development of crimped-on hermetic seal for metal cans renders soldering obsolete and makes high speed food production feasible.
1930 First beer cans, with conical, tops and crown cork developed.
1931 Liquid-tight cartons (the Perga system) commercialized.
1933 Bottles made from molded fiber described (FESA) in France.
1933 Polythene isolated by Swallow & Perin of ICI.
1935 Cellophane. the first transparent film, produced in the UK.
1937 Molded pulp egg trays designed (Hartman). patented in Europe.
1940 Liquid cartons first used for milk on large scale in Chicago.
1941 Goodhue & Sullivan in the USA produced the first practical aerosol container.
1948 Denis Gabor in Hungary discovers the holographic effect.
1950 First two-piece (impact extruded) aluminum beer can produced in Switzerland.
1951 Original ‘TetraPak’ designed.
1956 Flip-top carton launched.
1963 Pull-tab easy open end for beer cans.
1964 DWI Aluminum two-piece can for beer developed.
1970 Two-piece can in steel for beer launched.
1972 Stay-on easy open tab for beer cans.
1972 First ‘widget’ beer-foaming device manufactured for Guinness.
1980 Micro-flute corrugated board launched.
Plastics
Plastic is the newest packaging material in comparison with metal, glass, and paper. Although discovered in the 19th century, most plastics were reserved for military and wartime use. Plastics have become very important materials and a wide variety of plastics have been developed over the past 170 years.
Several plastics were discovered in the nineteenth century: styrene in 1831, vinyl chloride in 1835, and celluloid in the late 1860s. However, none of these materials became practical for packaging until the twentieth century.
Styrene was first distilled from a balsam tree in 1831, but the early products were brittle and shattered easily. Germany refined the process in 1933 and by the 1950s styrofoam was available worldwide. Insulation and cushioning materials as well as foam boxes, cups and meat trays for the food industry became popular.
Vinyl chloride, discovered in 1835, provided for the further development of rubber chemistry. For packaging, molded deodorant squeeze bottles were introduced in 1947 and in 1958, heat shrinkable films were developed from blending styrene with synthetic rubber. Today some water and vegetable oil containers are made from vinyl chloride.
Celluloid was invented during the American Civil War. Due to a shortage of ivory, a United States manufacturer of billiard balls offered a $10,000 reward for an ivory substitute. A New York engineer, John Wesley Hyatt, with his brother Isaiah Smith Hyatt, experimented several years before creating the new material. Patented in 1870, "celluloid" could not be molded, but rather carved and shaped, just like ivory.
Cellulose acetate was first derived from wood pulp in 1900 and developed for photographic uses in 1909. Although DuPont manufactured cellophane in New York in 1924, it wasn't commercially used for packaging until the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the interim, polyethylene film wraps were reserved for the military. In 1933, films protected submarine telephone cables and later were important for World War II radar cables and drug tablet packaging.
Other cellophanes and transparent films have been refined as outer wrappings that maintain their shape when folded. Originally clear, such films can now be made opaque, colored or embossed with patterns.
One of the most commonly used plastics is polyethylene terephthalate (PETE). This material only became available for containers during the last two decades with its use for beverages entering the market in 1977. By 1980, foods and other hot-fill products such as jams could also be packaged in PETE.
Current packaging designs are beginning to incorporate recyclable and recycled plastics but the search for reuse functions continues.
