Cardboard box

• 1. Introduction

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  Cardboard boxes are everywhere, and almost no one can define exactly what they are. On the 20th of December 1871, a patent was issued to Albert L. Jones of New York City for a curious invention: corrugated board, fluted paper pressed between flat sheets, designed to wrap bottles and glass lantern chimneys. That single patent quietly set in motion one of the most consequential changes in how human beings move goods across the world. What exactly is a cardboard box? Where did it come from? And why, in 2005, did a cardboard box earn a spot in the National Toy Hall of Fame?

• 2. The Naming Problem

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  Specialists in industry seldom use the word cardboard at all. The reason is straightforward: it does not name any specific material. Depending on context, cardboard can refer to card stock, corrugated fiberboard, or paperboard, and these are genuinely different things. Material producers, container manufacturers, packaging engineers, and standards organizations have spent decades trying to settle on more precise language, without ever fully succeeding.

  Paperboard, sometimes called cardboard, is defined by ISO standards as a paper with a basis weight above 224 grams per square meter. It is generally thicker than 0.25 millimeters. Corrugated fiberboard is something else entirely: a layered construction consisting of a fluted, wave-shaped corrugated medium sandwiched between one or two flat liner boards. That flute is not decorative. It is the source of most of the strength that makes corrugated boxes suitable for shipping and storage.

  What people casually call a cardboard box might be any one of four distinct objects. A shipping container made of corrugated fiberboard is built to withstand the rigors of transportation and handling. A folding carton made of paperboard is designed for consumer goods like cereals, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, and folds flat when empty to save space. A set-up box, used for high-end products such as jewelry or electronics, is made from a non-bending grade of paperboard and is delivered fully constructed, never flat. And drink boxes, made of paperboard laminates, are engineered to maintain the freshness of liquid products like juice, milk, and wine.

• 3. A Printer's Accident

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  The Scottish-born Robert Gair was working as a Brooklyn printer and paper-bag maker in the 1870s when chance intervened. While printing an order of seed bags, a metal ruler normally used to crease the bags shifted in position and cut them instead. Gair recognized what had happened: cutting and creasing could be done in a single operation. From that accident, he developed the pre-cut paperboard box, flat pieces manufactured in bulk that folded into boxes when needed. His patent came in 1890.

  The first commercial paperboard box, which was not yet corrugated, is sometimes credited to the firm M. Treverton and Son in England in 1817. Cardboard box packaging was made the same year in Germany. Separately, in France around 1840, silk manufacturers developed cardboard boxes for transporting the Bombyx mori moth and its eggs. For more than a century afterward, the manufacture of cardboard boxes was a major industry in the Valreas area of France.

  Corrugated paper itself was patented in England in 1856, where it was used as a liner inside tall hats. It took another fifteen years before corrugated board was patented as a shipping material. Jones's original design was single-sided, meaning the corrugated medium had a liner on only one face. In 1874, a machine for producing corrugated board in large quantities was built by G. Smyth. That same year, Oliver Long improved on Jones's design by adding liner sheets to both sides, producing corrugated cardboard in essentially the form it takes today.

• 4. From Wood to Paper

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  The first corrugated cardboard box manufactured in the United States arrived in 1895. By the early 1900s, wooden crates and boxes were being systematically replaced by corrugated paper shipping cartons. By 1908, the terms corrugated paper-board and corrugated cardboard were both in circulation in the paper trade.

  The advent of lightweight flaked cereals gave the new packaging a powerful commercial push. The Kellogg Company was the first to use cardboard boxes as cereal cartons, a decision that helped make the folding paperboard carton a fixture on grocery shelves. Applying Gair's pre-cut folding method to corrugated boxboard was, as the record notes, a straightforward development once the material became widely available around the turn of the twentieth century.

• 5. Play, Art, and Shelter

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  Calvin and Hobbes, the comic strip by Bill Watterson, gave the cardboard box one of its most enduring cultural portraits. Calvin, the strip's protagonist, regularly imagined a cardboard box as a transmogrifier, a duplicator, or a time machine. The joke contains a genuine observation: children use boxes as raw material for imagination in ways that purpose-built toys rarely match.

  That observation has institutional backing. In 2005, a cardboard box was added to the National Toy Hall of Fame in the United States, one of very few non-brand-specific objects ever honored with inclusion. As a result, a toy house modeled on a log cabin and built from a large cardboard box was added to the Hall's collection, now housed at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. The Metal Gear series of stealth video games built a separate tribute into its design: a cardboard box appears as a recurring in-game item the player can use to evade detection.

  The box's reputation for shelter runs darker in everyday speech. Living in a cardboard box is a phrase long associated with homelessness. In 2005, Melbourne architect Peter Ryan pushed against that association by designing a house composed largely of cardboard. More common are small seats and tables made from corrugated cardboard, and merchandise displays made of cardboard that appear routinely in self-service shops.

• 6. Physics of the Crush

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  In 2012, British stuntman Gary Connery completed what the record describes as a landing via wingsuit without deploying his parachute. The landing zone was a runway built from thousands of cardboard boxes, rising 3.6 meters high. The boxes were not chosen for drama. They were chosen because of how they fail.

  The mass and viscosity of the air enclosed inside a box, combined with the limited stiffness of the box itself, work together to absorb the energy of an oncoming object. The box crushes gradually, dissipating force rather than reflecting it. That property is the same reason corrugated fiberboard became the dominant material for shipping fragile goods. Albert L. Jones first put it to work wrapping glass lantern chimneys in 1871, and the principle has not changed since.