Cardboard boxes are so ubiquitous in our current society that we rarely wonder about their origin
. The completed drink boxes, cereal packets and cigarette cartons you see everyday are assembled by cardboard box making machines, however in the industry the term cardboard is seldom used as its not specific enough to the particular type of cardboard being utilised and could refer to any form of heavy paper-like material such as paperboard, corrugated fibreboard or just plain paper.
Some believe that cardboard originated with a man called Robert Gair, who was of Scottish decent and he invented the pre-cut cardboard box in the 19th Century by mass manufacturing flat pieces of paperboard that could be easily folded into boxes by the end user. This process came about by accident when Robert Gair was based in Brooklyn as a painter and paper-bag maker during the 1870s, and during a typical day at work he was printing an order of seed bags when a metal ruler normally used to crease the bags, shifted in position and cut them. In doing so the ruler helped Gair discover that by cutting and creasing in one operation he could make prefabricated cardboard or paperboard boxes. Applying this idea to corrugated boxboard was a straightforward development when the material became available around the turn of the twentieth century.
The Kellogg brothers drastically increased the commercial use of cardboard boxes with the advent of their flaked cereals and so there was suddenly a much bigger demand for box making machinery when Kelloggs Cornflakes became a popular breakfast fixture. And it is argued that the first corrugated cardboard box was manufactured in the USA in 1895 soon replacing wooden crates as shipping cartons.
However there is some debate about where exactly the first corrugated cardboard box really initiated. The Muse du Cartonnage et de lImprimerie (The Museum of the Cardboard Box) which is based in Valras in France, traces the history of box making and the art involved with the practice to the region. Cardboard boxes were used there in order to transport the Bombyx mori moth and its eggs from Japan to Europe by silk manufacturers since as far back as 1840.
Now cardboard boxes are so prevalent in our modern world that society would probably crumble without them and therefore factories full of cardboard box making machines are big as well as important business. If you consider the amount of cardboard used in product packaging you can understand the significance of the initial discovery, whether it was in America or France.