Business: Tupperware

During most of his adult life, easygoing Earl S. Tupper, 40, has described himself as “a ham inventor and Yankee trader.” By last week, one of his inventions—an unbreakable, flexible, shape-retaining plastic which can be moulded into all sorts of containers—was forcing him to temper the “ham” and drop the “trader” entirely.

At his big-windowed brick factory in Farnumsville, Mass., orders for Tupperware were pouring in—from the American Thermos Bottle Co. for 7,000,000 nesting cups; from Canada Dry Ginger Ale for 50,000 bowls to sell with beverages; from Tek Corp. for 50,000 tumblers to sell with toothbrushes; from Camel for 300,000 cigaret cases. To top it off, Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art would include two of Tupper’s bowls in a forthcoming show of useful objects.

The basis of this one-man boom is a paraffin-like substance which its chief producers, DuPont and Bakelite, call, respectively, polythene and polyethylene. Tupper’s all-important contribution is a process which overcomes the material’s tendency to split, makes it tough enough to withstand almost anything except knife cuts’ and near-boiling water.

Along with the new material, which he calls simply Poly-T (“There have been too many bum articles called plastic”), Tupper has developed machinery to press it into 25 pastel-shaded houseware items ranging from poker chips (100 for $1.98) to double-walled ice-cube bowls ($4.98). Some of the bowls have close-fitting caps which, upon slight pressure, create a partial vacuum, form an airtight container. All of them can be squeezed to form a spout which disappears when the bowl is set down. A Massachusetts insane asylum found Tupperware an almost ideal replacement for its noisy, easily battered aluminum cups and plates; patients could damage Tupperware only by persistent chewing.

As a farm boy in Harvard, Mass., Tupper found that he could make more money by buying and selling other people’s vegetables than by raising his own. He developed his trading instinct into a small mail-order business featuring combination sales of toothbrushes, combs, etc., made enough to start manufacturing on his own in 1937.

He set up the Tupperware Corp., of which he is president, general manager, treasurer, and sole stockholder, in 1942, but war postponed its almost unpromoted rise. With only one agency in New York, which he set up mainly as a distribution center, Tupper this year expects to gross over $5,000,000.