"The first commercial paperboard (not corrugated) box was produced in England in 1817.
[9][10][11] Cardboard box packaging was made the same year in Germany.
[12]
The Scottish-born
Robert Gair invented the pre-cut
cardboard or
paperboard box in 1890 – flat pieces manufactured in bulk that folded into boxes. Gair's invention came about as a result of an accident: he was a Brooklyn printer and paper-bag maker during the 1870s, and one day, while he was printing an order of seed bags, a metal ruler normally used to crease bags shifted in position and cut them. Gair discovered that by cutting and creasing in one operation he could make prefabricated paperboard boxes. Applying this idea to corrugated boxboard was a straightforward development when the material became available around the turn of the twentieth century.
[13]
The advent of
flaked cereals increased the use of cardboard boxes. The first to use cardboard boxes as cereal cartons was the
Kellogg Company.
Corrugated (also called pleated) paper was
patented in England in 1856, and used as a liner for tall
hats, but corrugated boxboard was not patented and used as a shipping material until 20 December 1871. The patent was issued to Albert Jones of
New York Cityfor single-sided (single-face) corrugated board.
[14] Jones used the corrugated board for wrapping bottles and glass lantern chimneys. The first machine for producing large quantities of corrugated board was built in 1874 by G. Smyth, and in the same year Oliver Long improved upon Jones's design by inventing corrugated board with liner sheets on both sides.
[15] This was corrugated cardboard as we know it today.
The first corrugated cardboard box manufactured in the USA was in 1895.
[16] By the early 1900s, wooden crates and boxes were being replaced by
corrugated papershipping
cartons.
By 1908, the terms "corrugated paper-board" and "corrugated cardboard" were both in use in the paper trade.
[17]
Cardboard boxes have been used there since 1840 for transporting the
Bombyx mori moth and its eggs from
Japan to
Europe by
silkmanufacturers, and for more than a century the manufacture of cardboard boxes was a major industry in the area."
I'm going to quote this to random ladies on the weekend and see if I pull.