The history of a cardboard box

The first commercial paperboard (not corrugated) box is sometimes credited to the firm M. Treverton & Son in England in 1817. Cardboard box packaging was made in the same year in Germany.

In 1890, Robert Gair, a Scottish-born inventor, invented the pre-cut cardboard or paperboard box – 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 he could make prefabricated paperboard boxes by cutting and creasing in the same operation. Applying this idea to corrugated boxboard was a straightforward development when the material became available around the turn of the twentieth century.

Cardboard boxes were invented in France around 1840 by silk manufacturers to transport the Bombyx mori moth and its eggs, and for more than a century, the production of cardboard boxes was a major industry in the Valréas area.

The advent of lightweight flaked cereals increased the use of cardboard boxes. The Kellogg Company was the first to use cardboard boxes as cereal cartons.

Corrugated (also known as pleated) paper was patented in England in 1856 and used as a hat liner; however, corrugated boxboard was not patented and used as a shipping material until December 20, 1871. Albert Jones of New York City received the patent for a single-sided (single-face) corrugated board. Jones used the corrugated board to wrap bottles and glass lantern chimneys. G. Smyth built the first machine for mass production of corrugated board in 1874, and the same year, Oliver Long improved on Jones' design by inventing a corrugated board with liner sheets on both sides. This was corrugated cardboard in its modern form.

In 1895, the first corrugated cardboard box was manufactured in the United States. By the early 1900s, wooden crates and boxes were being replaced by corrugated paper shipping cartons.

By 1908, the terms "corrugated paper board" and "corrugated cardboard" were both in use in the paper trade.