Robert Gair, the first manufacturer
In 1879 Robert Gair, an immigrant of Scottish origin born in Edinburgh, Scotland, invented the corrugated cardboard box. The family of Robert Gair He emigrated to Brooklyn in 1853, when Gair was only 14. He spent his adolescence as a plumber apprentice, learning his father's trade. Soon he developed his American patriotic spirit and at the age of 21, he voted for Abraham Lincoln for the first time.
After serving in the Civil War, Gair returned to Brooklyn, joined forces with a business partner and began manufacturing paper bags. During the war, when cotton was scarce, flour and sugar were often packed in paper bags rather than cotton cloth or burlap sacks. Although bulk flour sacks returned to cloth wrapping after the war, paper bags became the preferred packaging for small portions of dry goods. Gair saw a great business opportunity in these bags. After returning home and opening his paper factory on Reade Street in Manhattan, he quickly became a leader in the emerging paper industry, allowing the world's first packaged food products to appear on the shelves of general stores.
The first corrugated cardboard boxes
In 1879, he developed a technique for mass-producing corrugated cardboard boxes that brought him great wealth. In 1879, a worker at Gair's factory accidentally cut 20,000 paper seed bags. Rather than exploding with anger, Gair looked at the damaged bags and realized he could create a die that cut and creased cardboard in one operation. Before Gair's "happy accident," box manufacturing was a very labor-intensive process. Most assembly work was done by women working from their own homes. Every cut and fold was made by hand, and cardboard boxes were also expensive.
Gair's new invention resulted in the first corrugated cardboard box affordable from the world.
The first great cardboard box factory
In the late 1880s he sought a new location for his factory with better access to shipping, and settled in the small coastal area north of the new Brooklyn Bridge, a brick building on the west side of Washington Street, from Water to Plymouth.
It was the beginning of an empire of corrugated cardboard boxes whose buildings today are a tourist attraction.
1890 was a prodigious decade for cardboard boxes. Gair produced cardboard boxes for Bloomingdale’s, Colgate, Pond’s and some cigarette companies.
The folding box got its real big break in 1896, when the National Biscuit Company, now known as Nabisco, wanted to sell its popular Uneeda biscuits in folding boxes. Before that, crackers were usually stored in barrels and sold loose by general store owners. As you can imagine, this caused the crackers to go stale. Robert Gair's factory produced the first 2 million boxes for the National Biscuit Company, a moment that contemporary historians still highlight as the birth of consumer packaging.
The first Gair factory was designed by William Higginson, with the usual brick walls and wooden beams. This was followed by a second building, similar to the first, on Adams Street near Washington Street.
Gair was the typical honest, hardworking man, and his company followed in his footsteps. A good example of this is the announcement he published in “The Brooklyn Eagle” of 1890. He says, “It is sought: in the office, Bright Boy; good editor; he must reside with the parents.”
Origins of corrugated cardboard
The corrugated cardboard had been patented in 1856 in England and was used as a top hat coating. The first machine to produce large quantities of corrugated cardboard sheets was built in 1874 by G. Smyth, and the same year Oliver Long improved design and invented corrugated cardboard sheets as we know them today.
