Earl Silas Tupper was born in 1907 in Berlin, New Hampshire, and grew up on farms in central Massachusetts. After studying at Bryant College in Providence, Rhode Island, he started a landscaping and nursery business that the Great Depression drove into bankruptcy. He then took a job at DuPont, where a supervisor gave him polyethylene slag, a black, hard, foul-smelling waste product of oil refining. Tupper experimented at home, heating it, pressing it and working it until he had a purified plastic that was light, pliable and unbreakable, which he used for gas mask parts during World War II as well as early bowls and cups. He founded the Tupperware Plastics Company in 1938 and in 1939 co-founded Sterilite with Saul and Edward Stone.
To keep food fresh he copied the U-shaped groove of a paint can lid, and the flexible plastic let users burp out air to create a partial vacuum seal. Stores carried the containers from 1948, but shoppers did not understand them. Around 1946 Brownie Wise called his South Grafton office to say she was selling them at home parties. In the early 1950s Tupper pulled the line from stores, adopted her party plan and moved headquarters to Orlando, Florida. In 1958 he fired Wise and sold the company to Rexall Drug for $16 million, then divorced his wife, renounced his U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes, and bought a Central American island. He died in Costa Rica on October 3, 1983, at 76.
- Farm life taught him to fix machinery and make use of scarce materials.
- He aligned the slag’s chaotic polymer chains through heat and physical stress, removing its smell and toxic byproducts.
- Early party sellers in Everett, Massachusetts, helped pioneer the demonstration model.
- Sources disagree on whether his island lay off Costa Rica or was Isla San Jose in Panama.
- In 1969 he gave Bryant College 428 acres in Smithfield, Rhode Island, which became its campus in 1971 as the Providence campus went to Brown University.
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