Erik Wallenberg inventor of Tetra Pak first package

Erik Wallenberg (25 December 1915 – 18 October 1999) was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

engineer. He is credited for inventing the

Tetra Pak Tetra Pak is a Swedish multinational food packaging and processing company headquartered in Switzerland. The company offers packaging, filling machines and processing for dairy, beverages, cheese, ice cream and prepared food, including distr ...

tetrahedron In geometry, a tetrahedron (: tetrahedra or tetrahedrons), also known as a triangular pyramid, is a polyhedron composed of four triangular Face (geometry), faces, six straight Edge (geometry), edges, and four vertex (geometry), vertices. The tet ...

packaging in 1944.

Career

Wallenberg had initially planned to join the Army as an officer, but fell ill during military training and had to abandon his plans. He was accepted at

Karolinska Institutet The Karolinska Institute (KI; ; sometimes known as the (Royal) Caroline Institute in English) is a research-led medical university in Solna within the Stockholm urban area of Sweden and one of the foremost medical research institutes globally. ...

medical school in

Stockholm Stockholm (; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, most populous city of Sweden, as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in the Nordic countries. Approximately ...

, but decided to move to

Lund Lund (, ;"Lund"
(US) and ) is a city in the provinces of Sweden, province of Scania, southern Swed ...

and try to enter the medical school at

Lund University Lund University () is a Public university, public research university in Sweden and one of Northern Europe's oldest universities. The university is located in the city of Lund in the Swedish province of Scania. The university was officially foun ...

instead. In 1943, waiting to get accepted at

, Wallenberg got a job as lab assistant at Åkerlund & Rausing, a local firm manufacturing food packaging. When his manager got drafted in 1944, he became head of the research lab, aged 28. The team had orders from the company owner

Ruben Rausing Anders Ruben Rausing (; né Andersson; 17 June 1895 – 10 August 1983) was a Swedish industrialist and the founder of the liquid food packaging company Tetra Pak. Early life Anders Ruben Andersson was born in 1895 in Råå, a small fishing ha ...

to produce a viable packaging for milk that was cheap enough to compete with the current milk distribution system, based on loose milk sold in reusable glass bottles. The key to this was to use as little packaging material as possible. The research lab had tried and failed a number of different solutions. Finally, reportedly when ill with fever, Wallenberg got the idea of using one single sheet of paper rolled into a cylinder and folded from two different sides, creating a mathematical

. The volume created only needed to be sealed in three places and the packages could be produced in one subsequent sequence from one roll of paper, using a minimum of material, with a minimum of waste. After some initial hesitation, Ruben Rausing became convinced that the invention was a good idea and ordered the project to be developed. In March 1944 he filed for a patent, and in 1951 Tetra Pak was created as a subsidiary to Åkerlund & Rausing. The tetrahedron package made Tetra Pak one of the world's most successful companies. The package is still sold today under the name of Tetra Classic Aseptic.

Legacy

Upon visiting the Tetra Pak factory in Lund in the 1950s, Danish Nobel Prize winner and Physics professor

Niels Bohr Niels Henrik David Bohr (, ; ; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and old quantum theory, quantum theory, for which he received the No ...

called the tetrahedron "a perfect practical application of a mathematical problem", and the invention lay the foundation of the Tetra Pak success saga. The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences has called the Tetra Pak packaging system one of Sweden's most successful inventions of all times. The development of the triangular tetrahedron carton package, the rectangular

Tetra Brik Tetra Brik is a brand name for a carton package produced by the Swedish packaging company Tetra Pak. Its shape is cubic or cuboid, and it is available with or without various different caps. The Tetra Brik is the best-known and most sold package ...

, was represented at the 2011 exhibition ''Hidden Heroes – The Genius of Everyday Things'' at the London Science Museum/Vitra Design Museum, celebrating "the miniature marvels we couldn’t live without". Despite the positive attention of the tetrahedron, Wallenberg did not get due recognition for the invention until 1991, when he was awarded the Grand Gold Medal by The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences for "his ideas and efforts in the development of the packaging system Tetra Pak".Tetra Pak (Swedish)
Tekniska Museet, retrieved 6 December 2011

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wallenberg, Erik 1915 births 1999 deaths Karolinska Institute alumni 20th-century Swedish inventors 20th-century Swedish engineers