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–Swiss multinational food packaging and processing company with head offices in Lund, Sweden, and Pully, Switzerland. The company offers packaging, filling machines and processing for dairy, beverages, cheese, ice cream ...

tetrahedron In geometry, a tetrahedron (plural: tetrahedra or tetrahedrons), also known as a triangular pyramid, is a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, six straight edges, and four vertex corners. The tetrahedron is the simplest of all the o ...

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; sv, Karolinska Institutet; sometimes known as the (Royal) Caroline Institute in English) is a research-led medical university in Solna within the Stockholm urban area of Sweden. The Karolinska Institute is consiste ...

medical school in

Stockholm Stockholm () is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, largest city of Sweden as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people liv ...

, but decided to move to

Lund Lund (, , ) is a city in the southern Swedish provinces of Sweden, province of Scania, across the Øresund, Öresund strait from Copenhagen. The town had 91,940 inhabitants out of a municipal total of 121,510 . It is the seat of Lund Municipali ...

and try to enter the medical school at

Lund University , motto = Ad utrumque , mottoeng = Prepared for both , established = , type = Public research university , budget = SEK 9 billion Lund University , motto = Ad utrumque , mottoeng = Prepared for both , established = , type = Public research university , budget = SEK 9 billion Åkerlund & Rausing Åkerlund is a Swedish surname. Notable people with the surname include: *Gunnar Åkerlund (1923–2006), Swedish sprint canoeist * Jonas Åkerlund (born 1965), Swedish film and music video director *Magnus Åkerlund (born 1986), Swedish ice hockey ...

, 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 tetrahedron. 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 Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA; formerly known as Trans-European Trunked Radio), a European standard for a trunked radio system, is a professional mobile radio and two-way transceiver specification. TETRA was specifically designed for use by go ...

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 physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. B ...

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 scientists