The History of Cardboard Boxes
The simple cardboard box plays an important, but unsung role in our modern society. It’s hard to imagine how we ever got along before they were invented but they have only been in common use for the last hundred years or so. The story of this simple but important invention follows.
Cardboard boxes are industrially prefabricated boxes, which are primarily used for packaging goods and materials or for moving. The first commercial cardboard box was produced in England in 1817 by Sir Malcolm Thornhil and the first cardboard box manufactured in the United States was made in 1895.
By 1900, wooden crates and boxes were being replaced by corrugated paper shipping cartons. The advent of flaked cereals increased the use of cardboard boxes. The first to use cardboard boxes as cereal cartons were the Kellogg brothers.
In France the cardboard box has an even longer history. The Musée du Cartonnage et de l’Imprimerie (Museum of the Cardboard Box) in Valréas, France traces the history of cardboard box making in the region and notes that cardboard boxes have been used there since 1840 for transporting the Bombyx mori moth and its eggs from Japan to Europe by silk manufacturers. In addition, for more than a century the manufacture of cardboard boxes was a major industry in the area.
Cardboard boxes and children
A common cliché says that if a child is given a large and expensive new toy, he/she will quickly become bored with the toy and play with the box instead.
Although this is usually said somewhat jokingly, children certainly enjoy playing with boxes, using their imagination to portray the box as an infinite variety of objects.
One example of this from popular culture is Calvin of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. He often used a cardboard box for imaginative purposes from a “transmogrifier” to a time machine
So prevalent is the cardboard box’s reputation as a plaything that in 2005 a cardboard box was added to the National Toy Hall of Fame. It is one of the very few non-brand-specific toys to be honored with inclusion. In addition, a toy cardboard box “house” (actually a log cabin) made from a large cardboard box was also added to the Hall, housed at the Strong – National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
Another more somber use of the cardboard box is the stereotypical image of homeless people living in a cardboard box. In 2005 Melbourne architect Peter Ryan actually designed a house composed largely of cardboard.
A vital item of commerce, a toy for children, a home of last resort, these are just some of the roles played by cardboard boxes in the last two hundred years.
Tom Knapp
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/the-history-of-cardboard-boxes-518536.html
How can you make a shoe box look old?
It can be a cardboard box too. I need it for a history project. We need to put "old" letters and pictures in a box, and it should look old.
Thanks!
get some dirt, and put the dirt in some water, put the box in the dirt water, take it out, let it dry and it will dry lookin old
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take sandpaper and scrape it,
burn the edges with a lighter, or electric stove?(i did that for this history diary journal, it worked real well :])
sort of bend it and twist / play around with it.
_hope that helps :]
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stain it with some hot tea. just make tea and dab it on the shoe box.
take a bit of sandpaper or a rough kitchen sponge and make the edges and stuff of the box look worn down.
maybe bend the lid back and forth a bit so it doesn’t quite fit any more, so it looks like its been put on and off the box a lot.
you could do a decoupage thing to it; paste old looking images to it, of flowers or old newspaper stories.
tie it with a big ribbon
look online to see if you can find pics of old shoe boxes for other ideas
References :
use an old shoe box, and tear parts of it to make it look worn out
you can even burn sides of the box and to make it look discolored, stain it will coke or another drink.
for the letters to look old, you can burn the sides of them to make them look historic =]
hope this helps! =D
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