Erik Wallenberg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Erik Wallenberg

Erik Wallenberg (born December 25, 1915 in Sala , † October 18, 1999 in Lund ) was a Swedish inventor.

successes

In 1951 he and Ruben Rausing founded Tetra Pak AB in Lund as a subsidiary of Åkerlund & Rausing. The first filling line was delivered to a dairy in Lund in 1952, which was used to fill cream.

He designed the aseptic Tetra-Pak packaging. It was only around 50 years after the revolutionary invention that the Tetra-Pak company was forced to confirm that Wallenberg was the real inventor and that the company's founder Ruben Rausing was only the source of ideas.

Career

Wallenberg had originally planned to join the army as an officer, but fell ill during military training and had to give up his plans. He was accepted into the Karolinska Institutet Medical School in Stockholm but decided to move to Lund and go to the medical faculty of Lund University instead.

In 1943, while waiting to be accepted at Lund University, Wallenberg got a job as a laboratory assistant at Åkerlund & Rausing, a local company that makes food packaging. When his manager was drafted in 1944, he was head of the research laboratory for 28 years.

The team was commissioned by company owner Ruben Rausing to produce usable packaging for milk that was cheap enough to compete with the current milk distribution system, which is based on bulk milk sold in reusable glass bottles. The key to this was to use as little packaging material as possible. The research laboratory had tried various solutions and failed. Finally, when Wallenberg reportedly developed a fever, he had the idea of ​​using a single sheet of paper that was rolled into a cylinder and folded on two different sides, creating a mathematical tetrahedron. The volume created only had to be sealed in three places and the packaging could be produced in one sequence from a roll of paper with a minimum of material with minimal waste.

After initial hesitation, Ruben Rausing was convinced that the invention was a good idea and ordered the development of the project. He filed a patent in March 1944 and Tetra Pak was founded in 1951 as a subsidiary of Åkerlund & Rausing. The tetrahedron package made Tetra Pak one of the most successful companies in the world. The package is still sold today under the name Tetra Classic Aseptic.

meaning

When the Danish Nobel Prize laureate and physics professor Niels Bohr visited the Tetra Pak plant in Lund in the 1950s, he called the tetrahedron "a perfect practical application of a mathematical problem" and the invention laid the foundation for the successful Tetra Pak saga. The Royal Swedish Academy of Technical Sciences has named the Tetra Pak packaging system one of the most successful inventions of all time in Sweden. The development of the triangular tetrahedron packaging, the rectangular Tetra Brik, could be seen in 2011 at the exhibition "Hidden Heroes - The genius of everyday things" in the London Science Museum / Vitra Design Museum and celebrated "the little miracles without which we could not live" .

Despite the positive attention given to the tetrahedron, Wallenberg was not recognized for the invention until 1991 when he was awarded the Grand Gold Medal by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering for "his ideas and efforts in developing the Tetra Pak packaging system".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andersson, Peter and Larsson, Tommy, Tetra. Historien om dynastin Rausing, Stockholm: Norstedts 1998 ( ISBN 91-7263-014-0 ), p. 13
  2. ↑ Andersson, Peter and Larsson, Tommy, Tetra. Historien om dynastin Rausing, Stockholm: Norstedts 1998 ( ISBN 91-7263-014-0 ), p. 18th
  3. ↑ Tetra Pak (Swedish) at Tekniska Museet, accessed May 21, 2018.
  4. ↑ Leander, Lars, Tetra Pak. A Vision Becomes Reality. A company history with a difference, Lund: Tetra Pak International 1996 ( ISBN 91-630-4789-6 ), p. 27f
  5. ↑ Andersson, Peter and Larsson, Tommy, Tetra. Historien om dynastin Rausing, Stockholm: Norstedts 1998 ( ISBN 91-7263-014-0 ), p. 23
  6. ↑ Miraculous Mundane Objects: From Tetra Pak to Bubble Wrap at telegraph.co.uk, accessed May 21, 2018.
  7. ↑ Hidden Heroes - The Genius of Everyday Things at reiseperlen.com, accessed on May 21, 2018.
  8. ↑ Tetra Pak at familybusiness.ey-vx.com, accessed May 21, 2018.
  9. ↑ Tetra Pak (Swedish) at Tekniska Museet, accessed May 21, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Wallenberg, Erik
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish inventor
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Sala
DATE OF DEATH October 18, 1999
Place of death Lund , Sweden