It may sound strange to you, dear readers, if I tell you that you currently have museum objects in one of your kitchen cabinets. And, with some probability, these are objects that are worth some money. No, I’m not talking about the silverware set. Neither the crystal glasses nor the Vista Alegre service. I’m talking about those candy-colored fruit tuppers, already yellowed and scratched, with that characteristic smell of old plastic, with crooked translucent lids. In your homes they may be stacked behind cereal bowls in the cupboard to the left of the sink, but in dozens of museums around the world they’re on display in glass cabinets, with the right to caption and spotlight. Many museums have original Tupperware in their collections, such as the V&A in London or the MoMA in New York. If they are indeed Tupperware brand, the older and more complete they are, the more valuable they are. You just have to go to eBay or similar sites and you will see that some sets cost a hundred euros.
Unlike other objects that I have been talking about, tupperware is an object that frequently appears in the design history books. And it is an author object. By the way, its name comes from the name of its creator, an American named Earl Tupper, who began to use plastic in the late 1930s. XX to make containers and other domestic utensils (commodity, in English). But despite your family tree As a design object, Tupperware passes through our hands without passing through our eyes or our heads, and for this reason it has a gap in these lines. Nobody wonders, I guess, because we all have other things to think about, and Tupperware is just for that, to do the housework without thinking too much, without worrying about why it was invented or when, or why it has that. shape and that cap. Tupperware was designed to help and it’s invisible and it does the job: out of the cabinet, in the fridge, out of the fridge, in the microwave, out of the microwave, in the dishwasher, out of the dishwasher, back in the cabinet.
Tupperware is so widespread in everyday life that its name is no longer just a brand name. As with other well-known brands, Tupperware is now synonymous with a category of products and appears as such in Portuguese dictionaries. In Priberam’s online dictionary, for example, tupperware is defined as “a plastic container used to store food, usually with a tightly closed lid,” and also appears in its lexicalized spelling “taparuere” (which only reading gives a headache and which, of course, I am not going to use).
Earl Tupper was intent on inventing megalomaniac products that would change the world (and make you rich). He came from a wealthy family in rural America at the turn of the 20th century. XX, and from an early age, it is said, he invented and reinvented objects and solutions to the problems he encountered. When it came time to start a family of his own, he opened a landscaping business, all the while continuing to work compulsively on his own inventions. It seems that he compared himself to Leonardo da Vinci and that he kept in a notebook the incredible ideas that came out of his head, among which he found, among innocuous things, such as ice cream cones that did not drip or frames to carry photographs on the belts. , an object to cause menstruation in women who are late or pregnant, and a device that would allow the appendix to be removed through the anus without surgery. All the things that Tupper defended were revolutionary and that, who knows why, nobody ever wanted to develop.
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Source: Observadora
