Earl Silas Tupper was born in 1907, to a New Hampshire farming family of modest means. During his youth and boyhood in New England, his mother Lulu Clark Tupper, took in laundry and ran a boarding house, while his father, Earnest Leslie ran a family farm and greenhouses.
Ambitious and enterprising since boyhood, Tupper tinkered with ways to improve farm chores. At age ten he took his parents’ produce door-to-door to boost sales.
After graduated from high school in New Hampshire in 1925, Tupper continued to work in the family greenhouses in Shirley Massachusetts for two years.
In 1936, Tupper met Bernard Doyle, the inventor of Viscoloid, the plastics manufacturing division of DuPont, located in nearby Leominster, Mass. He worked in a DuPont chemical plant in 1937 where he was involved with that company’s experiments with plastics before World War II, but stayed there only one year.
In 1938, he formed the Earl S. Tupper Company, advertising the design and engineering of industrial plastics products in Leominster, Massachusetts.
In 1942, Tupper bought his first manufacturing plant, a factory in Famumsville, Massachusetts, to begin manufacturing his new products.
When polyethylene production took off in the United States in 1943, the material proved primarily important for wartime uses such as insulation, container linings, cable coatings, gaskets, and tubing. Tupper would domesticate polyethylene, viewing the material as a WWII veteran now ready for civilian tasks.
In the late 1940s, Thomas Damigella (in Massachusetts) and Brownie Wise (in Florida) were selling household products through Stanley Home Products. Brownie wrote to the Tupperware Company and told them she wanted to sell the products on home party plan.
Purchasing through local plastics distributors, both began offering Tupperware as part of their product line, and were moving enough Tupperware to attract Earl Tupper's attention.
Modeled on the home party plan pioneered by Stanley Home Products and expanded and refined by Brownie Wise, the home party plan became and remains the exclusive outlet for Tupperware.
History of Tupperware
