Before talking about the egg cup, that very simple but sensational invention that no one has surpassed in more than a century, it is worth dispelling some legends about why eggs are sold in multiples of six. According to a well-worn theory, the custom comes from medieval England, where one was worth a penny, and since twelve were equivalent to a shilling, the tradition of selling them in dozens would have established itself.
Another comes from numerology. Looking for hidden messages in the numbers, some remember that there were twelve Apostles, and twelve the months of the year. It is true that the duodecimal system has a long history – the astronomers of ancient Mesopotamia divided the calendar into twelve lunar months – but it is another thing to see in it any relationship with spiritual forces.
To solve this case it is not necessary to delve so much into history or get esoteric. Just think in mathematical terms. 12 is a number with many divisors, more than, for example, 10. This means that we can divide it into groups of six, four, three or two.
Why is this important? First of all, because we often use eggs in pairs. And, secondly, because parity facilitates transportation. The duplicate arrangement of the egg cup is what makes it rigid; Otherwise, it would be easier for the packaging to bend and break the contents.
Even so, the egg cup was not before the dozen or, rather, the custom of buying eggs in pairs. As is known, in the past this food was transported in baskets filled with straw or wrapped in newspaper. As the food journalist Rosa Molinero explains in La Vanguardia, in the latter case what was done was to always take an even number, so that the eggs fit together. If six were purchased, three were superimposed on the other three by curling the same piece of newspaper, so that the resulting package was more rigid.
And how did the egg cup come about? At the end of the 19th century, a couple of patents were already registered with separate transport systems. A box with a rack for 360 units appeared in San Francisco, and in Canada, a certain Herbert Harvey Cummer made a folding one that could carry a maximum of 15 units. The problem with the latter was that, since it was so expensive, once empty, the client had the obligation to dismantle it and return it to the supplier.
Anyway, there were many racking their brains over this issue, and it really was a problem. According to Molinero, at the beginning of the 20th century calculations were made, and in the United States alone 100,000 dollars were lost per month in broken shells.
The first to come up with a more or less effective solution was the Englishman Thomas Peter Bethell, who in 1906 brought his “Egg Box” to the market. It was a wooden box with several overlapping trays, each with a cardboard grid in which the eggs were placed.
The only good thing about this model, otherwise too large for domestic use – no one would think of going shopping carrying a suitcase just for eggs – was that it got the material right. The cardboard industry, and paper pulp in general, which took off at the beginning of the 20th century, was going to become a key element in this history. Because it is semi-rigid and at the same time very ductile, molded cellulose was the ideal raw material to manufacture what was being sought.
Thus we arrived at Joseph Coyle's egg cup, which was basically like one of the current ones; There was no container, it was all made of paper. Legend has it that the idea came to him after listening to the argument between a farmer and a hotel businessman from Aldermere (now Telkwa, British Columbia), who was very angry because half of his merchandise usually arrived broken.
Perhaps because he was a newspaper editor, Coyle had the idea of using old newspapers to make a small paper mache box with a succession of padded holes. He had invented the modern egg cup, but the sad thing is that he didn't earn a cent for it.
More of an inventor than a businessman, it did not occur to him to patent it until seven years later, nor to make the improvements that others did, until they became millionaires. In 1931, the American Francis H. Sherman made the first model with compressed cellulose pulp, and in 1969, the American The Portland Company created one with projections on the trays so that they could be stacked.
Very shortly after, plastic egg cups arrived, triumphant until awareness of their environmental burden began to take priority over the use of cellulose.
