The eccentric (and luxurious) life of Mr. Tupper, the inventor of the lunchbox
The businessman sold the company after an internal war with his partner
About 80 kilometers from the Panama Canal, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, lies San José Island. It's a quintessential Caribbean island: a 44-square-kilometer expanse of jungle, 57 beaches, and a humid, stifling heat. In 1980, in one of the few houses nestled in this remote place, lived an elderly man. His name was Earl Silas Tupper, he was an inventor, and he whiled away the hours jotting down all the ideas that came to him in small notebooks. He had been there for over twenty years. However, he was no Robinson Crusoe: he had arrived with a huge wad of cash in his wallet. The company he had founded in 1938, which had made his surname famous worldwide, had been sold for 170 million euros. Earl Silas Tupper was the father of the plastic lunchbox and, above all, of the Tupperware corporation.
In 1958, after two decades of success and an internal conflict with his most famous partner, Brownie Wise, Tupper decided to sell everything. He pocketed $16 million, renounced his U.S. citizenship, and vanished. With part of his fortune, he bought this island in the Pearl Islands archipelago, which for many years was the largest private island in the world. There, surrounded by jungle and deserted beaches, he lived like an eccentric hermit.
The obsession with improving everything
Mr. Tupper was born in 1907 on a small farm in Berlin, New Hampshire. He was the son of a laundress and a farmer. As a child, he helped sell the family's vegetables door-to-door, but he soon realized he was fascinated by improving all sorts of things. He was 12 years old when he began filling notebooks with sketches of inventions: garters to hold up stockings, a dagger-shaped comb that could be attached to a belt, trousers that would always keep the crease sharp... He dreamed of getting rich and becoming an inventor. But reality took him down a different path: he studied by correspondence, started a small gardening business, and ended up going bankrupt during the Great Depression.
After his initial failure, he found work in a small plastics factory in Massachusetts. At that time, plastic still seemed like a mystery: flexible, lightweight, and capable of taking on any shape. Tupper was immediately fascinated. In 1938, he founded his company, Tupper Plastics Company, and began manufacturing small plastic items, such as bottle caps and soap containers. But it wasn't until a few years later, when he obtained a block of pure polyethylene from DuPont, that he stumbled upon his big idea. He designed a lightweight, reusable, and airtight container that kept food fresh. He named it Tupperware.
The great rival
Tupperware's genius wasn't just in inventing an airtight container: it was in finding someone capable of selling it. Her name was Brownie Wise, she was a single mother, and she sold cleaning products door-to-door. She discovered that Tupperware bowls were better explained at the table than in a shop window and began organizing gatherings at her home, over coffee, games, and practical demonstrations. Those meetings—the Tupperware partiesThey became a national phenomenon. Thousands of women started doing the same, and in just a few years, what had begun as a simple plastic invention transformed into a revolutionary system. Tupper controlled production from Massachusetts; Wise, customer service from Florida. One was as airtight as his containers; the other, outgoing and charismatic.
For a time, they were an unlikely but perfect match. Profits soared, magazines featured Brownie Wise on their covers, and Tupperware grew into a domestic empire. But as his partner became more famous, Tupper became increasingly withdrawn. He couldn't bear the media spotlight, nor could he stand seeing his invention constantly turned into a spectacle. In 1958, exhausted, he decided to break with it all: he fired Wise, sold the company, and disappeared to a tropical island. He died on October 3, 1983, at the age of 76.
In 2024, forty years later, its legacy was faltering: Florida-based Tupperware was burdened with hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and its revenue had plummeted to $1.3 billion, down 42% from five years earlier.