Disposable Society

Okay, maybe society itself isn't actually something to dispose of. However there's much to say for disposing of it in its current form, as we've literally built it in disposables.

Today's post is briefly remembering the inventor of disposable products. I'm talking about William Painter, the inventor of the "crown cork" bottle cap and the founder of Crown Holdings, Inc., a Fortune 500 company. Of course he also invented the bottle opener used to remove the caps used to seal the bottles. Painter was a prolific inventor who patented more than 80 inventions, many of which had nothing to do with bottles or caps; next to the crown cork and bottle opener, he patented a paper-folding machine, a machine for detecting counterfeit money and a safety ejection seat for passenger trains. It's safe to say that he was a smart man whose mind ventured regularly outside of the proverbial box.

Before he started his own company, he worked with manufacturers to develop a universal neck for all glass bottles; a standardized size and shape of glass bottles provided him with the foundation on which he could develop a universal sealing method. So he started the Crown Cork & Seal Company of Baltimore in 1892 to manufacture caps that could be used to seal the universal necks. I can't find a confirmation of this, but I don't actually think he invented the crown cap just to become a rich man. He clearly loved inventing things, and his work towards standardization in the glass bottle industry implies to me that he also worked towards improving the efficiency of the manufacturing processes.

Before the crown cork, bottles were mostly sealed by inserting a plug, typically a cork, into the bottleneck; this was a rather labor-intensive process with questionable sanitation standards. We can add to Painter's list of inventions the machine for crowning bottles; a metal cap with a sealing surface on one side is crimped around the outside surface of the end of the bottleneck, sealing the bottle while providing the rippled edge that allows the cap to be easily removed. The machine was powered by foot and enabled operators to fill and cap 24 bottles per minute, which was a remarkable speed for the time.

So his invention did improve on the manufacturing process as well as its sanitation. But it had an additional advantage, for the inventor at least: the success of the crown cork was based, at least in part, on the fact that the bottle caps were now disposable. Like I said, I'm not sure if he deliberately made them disposable, but his invention did introduce to our world the concept of disposable products, and showed how profitable they are. Painter shared this notion with King Camp Gillette who worked for his company as a travelling salesman. Gillette later recalled his conversation with Painter in his memoir. According to Gillette Painter once remarked: "King, you are always thinking and inventing something. Why don't you try to think of something like the Crown Cork, which, when once used is thrown away? The customer keeps coming back for more. With every additional customer you get, you are building a permanent foundation of profit."

Several years later, while shaving and noticing that his razor was dull, Gillette was struck with an idea and went on to invent a razor with disposable blades. He made a fortune with his Gillette safety razor, and we still use his blades. They're "the best a man can get", right? Well, no, not exactly; we're perfectly able to manufacture blades with a DLC (Diamond-Like-Carbon) coating which last for years. Or how about using real diamond? We can do that too:

The technological breakthrough achieved by GFD on the Diamaze® blades employs two specialized processes: the nanocrystalline diamond coating of a carbide blade followed by the plasma sharpening of the blade. To manufacture such a technically superior razor blade a nanocrystalline diamond coating is first applied to a carbide blade. Then the ultra thin layers of pure diamond are polished by an innovative plasma sharpening process developed by the GFD researchers. The blade is polished until the cutting edge is sharpened to only a few nanometers, therefore consisting of merely a few atoms. This process manages, for the first time, to combine the hardest material in the world with the sharpest possible cutting edge.
_{source: Cadence Blades}

Of course, these are only used in specialized industries, and not for sale for mere men with mere beards. The problem is that we'd only buy one or two of them in a lifetime, which would make them scarce and very expensive; it's just the irrationality of our economy that prevents us from living sustainably and responsibly. Instead capitalism incentivizes waste, demands that customers keep coming back for more, that we rape the planet and pollute the environment. Anybody remember cotton diapers? It's such a hassle to wash them, isn't it? Thank God we've got Pampers™! Anyhow, we've made a world in which we deliberately produce things that do not last, and William Painter as well as King Camp Gillette were the pioneers of this phenomenon. Watch the video on "planned obsolescence" in yesterday's post and the below linked video for some interesting factoids about the Gillette safety razor.

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