Egg cartons

Last week I talked about preventive actions in general, and remarked that you have to make sure you are solving the right problem. But of course there are other requirements too, in order for a preventive action to be really effective. It should be (for example) simple, inexpensive, and easy to replicate at scale. So I thought it would be fun to take a minute to look at one of the most successful preventive actions of our time, an invention so ubiquitous that it can be hard to remember the problem it was designed to solve.

Consider the egg carton.

The modern egg carton was invented in 1911 by Joseph Coyle, a newspaperman in British Columbia, after overhearing an argument between a hotel owner and a deliveryman over an order of eggs that had arrived broken.

"[Coyle] said there's got to be a better way. And … well, the rest is history," Fergus Tomlin, director of the Bulkley Valley Museum, said in an interview.

The modern egg carton is an ingenious device—so ingenious that it becomes easy to think of it as an obvious tool or a fact of nature, rather than a preventive measure created by human intelligence to solve a problem. But a moment's reflection reveals some interesting questions. Among these:

Eggs have been fragile as long as people have been eating them; so why did it take until 1911 for someone to invent a protective container to carry them in?

What was it about Coyle's design that made it universally adopted?

For the first question, I think there are two answers. Over the long term, it is only comparatively recently that we have developed economic markets large enough that the fragility of eggs carried to market could be treated as one large problem rather than as hundreds of small, individual problems. And if anyone did happen to develop an egg carton back in the Middle Ages, he never wrote it down in any document that has survived—so the idea died with him. By the dawn of the twentieth century, by contrast, we had national markets and a patent system to spread innovations.

The second answer is that other people before Coyle did come up with solutions to the problem, but their solutions simply weren't as good! There were wooden crates designed to carry eggs in quantity, but they were large and bulky. At best, they were suited to large commercial transactions, but they were too cumbersome for anyone who wanted to by a simple dozen.

This brings us the the second question: What was it about Coyle's design that made it universally adopted? And I think I anticipated the answers in my introduction above.

Coyle's design was simple: The whole carton is one part. There are no interior slats to insert and align, in order to keep the eggs in place.

Coyle's design was inexpensive: His egg cartons were made of cardboard or paper pulp, not wood.

Coyle's design was easy to replicate at scale: Ironically, this is why Coyle never became a millionaire. Other people took his simple design, made this or that minor improvement, and then patented the result. In a brief Google search I found four different US patents for variant egg cartons; it would not surprise me if there are more.

US patent 1269394, to Joseph Coyle        

US patent 1543443 to Morris Koppelman

US patent 1975129 to Francis H. Sherman

US patent 3458108 to Walter H Howarth, Gerald A Snow, and Harold A Doughty

At a personal level, this outcome may be disappointing. Years later, in an interview, Coyle's daughter said, "As is so often the case with inventors, he was no match for the sharp practices of big business and their sharper lawyers. The Coyle carton made several millionaires but dad was not one of them. We lived comfortably, but not affluently."

But from a Quality perspective, in a sense this is the best possible outcome. Innovations should be spread, picked up, adapted, improved-upon, and then those improvements should be passed along in their turn. We learn from others, and then others in their turn learn from us. The Quality goal is to solve problems as well as possible. And the problem of carrying eggs without breaking them was solved—almost (if not quite) as well as possible—by Joseph Coyle in 1911.