Earl Silas Tupper was born in 1907 on a farm in New hampshire. While working as a Dupont chemist in the 1930s, he became convinced that plastic was the material of the future.

So in 1938 he left DuPont to form his own company, Tupper Plastics. He began experimenting with plastic shoe heels, and eventually moved on to bathroom cups.

By 1945, he had created a plastic cup out of pastel polyethylene, or, as he called it, Poly-T. Next he crafted plastic bowls with tops that sealed in air. These he called "Poly-T Wonder Bowls."

For the most part, the public simply wondered what the bowls were, and they weren't curious enough to buy them to find out.

It was a fortuitous accident that changed all that. A Detroit woman named Brownie Wise had been given a set of the new plastic bowls. "It took me three days to figure out how the seal worked," she said. Once she had the bowl sealed, she dropped it one day as she was putting it into the refrigerator. Instead of breaking open, it bounced and remained sealed.

Wise was sold, and she decided to start selling. She was already selling Stanley Home Products at demonstration parties, and she added Tupperware to her line. She was so successful with the parties that Tupper decided to sell the products exclusively at home parties.

By the late 1970s, more than $900 million worth of Tupperware was being sold at parties each year.