A Complete History of Cardboard

Originally published in 2022. Updated September 2026 with additional historical research, corrected sourcing, and new information on the development of paper tubes and cores.

Cardboard is a heavy form of paper, typically reinforced by gluing or pressing multiple layers of paper together into one thicker unit. There are several ways of making paper more rigid, the most recognizable being corrugated cardboard, where a fluted sheet is sandwiched between flat layers of paper.

It is also one of those materials we rarely think much about despite being surrounded by it. Cardboard carries our packages, holds our cereal, supports rolls of paper and film, and, if you have ever moved apartments, briefly becomes one of the most valuable materials on Earth.

Its history is surprisingly complicated. There is no single person who can neatly be credited with inventing cardboard, and some of the people who are commonly credited may not have existed at all.

When was cardboard invented?

The origins of cardboard are difficult to pin to one specific date because cardboard developed gradually alongside papermaking. Some histories trace the use of thicker paper-based packaging materials in China to the early 1600s, when paper was still commonly produced using fibers recovered from cloth and rags. What we would now call paperboard developed as papermakers learned to create thicker, stiffer sheets for applications where ordinary paper was not strong enough.

One early European reference appears in Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, first published beginning in 1677. Moxon was writing about printing and the mechanical trades rather than packaging, but he refers to materials such as pasteboard being used by printers. By the early 1700s, terms such as pasteboard and millboard were common enough in Britain to appear in official records.

So, unfortunately, there isn't a satisfying "cardboard was invented on Tuesday by this guy" answer. It was more of an evolution. As paper manufacturing improved, people continued finding ways to make sheets thicker, stronger, and useful for things beyond writing and printing.

When was the first cardboard box made?

More than a century later, we begin to find cardboard being used in a way that looks much more familiar.

In 1817, a German strategy game called The Game of Besieging was sold in a paperboard box. It is considered one of the earliest documented examples of a commercial product being packaged in a solid paperboard box. That fact would seem to point toward Germany as having a pretty good claim to the first cardboard box, but, as is often the case with history, things immediately become more complicated.

The same year is repeatedly connected to another supposed inventor in England.

The Malcolm Thornhill mystery

The name Malcolm Thornhill, sometimes upgraded to Sir Malcolm Thornhill, has been credited with inventing the cardboard box in 1817 by countless websites and even several printed books.

The strange thing is that there is remarkably little evidence showing who Malcolm Thornhill actually was.

This isn't to say that the year 1817 is wrong. There is good evidence that paperboard boxes were being commercially used around that time. What is much harder to establish is why the name Malcolm Thornhill became attached to that history.

The mystery had already made its way into Wikipedia discussions by January 2008, when editors began questioning where the Thornhill attribution had come from. One editor noted that the name appeared to have been added alongside an existing reference supporting the 1817 date, making it look as though the same source supported Thornhill as the inventor. Other editors repeatedly restored the name, and at least one claimed that historical evidence existed, but a convincing primary source never seems to have surfaced.

Things became even stranger once the claim began appearing elsewhere. Thornhill was eventually cited in books and numerous packaging histories, which could then be used by later writers as evidence that Thornhill was real. A questionable fact had effectively begun sourcing itself.

There is even a word for this sort of thing: citogenesis. A claim appears online, gets repeated by another source, and eventually finds its way back into places where it is treated as established history simply because so many other people have said it.

So, did Malcolm Thornhill invent the cardboard box? Maybe. But until someone finds a contemporary business record, patent, newspaper clipping, census record, or some other reliable evidence tying him to the invention, it is safer to consider him one of cardboard history's stranger unresolved mysteries.

At the very least, Thornhill is a good reminder to always check your sources.

Who truly invented the cardboard box?

Another English company, M. Treverton & Son, is frequently credited with producing commercial paperboard boxes around the same period. Unfortunately, the exact chronology is murky here as well, and there is no single surviving patent that allows us to hand one person a trophy for inventing the cardboard box.

The French also have a claim. The Musée du Cartonnage et de l'Imprimerie in Valréas preserves the history of cardboard-box manufacturing associated with the local silk industry beginning in the 19th century. Small cardboard cartons were used to transport silkworm eggs and other delicate products.

The most likely answer is considerably less exciting than finding one forgotten genius. With industrialization accelerating during the 19th century, manufacturers in several countries were looking for the same thing: a lightweight, inexpensive material that could be shaped into containers. It makes perfect sense that several people arrived at similar ideas at around the same time.

The first truly transformative cardboard patents would arrive a few decades later.

Ruffles have ridges, and so does stronger cardboard.

Cardboard doesn't only serve as packaging material, unless you consider a hat packaging for your head.

During the 1850s, tall hats were very much in fashion, and English inventors Edward Charles Healey and Edward Ellis Allen were looking for a way to give them structure without adding too much weight. In 1856 they patented the use of corrugated, or pleated, paper as a hat lining. The ridges created a material that was light and flexible but considerably more resistant to bending than a flat sheet.

At this point, corrugated paper still wasn't being used to ship anything. Its first major commercial purpose was helping Victorian men wear increasingly ambitious hats.

Less than 20 years later, an American inventor would realize that those same ridges were pretty good at protecting fragile objects.

In 1871, Albert L. Jones of New York patented an "Improvement in Paper for Packing." His design involved corrugating paper or cardboard to create a cushioning surface around bottles, vials, and other breakable products. At the time, glass products were commonly protected with materials such as cloth or sawdust, so a lightweight paper material that could absorb impacts offered an obvious advantage.

Jones' patent even shows corrugated paper formed around bottles and into a packing box. It is one of the clearest early steps from corrugated paper as an odd structural material to corrugated paper as packaging.

An invention by accident that changed the world.

Jones' corrugated material still had an obvious weakness. Leave the ridges exposed and they can stretch, flatten, or lose their shape.

In 1874, Oliver Long patented an improvement that combined the fluted paper with flat paper. The flat liner helped hold the corrugations in place while preserving the cushioning effect created by the ridges. The idea was simple, but it pushed the material much closer to the corrugated board we recognize today.

Further improvements followed as machinery made it possible to corrugate paper and bond it to liners more efficiently. By the late 19th century, manufacturers were producing increasingly sophisticated forms of corrugated board, eventually sandwiching the fluted medium between flat sheets on both sides.

What began inside a top hat was quickly becoming one of the world's most useful packaging materials.

The Invention of the Paper Tube

While cardboard boxes were becoming more sophisticated, another extremely important cardboard product was developing: the humble paper tube.

Which brings us, naturally, to toilet paper.

Toilet paper itself is considerably older than the tube inside it. Paper for sanitary use has a long history in China, while in the United States Joseph Gayetty began commercially selling Gayetty's Medicated Paper in 1857. His product did not come on the familiar roll, however. It was sold as individual sheets.

The roll came later. American inventor Seth Wheeler spent years developing improvements to perforated toilet and wrapping paper, including patents during the 1880s and 1890s describing rolls that could be separated into individual sheets. His work helped establish the basic format that eventually became familiar in bathrooms around the world.

And yes, Wheeler's patent drawings generally show the loose end of the paper coming over the top of the roll. So if your household is still fighting about this more than a century later, history has at least provided supporting evidence for one side.

The cardboard core itself seems unremarkable until you think about what it does. A flexible material can be wound into a compact, stable roll, stored, transported, and then dispensed predictably. The same basic idea would eventually become incredibly important far beyond the bathroom.

From Toilet Paper Rolls to Cardboard Tubes

By the beginning of the 20th century, paper tubes and cardboard cores were becoming established commercial products. E Revell & Sons in South London, for example, traces its tube manufacturing business to 1903, when its early tubes were produced by hand.

At the time, cardboard tubes could be used for products such as cigars and other packaged goods, but manufacturers quickly discovered that the tube itself could also serve as a structural component. Paper, fabric, yarn, film, tape, linoleum and carpet flooring, and other flexible materials could all be wound around a rigid cylindrical core.

This distinction becomes important. A mailing tube is primarily a container. A paper core may actually become part of the manufacturing process.

That brings us to Charles K. Dunlap.

Paper Tubes Become Industrial Components

Dunlap did file an interesting paper-tube patent in 1926, but it wasn't for the first tube-making machine. His invention concerned paper tubes used on knitting machines, creeling machines, and similar textile equipment. He was trying to create a more cylindrical surface and improve the way yarn gripped the outside of the tube.

The original version of this article credited Charles K. Dunlap with inventing the first paper-tube machine in 1926. After digging into the patents, that turns out to be a little too neat.

In some ways, the real story is actually more interesting.

By the 1920s, engineers were no longer simply asking how to make a cardboard cylinder. They were designing paper tubes around specific industrial requirements such as surface properties, dimensional consistency, winding behavior, and resistance to slippage. The paper tube had become an engineered component.

Dunlap and other engineers would continue developing paper cores and textile carriers during the following decades, while improvements in spiral winding, adhesives, paperboard, and production machinery made tubes stronger and faster to manufacture.

Cardboard Tubes Go to War

Paper tubes became even more useful as industrial production expanded during the 20th century. During the World War II era, fiber and paperboard containers were used for a wide variety of packaging and shipping applications where lightweight materials could replace heavier or more strategically valuable materials.

That versatility is one of the reasons paper tubes survived long after many other historical packaging formats disappeared. Change the diameter, wall thickness, paperboard grade, adhesive, or number of plies, and the same basic cylindrical idea can serve an entirely different purpose.

Today, paper tubes can be lightweight containers for posters and documents or heavy industrial cores carrying large rolls of film, paper, foil, flooring, labels, tape, textiles, and other materials.

The toilet-paper tube and the industrial paper core may look like distant relatives, but the underlying idea is essentially the same.

The Future of Cardboard

After following cardboard from early paperboard and Victorian top hats through mysterious inventors, toilet paper, corrugated shipping boxes, and industrial paper cores, it is difficult to guess exactly what comes next.

What makes cardboard interesting is that the material itself isn't particularly complicated. Much of its usefulness comes from what we do with its structure. Fold it, flute it, laminate it, wind it, coat it, or change its geometry, and a relatively simple paper-based material can behave in remarkably different ways.

That process hasn't stopped. Modern manufacturers continue developing paper-based packaging around higher production speeds, automated handling, tighter dimensional requirements, improved recyclability, and applications that were once dominated by plastic, wood, or metal.

At Erdie Industries, we have spent decades working on one branch of that history: paper tubes and industrial paper cores. From mailing and shipping tubes to cores designed for film, labels, tape, flooring, textiles, and other converting applications, we're still finding new things to do with what is, at its core, a very old idea.

And if history is any indication, somebody will eventually find another use for cardboard that nobody saw coming.