The Man Who Invented the Pringles Can Was Buried in One

Most inventors are remembered, if at all, by a brief Wikipedia entry and a footnote in a technology history. Fredric Baur, the organic chemist who invented the Pringles can in the late 1960s, found a more literal way to ensure his legacy: he made his children promise to bury part of his ashes in one. When Baur died on May 4, 2008, at the age of 89, his son Larry stopped at a Walgreens on the way to the funeral home to fulfill the request. They chose sour cream and onion.

The Invention Behind the Request

Baur was not merely the designer of a container. He invented the entire Pringles system: the distinctive saddle-shaped crisp (technically a hyperbolic paraboloid — the mathematical surface with curvature in two opposite directions that allows the chips to stack uniformly), the cylindrical aluminum and paperboard can that holds them in a single neat column, and the manufacturing process that produced uniform chips from a mixture of dehydrated potato flour rather than sliced potatoes.

The problem Baur was solving was packaging. Conventional potato chips, made from sliced potatoes and sold in flexible bags, broke easily, went stale quickly, and were inefficient to package — a bag of chips is mostly air by volume. Baur, working for Procter & Gamble in the 1960s, was tasked with creating a chip that could be packaged more efficiently. His solution was to make chips that were identical in shape and size, allowing them to stack face-to-face like roof tiles, and then package the resulting column in a rigid, airtight container that protected them from breakage and staleness.

The Patent and Its Complications

Baur filed his patent for the container (US Patent 3,498,244) in 1966 and it was granted in 1975. The patent covers the stackable chip container with remarkable specificity — the cylindrical shape, the foil seal, the plastic lid, and the structural dimensions that allow the chips to be stacked in a single column. However, the project stalled internally at Procter & Gamble, and Pringles was actually launched commercially in 1968 under a different project team, with a revised chip shape (developed in part by Alexander Liepa, who holds a separate patent). The complex patent history means Baur's contribution, while real and foundational, exists alongside the contributions of several other engineers and chemists.

Baur himself was reportedly proud of the invention but ambivalent about the fame it brought. He was a serious scientist with a doctorate in chemistry and had worked on more conventionally significant research. But the Pringles can was what the public knew him for, and in his final years he made peace with that legacy in a very concrete way.

A Posthumous Choice That Says Something

Baur's request to be buried in a Pringles can is easy to read as eccentricity or dark humor, but his children described it as a straightforward expression of professional pride. He had created something that was used by hundreds of millions of people, and he wanted the object of that creation to be part of his final resting. The family split his ashes — some in the Pringles can, the rest in a traditional urn — and buried both.

The story traveled quickly after his death, appearing in newspapers and websites around the world, and became one of those small true stories that illuminate something about the relationship between inventors and their inventions. Baur spent decades working on a packaging problem that most people would not consider work of lasting importance. Yet the container he designed is globally recognizable, unchanged in its essential form since the 1960s, and durable enough — in both physical and cultural terms — to serve as someone's final resting place. The can outlasted its inventor. The inventor made sure to acknowledge that fact.