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ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER
Issue #012 | Did You Know? | April 2026
The Man Who Invented the Pringles Can Was Buried in One
In 1966, an organic chemist in Cincinnati designed the tube that would become one of the most recognisable pieces of packaging in the world. He was so proud of it that, when he died more than four decades later, he asked his children to bury him in one. They did.
BY THE NUMBERS
1966 | Year Fredric Baur filed the patent for the Pringles can |
1970 | Year the patent was finally granted |
89 | Baur’s age when he died in 2008 |
20 days | How close he came to his 90th birthday |
Original | The flavour his children chose for the burial can |
A Chemist With an Unusual Problem to Solve
Fredric John Baur Jr was born on 14 July 1918 in Ohio. He was a serious, quiet man — the kind of man who earned a PhD in organic chemistry from Ohio State University, served as an aviation physiologist in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and spent most of his career working on research and development at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati.
In the mid-1960s, P&G handed him a problem. People kept complaining about potato chips. The chips came in bags. The bags were full of air. And when you finally opened them, most of the chips inside were broken.
Baur’s job was to solve it.
THE SADDLE-SHAPE SOLUTION Baur figured out that the only way to stop chips from breaking during shipping was to stack them. But standard flat chips don’t stack cleanly. So he designed a new shape: a hyperbolic paraboloid — a saddle-shape curve that is mathematically identical in every direction. Stacked together, these saddle-chips form a stable column that resists breakage. It was an elegant solution to a boring problem. And it gave Pringles its distinctive shape. |
Designing the Can
But a perfectly stacked column of chips is useless without a container that keeps them that way. Baur turned his attention to the packaging itself.
He designed a tubular can — a rigid cylinder with a resealable lid, tall enough to hold a full stack of chips, narrow enough that the chips couldn’t shift around during shipping. The cardboard walls were lined with foil to keep the chips fresh. A plastic cap on top let you close the tube between servings.
He filed the patent in 1966. It was granted in 1970. That tube — almost completely unchanged from Baur’s original design — has been on supermarket shelves ever since.
The most recognisable piece of snack-food packaging in the world was designed in a Cincinnati laboratory by a PhD chemist doing his day job. |
The Quiet Pride
Baur was never a celebrity. He retired from P&G in the early 1980s and lived out his years in Cincinnati. Most of his neighbours had no idea that the tube in their pantry had been invented by the man next door.
But he was quietly, deeply proud of what he had made.
In the 1980s, he started telling his children that when he died, he wanted to be buried in one of his cans. At first, they thought he was joking. Then they realised he was not.
THE FAMILY’S REACTION “When my dad first raised the burial idea in the 1980s, I chuckled about it,” his eldest son Larry told Time magazine in 2008. The family treated it as a running joke for years. Nobody seriously believed their father was planning to be buried in a crisps tube. But Fred Baur never wavered. He meant it. |
4 May 2008
Fredric Baur died on 4 May 2008 at Vitas Hospice in Cincinnati, after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 89 years old — just twenty days short of his 90th birthday.
His children remembered his request.
On the way to the funeral home, they stopped at a Walgreens pharmacy to buy a Pringles can for their father’s ashes. They briefly debated which flavour to use.
“My siblings and I briefly debated what flavour to use,” Larry Baur told Time, “but I said, ‘Look, we need to use the original.’” |
And so Fredric Baur was cremated, and a portion of his ashes was placed inside a can of Original Pringles. The can was buried alongside a traditional urn containing the rest of his remains, in a quiet cemetery in Springfield Township, on the outskirts of Cincinnati.
A third portion of his ashes was placed in another urn and given to one of his grandsons to keep.
His Grave Is Unremarkable — Above Ground
If you visit the cemetery today, you will not find anything unusual about Fredric Baur’s grave. The headstone is modest. The plot is surrounded by much larger, fancier graves. There is nothing to indicate what is buried beneath.
But beneath the grass, in the cool Ohio soil, is a sealed Original Pringles can containing the ashes of the man who designed it.
It is quite possibly the most literal “going out in style” in the history of product design.
The Other Inventions He Worked On
The Pringles can was not Baur’s only invention, but it was by far his most successful.
During his career at Procter & Gamble, he also worked on the development of frying oils and a freeze-dried ice-cream product called Coldsnap — an instant, shelf-stable dessert that only needed milk added. The Coldsnap project eventually included a young product manager named Steve Ballmer, who later left to join Microsoft and became its CEO.
Coldsnap never took off commercially. The Pringles can did.
A SMALL IRONY Baur did not invent the Pringles chip itself — only the shape and the container. The original chip recipe he developed for the tube did not taste very good, and the project was reassigned to other chemists before Pringles launched commercially in 1968. But his packaging design was so effective that it became inseparable from the product. When people say “Pringles,” they picture the tube. The tube is Baur’s legacy. |
A saddle-shaped chip. A cardboard tube. A PhD chemist who lived quietly in Cincinnati for forty years.
And a single request, carried out by his children at a suburban Walgreens in May 2008.
Fredric Baur got to take his proudest invention with him.
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SOURCES
CBS News / Associated Press — “Man’s Final Resting Place: A Pringles Can” (June 2008)
NPR — “Inventor’s Ashes Buried in His Creation: Pringles Can” (June 3, 2008)
Time Magazine — “The Man Buried in a Pringles Can” (June 2008)
Atlas Obscura — “Grave of Fredric J. Baur”
U.S. Patent No. 3,498,798 — Baur (filed 1966, granted 1970)
Wikipedia — Fred Baur (verified against multiple primary sources)