"The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"


(?) The Answer Guy (!)


By James T. Dennis, answerguy@ssc.com
LinuxCare, http://www.linuxcare.com/


(?) Thinking AROUND the Box?

From Jeanette Torgerson on Wed, 29 Mar 2000

Could you please tell me who invented the cardboard box?

(!) I presume this is a joke. I'll leave it to my readership to determine just who the joke is on.
In case you haven't actually read any of my work, I'm the Linux Gazette Answer Guy. I think you might have preferred to directed this to the "Georgia Pacific" Answer Guy if they had one.
However, I was curious if this could be obtained with a web search. The first promising link I found is apparently an audio file from the National Public Radio:
The Cardboard Box
http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/me/19991229.me.08.ram
... which I found referenced at:
AITLC Guide to Inventors & Inventions
http://tlc.ai.org/invent.htm
I also found this site:
National Inventors Hall of Fame Index to Inventions
http://www.invent.org/book/book-index.html
... but that doesn't list any inventor for the "cardboard box?"
Another good site might be:
Inventions & Inventors
http://inventors.about.com
... from which I learned that Johan Vaalar of Norway invented the paper clip in 1899
Oh well. That's as much searching as I'll do on that. Perhaps the joke is on me.

[ The Straight Dope, which does answer those kind of off the wall questions, is by Cecil Adams, not Jim Dennis. And in the modern age, couldn't you guess his website would be www.straightdope.com ?

But the patent office actually has a search engine these days, so maybe the search result on "cardboard box" there would be useful to you:

http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser? Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50 &Query=%22cardboard+box%22&d=pall

Um, and happy April. We really did receive this letter. I swear.

-- Heather ]


Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 52 April 2000
HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Tuxtops, Inc., http://www.tuxtops.com/


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