science · 25 April 1965 · 59 years ago
In 1965, a U.S. patent for the design of a plastic bag with handle was issued to Swedish inventor Sten Gustav Thulin, assigned to the Celloplast company (No. 3,180,557, filed 10 Jul 1962). The design is the widely-used, disposable, plastic “T-shirt” grocery bag. The bag is made from a continuous-feed of seamless tubular weldable plastic material (such as polyethylene), pleated in a flat state. To make the bag, transverse seams are welded, a segment is punched out to form the top handles portion, and separated at the transverse seams. Celloplast thrived until Mobil overturned the patent (1977). H. Gordon Dancy refined the design, assigned to Sunoco, so that a bag pack would hang on a frame, to be more easily opened and filled (U.S. patents 4,480,750 issued 6 Nov 1984; D287,572 on 6 Jan 1987).
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