In 1900, a Swiss gentleman named Jacques E. Brandenberger was sitting at a table in a restaurant. He didn’t know it but his life was going to change. Brandenberger noticed a customer spilt wine onto the tablecloth. As the waiter replaced the cloth, Brandenberger got the idea to develop a material that would repeal liquid instead of absorbing it. His first step was to spray a waterproof coating onto fabric and he opted for viscose. The resulting coated fabric was far too stiff and the clear film easily separated from the backing cloth. He abandoned his original idea as the possibilities of the new material became apparent. Brandenberger was awarded the Franklin Institute’s Elliott Cresson Medal in 1937. His estimated net worth at the time of his death in 1954 was around $10 Million.
The original Cellophane material was made from wood cellulose. Cellophane is thus initially a bioplastic. Nowadays much of what we refer to as “Cellophane” is actually plastic wrap derived from petroleum. PVC has been used since the 1960s and polypropylene since the 1980s. For many years after World War I, cellophane was the only flexible, transparent plastic film available for use in such common items as food wrap and adhesive tape.
In the 1950's, DuPont's then-revolutionary product, Cellophane, became very popular. The see-through plastic allowed consumers to see what they were buying, and it would keep food fresher for longer periods of time. DuPont ran a series of ads through the 1950's extolling the benefits of its product. Cellophane became so widely used that the name, originally trademarked by DuPont, is now used for any clear plastic film.
