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Quick & curious · Technology

The Pringles can's inventor is partly buried in one.

Fredric Baur designed the tube for the stacked chips. After his death in 2008, some of his ashes went into a Pringles can.

Computer graphic of a saddle-shaped surface with grid lines, coloured from blue to yellow
Visualization: Sam Derbyshire · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Original

The story behind it

The inventor of the Pringles can was partly buried in one.

From 1956, Fredric Baur was tasked with developing a chip that wouldn't break. He shaped dough into saddles and chose a tube as the package. In 2008 his children put some of his ashes in a can. In mathematics, the saddle shape is called a hyperbolic paraboloid.

Sources

Every statement in this discovery is backed by one of these sources and was checked before publication.

  1. Wikipedia: Fredric J. Baur (accessed 2026-10-07)
  2. Wikipedia: Pringles (accessed 2026-10-07)

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