An Eggs-quisite Invention

Chances are you have not heard of a man named Joseph Leopold Coyle. Yet few people in the world do not make regular use of one of his inventions, an innovation that has likely made life much more convenient for you.

For most of us, life today is easier in many ways than it was for our great-grandparents because of a number of rather simple inventions often taken for granted. In thinking of life-changing innovations, we often consider very complex machines like airplanes, motorized transportation or perhaps even MRI machines. However, our day-to-day lives are also made much less difficult by a number of seemingly insignificant items, the contributions of which are often overlooked because they are considered commonplace and mundane.

We are not overly awed when we think of the paint roller—simple and yet tremendously timesaving—or the zipper, which facilitates many operations. In fact both of these inventions have a strong Canadian connection, but for our purposes today, let us look at something that we probably do not even think of as an invention.

For centuries, even millennia, one of the great challenges for farmers, sellers of farm produce, and consumers was how to transport a very important food product to the market and then to the home without messy and irreparable damage.

Eggs are a key part of the diet of millions of people. In 2018, according to Statistics Canada, Canadian farmers produced just over 800 million dozen, or about 9.6 billion eggs. In the United States, in 2020, farms produced 111.6 billion eggs. It is difficult to imagine such a volume. To put it another way, China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of eggs, produced 31 million tons of them in 2016—about 566 billion eggs.

Eggs are a very important source of protein and vitamins to a great percentage of the world’s population. In more rural settings, many can raise a few chickens and maintain a local supply, but the majority of earth’s population, now crowded into cities and large towns, must rely on food distributed from zones of agricultural production to markets, and then to their homes.

But many—if not most—of these eggs would be hopelessly scrambled unless there was some means of transporting them without crushing or cracking their fragile shells. This once was, in fact, a constant problem. Collecting and moving eggs to market and then to the homes of buyers involved a huge amount of loss due to broken eggshells.

Enter Joseph Leopold Coyle. Born in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1871, he worked as a surveyor and eventually as a journalist. In 1906 he settled in Smithers, British Columbia, and in 1910 founded The Interior News, which is still published today. Coyle was a very resourceful and creative man who tried to invent items that would solve practical, everyday problems.

[His] paper’s office stood… near a hotel that was the spot of frequent fighting between the hotelier and a farmer, Gabriel Lacroix. The owner hated that his regular order of eggs often arrived as a mess of runny yolks.

One day, Coyle overheard this argument and that — as legend has it — was his a-ha moment. He set out to create a container to keep the eggs intact from coop to customer. In a 1917 patent application to CIPO, he described a “simple, inexpensive and safe” way to carry a dozen eggs at once in an egg box that suspended and supported each one without letting it touch the others. Coyle later obtained patents for several other countries as demand for his egg box grew. (“Our inventors changed the world,” Times Colonist, April 27, 2017).

Coyle’s design changed over the years, and demand for this new egg box spread internationally; he had offered a solution to a global problem. He now had to keep up with orders, and the need for expanding production. So by March 1920, he fashioned a machine that could efficiently manufacture the egg box from a firm, yet soft wood-pulp paper at factories he established at Vancouver, San Francisco, Chicago and London, Ontario.

Not long after launching his invention, Coyle found many competitors copying it, some avoiding patent violation by using plastic versions. Competition and legal fees prevented him become rich because of his innovation—nonetheless Coyle was comfortably well-off and enjoyed life with his family, dying at age 100 in 1972. None of his other inventions matched the global impact of his egg box, which still saves millions of pounds of eggs from accidental destruction every year.

The fragile egg needs protection from bumps and pressures, so Coyle’s egg box wraps each egg in a protective cocoon. One simple and brilliant idea, combined with a great deal of work and investment, has allowed billions of eggs to make it to markets and the plates of the world. Losses to farmers, shippers, retailers, and customers have been drastically reduced, increasing profits as well as reducing cost to the consumer.

We humans, like the humble egg, are fragile. We are vulnerable not only to physical harm, but also to forces which can damage our mental health. We live in a world in which values are being promoted which many feel are contrary to common sense, ranging from revolutionary ideas about gender, or when human life commences, to challenging the importance of hard work, frugality, honesty, and loyalty. In truth, most know in their hearts that giving in to any of these social pressures will “crack shells” and lead to unpleasant and unhappy results.

The traditional values and morals upon which our nation was originally founded were like an “egg-box” that protected us. Today those same values can protect our sanity from the fantasy world developing especially in Western nations. Let’s have the courage to stand firm for those values. Take time to watch our video, “Does Character Matter anymore?”. You will find the link in the description below.