(First published in 2001, filling a gap in 2007.)
It’s a little-known fact that many of the world’s supposedly naturally occurring resources were in fact artificially created in the late eighteenth century by a lowly blacksmith’s son from a small hamlet in the vicinity of what would later become Milton Keynes.
Jeremy Tetrapak was the man responsible for the planet in the form we know it today, and it is he who created many of the things that we now take for granted. His inventions have supported the planet for more than a century now, yet his name is far from being as well known as Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday and Ben Woodbridge, the Scotsman who first dropped a Mars bar into a cooker full of boiling fat, creating a sickly snack loved briefly by the Scottish in the mid 1990’s.
Yet it was Tetrapak who created stone, oil and even water, endlessly toiling with small designs and ideas which would later revolutionise the modern world. The fact that Tetrapak is not well-known is down to the scientific community’s distrust of him and his ideas; the established scientists and professors of his day maintained that stone, oil and water were indeed naturally occurring, and that Tetrapak was simply taking advantage of the poor education of his peers for financial gain.
However Tetrapak was never one to deny that one of his major motivations was financial; indeed by 1792 he had over 100 products on the market, ranging from pre-packaged rocks in such wild variants and limestone, sandstone and even igneous rocks to the preposterous concept of bottled water (still or carbonated), which sold at outrageous prices to those willing to pay.
Again, it is a sign of his success that many of his forgotten ideas, such as packaged rocks and bottled water are now in widespread use over one hundred years later, sold as pebbles in garden centres, or expensive items sold in nightclubs to save the life of a dehydrated pill-popping no-mark from Swindon.
There is precious little documentation on how Jeremy created his inventions - his father’s business barely generated enough money to feed his family, let alone to fund the scientific research of his son. In fact, the family only started making any money at all after the inventions were announced and sold on.
Many people at the time said that the inventions were in fact just a massive scam designed by Jeremy and his father, Isaiah in order to make their family fortune. Both men were renowned for their showman-esque abilities, often entertaining the people of the hamlet with fantastical tales of dubious origin. It was suggested that the inventions did in fact already exist, and that the Tetrapak family had simply struck on the most successful marketing scam of all time.
However those theories often make few suggestions as to why so few stone buildings or remains of them exist from before Jeremy’s time. Walk down the street of any town these days and you will seldom find a building from the earlier eighteenth century or before. Without conclusive evidence that stone, water and oil did exist before the Jeremy Tetrapak discovered them, who are we to doubt the evidence that they were indeed his inventions and discoveries?
With so little known about Tetrapak and the routes his scientific journeys took him on, it is perhaps no surprise that you will not find any information on him in many of the major reference sources, and few museums like to mention him as they are often run by the descendants of the very same scientists who mocked Tetrapak when he was alive. However, if you would like to find out more on Jeremy Tetrapak, or you like the colour brown, or you are a confused old person who thinks I’ve been writing about Horlicks for the last few paragraphs, you might like to visit the Cromer Museum of Scientific Fact, which will be hosting a small exhibition of Tetrapak’ work on the 28th and 29th. Museum curate Bob Holpeg has promised an amazing display, and he is currently in negotiations with Tetrapak’s estate to allow visitors to perhaps even handle the stone and oil, and maybe even drink some genuine Tetrapak water at a small charge.
