In the 1960s, Gene Wolfe worked as an industrial engineer at Procter & Gamble. One day, he was called into a team tasked with mass producing a new product: chips.
The process was divided into several stages, from dough-making, rolling, and pressing to cooking, salting, and packaging. Gene was in charge of the cooking stage. He had to build a machine that would fry an exact amount of chips for an exact amount of time.
Since this was a new kind of potato chip, a real innovation if you will, developing proper equipment was no easy feat.
The chips were wavy and shaped like a saddle. This way, they stacked neatly on top of one another, but it also meant they all had to look exactly the same — and not break. In order to protect each chip stack, P&G decided to sell them in a can rather than a bag, which led to more manufacturing challenges.
In fact, someone at P&G had invented the chip more than ten years ago, but so far, the company hadn’t been able to make all the puzzle pieces fit together. This was Gene’s time to shine.
I can’t tell you what exactly Gene did. I don’t know how long it took. But eventually, each engineer figured out their part, and, together, they brought Pringles to the world.
The next day, Gene went back to work.
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