In 1910, a Swiss law student who never finished his degree was trying to make hot air balloons more airtight; he ended up inventing aluminium foil now used in kitchens worldwide

In 1910, a 24-year-old Swiss law student who had never finished his degree worked out how to roll aluminium into thin, continuous sheets suitable for wrapping food. His name was Robert Victor Neher. Most people have never heard of him.

According to the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, Neher was born on 2 February 1886 in Schaffhausen and was the son of Georg Robert, a factory director. He studied law in Zurich, Geneva, and Berlin between 1906 and 1910, which is to say he was a law student, not a chemist, not an engineer, and not a materials scientist.

The dictionary records that in 1910, working together with Edwin Lauber and Alfred Gmür, Neher succeeded in producing aluminium sheets suitable for packaging food, including chocolate. That single line in the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland is the foundation of an industry that now touches nearly every kitchen, pharmacy, and food packet on earth.


The balloon that started it all

The path to that breakthrough was not a straight one. It began, of all places, with a balloon.

According to the European Aluminium Foil Association, Neher's invention was conceived as a replacement for tin foil. Tin was expensive, less flexible, and left a metallic taste on food it wrapped. Neher saw aluminium as the answer, but the challenge was producing it in a form that was commercially usable.

His early experiments involved trying to coat the silk envelopes of gas balloons with thin aluminium to make them more airtight. Those experiments failed. The foil could not be applied evenly and the sheets were inconsistent. But Neher stayed with the underlying idea, convinced that what was needed was a process for producing aluminium in continuous, unbroken rolls pressed to a uniform thickness, something no existing method could reliably achieve.

He eventually cracked it, and the patent followed.

The patent and the plant

According to the EAFA's official history, Neher took out a patent in 1910 for the continuous rolling process and opened the first aluminium rolling plant in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.

The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland records that Neher, Lauber, and Gmür founded a partnership called Dr. Lauber, Neher and Cie. in 1910. That company was converted into a joint-stock company in 1912, renamed Aluminiumwalzerei Emmishofen in 1915, and then renamed again, in 1918, to Robert Victor Neher AG, a name that survives in the historical record as testament to how central he was to what he had built.

Customers came quickly. According to the EAFA, by 1911 the Bern-based company Tobler had begun wrapping its chocolate bars in aluminium foil, including the triangular bar that the world now knows as Toblerone. By 1912, Maggi was using the material to pack soups and stock cubes. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland also notes that Neher opened a second operation in Singen, Germany in 1912 to serve the German market, which Maggi was a major part of.

What the material became

The EAFA history records what followed over the next century: aluminium foil entered the dairy sector in the 1920s, conquered the packaging market for butter and cheese through the 1930s, appeared in the first European food containers for bakery products in 1948, and became the tray that held the first American TV dinner in 1954. By the 1960s it was inside the laminate layers of aseptic cartons for UHT milk and fruit juice. By the 1980s it was everywhere in blister packs for pharmaceuticals.

Today, according to the EAFA, it is used in every conceivable market from food and drink to pharmaceuticals, from aseptic beverage cartons to lidding, wrappers, pouches, and foil containers.

The man who did not live to see it

The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland records that Robert Victor Neher died on 21 November 1918 in Schaffhausen, the same city where he was born. He was 32 years old.

He did not live to see butter wrapped in his foil across Europe. He did not see the TV dinner, or the blister pack, or the Toblerone sold in its golden wrapper at every airport on the planet. He married in 1918, the same year his company was renamed after him and the same year he died.

The law degree he had been studying for when the balloon experiment sidetracked him was never completed either.

What he left behind was a rolling process, two plants, a company, and a material that 115 years later has still not been replaced.

(Disclaimer: The article is made from publicly available information. For informational purposes only.)