How Gene Wolfe Helped Invent Pringles

Plenty of writers have made certain foods or drinks iconic: Marcel Proust had his Madeleines, Hemingway his namesake Daiquiri. C.S. Lewis made kids who’d never tried it crave Turkish Delight. 

But there may be only one writer who helped create an iconic snack available in grocery stores everywhere: Gene Wolfe. This largely unheralded genius allowed generations worldwide to enjoy the Pringles Potato Crisp. 

How Gene Wolfe helped create Pringles

Before he became a critically acclaimed writer of the Book of the New Sun series and was compared to Melville and James Joyce, Wolfe was a young engineer. Wolfe worked for Procter & Gamble in the 1960s, at the height of “food science.” These were the Jetsons years, when men in white lab coats with clipboards and pocket protectors worked to make everything better — which is to mean, mechanized and uniform. 

Soon enough, a chemist named Frederick Baur turned his attention to the potato chip. They were a mess! Some were small, some were large, some were folded up and undercooked, or overcooked. And it seemed like there was always at least one green chip in the bag. 

Baur’s designs would yield an ideal chip. He used a mixture of potato, corn, and rice flour to ensure each one was the exact same size and consistency. By rolling the dough out and forming it into the iconic “hyperbolic paraboloid” saddle shape, he made sure they were easy to stack, with good strength and plenty of snap.

He then stacked the chips into a futuristic tubular container shaped like a tiny missile silo so the chips wouldn’t bounce around and break. (Though anyone who’s dug to the bottom of a can will attest that the design does not work perfectly.) 

It was exactly the kind of potato chip that the Jetsons would eat, and Procter & Gamble loved it. The company tasked Wolfe and several others with creating machines to mass-produce the chips. 

In 2002, Wolfe spoke about his role: 

“I was the engineer on the original Pringles cooker,” he said. “Pringles was invented by a German madman. He was making them with a kind of scissor-and-dip mechanism that wasn’t adaptable to mass production. There was a four-man team, and I did the cooker that closed around the future potato chips and dragged them through the hot oil and opened them up and dumped them out. The fourth guy, who did the canning machine, they literally drove crazy.”

To see the part of the process that Wolfe invented, check out this YouTube video of Pringles being made. 

The rest, as they say, is history. After a slow start, and some questions about whether they were legally even potato chips, Pringles took off with snackers. It’s still the fifth-most popular snack brand, behind only Ritz in terms of salty things.

Some thoughts on Pringles, and Wolfe

So, what does it mean that the same mind who developed the complex machinery necessary to create a massively popular “potato crisp” also created some of the most subtle and fascinating stories of the 20th and 21st centuries? I popped a can while reading one of my favorite Wolfe stories to see if I could figure it out. 

If you haven’t had a Pringle in a while, especially the original flavor, it’s well worth buying a can just to get a sense of what food makers in 1968 considered innovative. 

Pringles do achieve a certain perfection, the ones broken in transit notwithstanding. The potato crisp is a platonic ideal. It is not greasy, nor bland, and certainly not soft. Every bite snaps and crunches. (In fact, I did some damage to the roof of my mouth.) 

Every bite delivers a uniform combination of starch and oil and salt — one could say an ideal amount. They really are, as the jingle reminds us, difficult to stop eating.

But they are also — and how to put this politely? — a little boring. Though I tried to eat them with some attentiveness, my mind wandered. I finished the can before I noticed I was done. 

This is less the case with a bag of actual potato chips, especially kettle chips made from fried and salted potato slices. They offer a lot more variety, and thus interest. The chips have different shapes and sizes, some large, some small. Some are folded up into weird shapes. They have slightly different textures. You have to think, even a small bit, about what you’re picking up and eating. 

If you’re eating chips with dip, you have to hunt for ones that will hold dip better. And, of course, there’s always the green one, and the decision to eat it or not. (I eat it. it never really tastes any different. My 14-year-old daughter strongly disagrees.)

Consuming Wolfe’s writing is the exact opposite experience of consuming Pringles. His narratives are unlike any other and would be impossible to imitate. Every sentence is a surprise. I find myself, even re-reading, needing to pay close attention to what I’m ingesting. 

Wolfe’s stories are meant to be savored, to make one consider where they are in a tangle of events, and how those events affect everything that happens thereafter. 

Every moment, every sentence, every word feels integral. Nothing feels gratuitous. His stories function like an ingenious machine that takes readers on a Byzantine journey toward unseen ends. 

Unlike the easy-eating potato crisps, readers who begin may quickly be tempted to stop. But for those who persevere, the results are most satisfying.