It may come as a surprise that the cardboard box is a relatively new innovation, having been used in mass market situations for little more than 100 years now. In that time, it has replaced the wooden crate, entered the hall of fame and become as ubiquitous as that stack of New Yorkers it holds at the back reaches of your garage; you know, the one you keep saying you’re going to “get to.” Let’s get to it …

1. Like all things paper, cardboard was invented by the Chinese, probably in the 1600s. But it was in the 1890s, when a manufacturing accident showed a Brooklyn printer named Robert Gair he could cut and crease in one operation, that the prefabricated cardboard box came into being. Acceptance of the cardboard box was so swift that, by the turn of the century, it had already begun to replace the wooden packing crates as a form of moving and shipping.

2. The first industry to embrace cardboard boxes were cereals, specifically Kellogg’s Cornflakes; patented in 1896 and mass marketed in the early 1900s in a box. Originally intended for adults, breakfast cereals eventually would become dominated by products aimed at children who would grow up spending their mornings being entertained by what was in, and drawn on, cardboard boxes.

3.  It’s not unusual for parents to complain that those many-times sugar-laden breakfast cereals actually taste like cardboard. In fact, there is a popular Internet rumor that researchers once tested on rats which had more nutritional value: a sugary cereal or the box it came in—with the box getting the better of it. The story is so widespread that TV’s Mythbusters took it up and found that cereal had more fat, protein, sugar and starch than cardboard and contained about 20 percent more energy which has got to be some sort of record for setting a nutritional bar low.

4. Though China is the largest paper and cardboard producing country in the world, International Paper of Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest paper company in the world—about a quarter of all American cardboard manufacturers are located in the Southeast. International Paper greatly enhanced its cardboard production when it purchased the containerboard unit of Weyerhaeuser for $6 billion cash; a lot of paper to buy a lot of paper.

5. Cardboard, or corrugated fiberboard, is typically comprised of two outer layers with an inner, corrugated layer, usually made of a different pulp which produces a thinner paperboard that can easily be sculpted into a rippled form to strengthen and support the outside layers. The corrugated layer, known as the medium, is heated, wetted and formed by wheels and joined to the outside layers by a starch-based adhesive.

6. It’s the folding of the paper that creates a series of triangles called corrugations. The angle of a triangle cannot be changed because each angle is fixed by its opposite side, making it particularly strong. Which explains why the design can be used not only to construct an effective holding device like a cardboard box but also an effective device like a corrugated shipping container that the box will be transported in across the ocean.

7. Corrugation is so strong that cardboard is now being used in the manufacture of everything from furniture to bikes, something that could have global implications. Israeli designer Izhar Gafni has said he can mass produce a cardboard bicycle using just $9 in raw materials and sell it for just $20, allowing some of the poorest people on Earth access to personal transportation.

8. The beverage industry, which first gave you the juice box and then boxed wine, is increasingly producing water in a box. Easier and more economical to package and ship, greener on the environment and, some say, safer and less chemical-y to drink, boxed water has been experiencing double-digit growth while bottled water has nearly flat-lined.

9. Perhaps no industry this side of moving companies is so identified with the cardboard box as the toy industry, not only because the boxes have delivered so many toys but because parents have often complained that their kids end up playing more with the box than the toy inside it. Recognizing the power of the box, the National Toy Hall of Fame inducted the cardboard box into its hall of fame—along with Candy Land and a Jack-in-the-Box—citing that within this simple corrugated magic “a child is transported to a world of his or her own, one where anything is possible.” Anything but their parents getting their money back on that toy.

10. While cardboard boxes have been conduits for imagination, they now are delivering big doses of virtual reality. Google has shipped more than 1 million of its Cardboard virtual reality headsets to users. The devices are made of precut cardboard and 45-millimeter focal lenses that create a stereoscopic 3D image by enhancing the image of an app off a smartphone that is inserted in front of the lenses. Yeah, we have no idea how it works either; then again, we’re still trying to figure out who thought cardboard was part of this balanced breakfast.