Heavy Duty Paper Shredders have been around for a century now and have been evolving with technology into the sophisticated machines we see today. But how did they come into existence and how did they evolve over time?
We have a Abbot Augustus Low, and American from Piercefield, New York, to thank as it was Low who came up with his patent for a 'waste paper receptacle' that offers a much improved method of disposing waste paper. Low's patent was filed in 1909 but was unfortunately never manufactured.
Then after a hiatus of 26 years, Adolf Ehinger came up with the idea of a paper shredder that was based on a hand-crank pasta maker in 1935. It was supposed to shred his anti-Nazi propaganda to avoid the inquiries of the authorities. He then decided to market the shredders to government agencies, and indeed. Ehinger's company, EBA Maschinenfabrik, manufactured the first cross-cut paper shredders in 1959 and continues to do so to this day as EBA Krug & Priester GmbH & Co. in Balingen.
As we move through the century we know that only government agencies tended to use paper shredders,
indeed history tells us that the U.S. embassy in Iran used strip-cut paper shredders to reduce paper pages to strips before the embassy was taken over in 1979.
In the 1980s, shredders became more and more popular within the American household due one particular ruling made by the supreme court in 1984.
In the case California v Greenwood, they held that the fourth amendment does not prohibit the warrantless search and seizure of garbage for collection outside of a home. So paper shredders became an overnight success with thousands of Americans concerned over the privacy of their documents. Indeed anti-burning laws, concern over landfills, industrial espionage, and identity theft concerns created greater demand for paper shredding.
They further increased in popularity after Colonel Oliver North told Congress that he used a Schleicher Intimus 007 S cross-cut model to shred Iran-Contra documents, with shredder sales for that company increased nearly 20 percent in 1987.
Today with the high need for confidentiality to prevent the growing rise in identify theft, shredding continues to be a feature of the everyday home in the 21st century. It also continues at governmental level where it is vital for preventing information from getting into the wrong hands, so the need for heavy duty paper shredders will doubtless continue to be there well into the 21st century.
