密封塑料袋是谁发明的？
Who Made That Ziploc Bag?

“It seems hard to believe it now, but people did not know how to open the bag,” Steven Ausnit, developer of the original Ziploc, recently told an audience at Marquette University. He recalled that sometime around the early 1960s, his company persuaded Columbia Records to try a plastic sleeve with the zipper on top for albums. “At the final meeting, we were all set to go. The guy called in his assistant, handed her the sealed bag and said, ‘Open it.’ I thought to myself, Lady, please do the right thing! The more she looked at it, the more my heart sank. And then she tore the zipper right off the bag.”

“现在听起来似乎难以置信，但是当时人们真是不知道该怎么打开那个袋子，”原密保诺塑料袋(Ziploc)的研发者史蒂文·奥斯尼特(Steven Ausnit)前不久对马凯特大学(Marquette University)的观众说。他回忆说，在20世纪60年代初的某个时候，他的公司劝哥伦比亚唱片公司(Columbia Records)尝试把唱片装到一个顶部有拉链的塑料套中。“在最后一次会议上，我们都准备离开时，那个人把助手叫了进来，把密封袋递给她，说：‘把它打开。’我心想：小姐，你可一定要打开！她看得越久，我的心越沉。然后她把拉链整个从袋子上撕下来了。”

Ausnit, who fled Communist Romania with his family in 1947, had been experimenting with plastic zippers since 1951. That was when he, his father (Max) and his uncle (Edgar) purchased the rights to the original plastic zipper, designed by a Danish inventor named Borge Madsen, who had no particular application in mind. They formed a company called Flexigrip to manufacture the zipper, which used a plastic slider to seal two interlocking grooves together. When the slider proved costly to manufacture, Ausnit, a mechanical engineer, created what we now know as the press-and-seal type zipper.

奥斯尼特1947年和家人逃离共产党统治的罗马尼亚。他从1951年起开始对塑料拉链进行试验。他和父亲（马克斯[Max]）及叔叔（埃德加[Edgar]）买下了原创塑料拉链的专利权。它是丹麦发明家博奇·马德森(Borge Madsen)设计的，他没有想出特别的用途。他们成立了一个名叫Flexigrip的公司，生产那种拉链，它用一个塑料滑动器把两个相互咬合的凹槽密封到一起。当他们发现生产那种滑动器成本很高时，机械工程师奥斯尼特创造了我们现在知道的按动密封式拉链。

In 1962, Ausnit learned of a Japanese company called Seisan Nihon Sha, which had figured out a way to incorporate the zipper into the bag itself, which would cut production costs by half. (Flexigrip was attaching its zippers to bags with a heat press.) After licensing the rights, the Ausnits formed a second company called Minigrip; their big break came when Dow Chemical asked for an exclusive grocery-store license, ultimately introducing the Ziploc bag to a test market in 1968. It wasn’t an immediate success, but by 1973, it was both indispensable and adored. “No end of uses for those great Ziploc bags,” Vogue told readers that November. “From holding games to keep the young occupied on the long drive to the mountains, to safe storage places for cosmetics, first-aid supplies and food. Even your wig will be happier in a Ziploc.”

1962年，奥斯尼特听说一个名叫Seisan Nihon Sha的日本公司找到了一种方法，能把拉链和袋子合二为一，这能把生产成本降低一半（Flexigrip公司本来是用热压法把拉链装到袋子上）。在获得专利许可后，奥斯尼特家族成立了第二个公司，名叫Minigrip；随后他们的重大转机到来了：陶氏化学公司(Dow Chemical)想得到这种塑料袋在食杂店的专用权，最终于1968年把密保诺密封袋推向市场试验。它没有马上获得成功，但是到1973年，它变得不可或缺，深受喜爱。“密保诺密封袋很棒，它的用途多得数不清，”《Vogue》杂志当年11月对读者说，“在去山上的长途汽车旅行中，你可以用它来装野味，让年轻人有事可干；你还可以用它来安全地存放化妆品、急救用品和食物。甚至连你的假发也会更乐意待在密保诺密封袋里。”

本文最初发表于2014年7月27日。

翻译：王相宜