Tupperware is the least mysterious name in the kitchen: it is the inventor's surname plus a plain old word for goods.
Earl Silas Tupper was born in Berlin, New Hampshire, in 1907. Etymonline says the name combines ware, "manufactured goods," with Earl S. Tupper, a New England chemist and inventor. It records the line as popular from 1947.
Ware is much older than the plastic. It comes from late Old English waru and may originally have meant something like "that which is kept in custody." It survives in compounds such as hardware, silverware and tableware. Tupperware borrowed that familiar pattern for a product that was new.
The material was new too. Tupper worked in plastics at DuPont, then started his own company in 1938. He refined polyethylene slag, a waste product, into a plastic he called Poly-T. Etymonline quotes a 1948 advertisement that describes the plastic by that name.
The famous seal came next. Tupper took the idea from the lid of a paint can. The bowls, called Wonderbowls, were introduced in 1946, and he received a patent for the "burping seal" in 1949. Customers needed demonstrations to understand the seal, and store and catalog sales were slow.
The name only became a household word after a change in how it was sold. Saleswoman Brownie Wise championed selling through home parties. She was selling Tupperware by 1949, and in 1951 she became vice president of Tupperware Home Parties.
Tupper forced Wise out in January 1958 and sold the business to Rexall that year for $16 million. He retired at 51, moved to Costa Rica, and died there in 1983.
Accounts differ on small dates, such as when the first containers reached shops, and none of the sources says who first proposed the name. What they agree on is the logic. He put his own name on it.