What do you think of this fact?
Picture your living room covered wall to wall in bubble wrap. Sounds like a bad joke, but in 1957 it was a serious plan. And that failed plan gave us one of the most popular packing materials on the planet.
Two shower curtains and an idea
Engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes set out to invent a new kind of wallpaper. Plastic, with a 3D texture, modern and easy to clean. According to Smithsonian Magazine, they were aiming it at the young, style-conscious Beat generation.
For their experiment, they ran two pieces of shower curtain through a heat-sealing machine. What came out wasn’t sleek wall decor, though. It was a sheet full of trapped air bubbles. As wallpaper, nobody wanted it.
Plan B, Plan C, Plan IBM
The inventors didn’t give up and went looking for other uses. One was insulation for greenhouses. That didn’t really work either.
In 1960 they founded a company called Sealed Air, and then the breakthrough came from an unexpected direction. IBM had just launched its 1401 computer, and those delicate machines had to reach customers in one piece. The bubbly plastic was exactly what they needed. “It was the answer to IBM’s problems,” Chad Stephens of Sealed Air told Smithsonian Magazine.
From there, things took off. Packaging instead of wall decor, padding instead of a design statement.
Why popping feels so good
Today bubble wrap sits in every shipping warehouse and plenty of basements. Lots of people mainly love the sound of the bubbles bursting. The wallpaper nobody wanted turned into a stress-relief toy almost everyone knows. There are even silicone toys made just to copy that popping feeling.
Fielding and Chavannes earned 6 patents in total for their work, mostly for processes that emboss and laminate plastic.
Sometimes the biggest success is whatever’s left over when the original plan fails. In this case, with sound effects.