We were popping bubble wrap from a recent shipment this week and ended up down a small rabbit hole about where the stuff actually came from. The answer is genuinely strange. Bubble wrap was invented to be wallpaper. Like, the kind you'd glue to your living room wall.
In 1957, two engineers named Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes were trying to make a textured plastic wallpaper in a garage in Hawthorne, New Jersey. They took two shower curtains, ran them through a heat-sealing machine, and ended up with a sheet of plastic full of trapped air bubbles. They thought beatnik-era homeowners would love it. Modern. Wipeable. A little space-age.
Nobody bought it. So they pivoted and tried to sell the same product as greenhouse insulation. That also flopped. By this point they'd founded a company called Sealed Air and had a warehouse full of bubbled-up plastic and no customers. Three years in, and the entire business case for the product was "we made it, surely someone wants it."
The save came in 1960. A marketer at Sealed Air named Frederick Bowers noticed that IBM had just announced the 1401, a new computer they were going to start shipping to customers across the country. Computers in 1960 were not laptops. The 1401 weighed something like a ton and was made of delicate vacuum tubes and circuit boards that hated being jostled.
Bowers pitched IBM on using the failed wallpaper as protective packaging. IBM tried it, it worked, and bubble wrap became a packaging product basically overnight. Sealed Air is still around today and still makes it, and it's a multi-billion-dollar company built entirely on a wallpaper idea that nobody wanted on their walls.
The part we love most: the satisfying pop is not an accident of physics they tolerated. Sealed Air has actually experimented over the years with non-popping versions (a continuous-channel design where the air flows between bubbles instead of being trapped), and people hated them. So the company kept making the poppable kind because customers specifically wanted to pop it. There are stress-relief studies, fan clubs, and an unofficial Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day on the last Monday of January.
So the next time a package shows up at your door, remember you're holding a failed interior design product from the Eisenhower administration that got rescued by a mainframe computer and survived because humans cannot stop squeezing it. Hard to think of a weirder career arc for a piece of plastic.
If you've got a weirder invented-by-accident origin story we should write about next week, send it our way — we read every email.
— Alexander & Amanda @ SBATC
