In 1957 two engineers in New Jersey, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, were trying to invent a new kind of textured wallpaper. They took two shower curtains, sealed them together and trapped neat little air bubbles between them. The bubbles were great. The wallpaper idea was not. Nobody wanted bumpy plastic walls.
They tried selling the same product as greenhouse insulation. That didn’t really work either. Finally, in 1960, the computer company IBM needed a safe way to ship its huge, fragile new mainframe computers across the country. Fielding and Chavannes pitched their bubble-filled plastic. IBM loved it. Bubble wrap became a packaging product, and the rest is shipping history.
Today billions of square feet of bubble wrap are made every year, with bubbles ranging from tiny to giant. There’s even a Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day every January, and surveys show most people will pop a stray bubble within minutes of seeing one. There’s nothing quite like that little pop.
