Bubble Wrap Was Invented as Wallpaper
In 1957, two engineers in New Jersey sealed two shower curtains together and created a sheet of plastic filled with air pockets. Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes had set out to make textured wallpaper that would appeal to the Beat generation. The wallpaper did not sell.
Fielding was a mechanical engineer; Chavannes was a Swiss chemical engineer who had approached him with the concept. Their idea was to create an insulating wallpaper by sealing two sheets of plastic together on a paper backing. The result was a material covered in small air bubbles that looked interesting but proved impractical for walls. Nobody wanted bumpy wallpaper.
The pair tried marketing their invention as greenhouse insulation instead. This also failed to gain traction. But Fielding and Chavannes believed their product had potential, so in 1960 they founded a company called Sealed Air Corporation to keep developing it. The question was what to use it for.
The answer arrived later that year when IBM announced the 1401, one of its first commercially successful computers. The machine was delicate and needed protection during shipping. Frederick Bowers, a marketer at Sealed Air, recognized an opportunity. He pitched bubble wrap to IBM as a protective packaging material and demonstrated how the air-filled pockets could cushion fragile equipment. IBM was convinced and began wrapping their computers in it.
The IBM contract transformed bubble wrap from a failed wallpaper experiment into a shipping industry standard. By the mid-1960s, it had become the default material for protecting fragile items in transit. Fielding and Chavannes would eventually file six patents and catalog over 400 uses for their invention. Both men were inducted into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame in 1993, a year before they died.
Sealed Air Corporation is now a Fortune 500 company operating in 122 countries. The textured wallpaper that nobody wanted became a product that nobody can stop popping.