Tools of the trade: How Bubble Wrap became a pop idol

There are devices in the retail world you take for granted. Let’s stop doing that.

Bubble wrap

• Patented: 1960
• First patent holders: Marc A. Chavannes and Alfred W. Fielding

Off the wall: In 1957, Alfred Fielding, a mechanical engineer who had a machine shop in Hawthorne, New Jersey, and Marc Chavannes, a Swiss chemical engineer, were trying to get an idea off the ground.

And onto the wall.

They were hunkered down trying to invent wallpaper that, unlike typical wallcovering, would have a layer of textured plastic atop it.

At one point, they fused two plastic shower curtains together by running them through a heat-sealing machine. They may not have been intending for air pockets to form in between, but when it happened, they saw potential and developed a machine and process that could do so in a grid.

This plastic film with what they called air “cells” in their patent application—or, what anyone today would recognize as Bubble Wrap—was ingenious, but turned out to not make a lot of sense for wallpaper.

• Fielding and Chavannes formed Sealed Air Corporation, in 1960, and Job No. 1 was to figure out how to market the product, which they called Air Cap.

Like any entrepreneurs, they were trying to think outside of the box. But it turned out that the best place for their invention was inside of it.

Package deal: In October 1959, IBM announced it was introducing what would become one of its first popular commercial computers, the 1401 Data Processing System.

IBM was looking for a way to ship all those computers, and Sealed Air’s material was about to finally get its close-up.

“It was the answer to IBM’s problems,” Chad Stephens told Smithsonian Magazine in 2019, when he was a VP at Sealed Air (he’s since left the company). “They could ship their computers without damage. That opened the door for a lot of other businesses to start using Bubble Wrap.”

Pop culture: Is there anything more satisfying than popping Bubble Wrap (or more annoying to Gretchen in the next cubicle)?

When it’s not being used for packaging or stress relief, it’s everywhere else, including as part of the permanent collection at MoMA.

Plus, that popping sound has been at the center of at least two toy crazes.

• Bubble fidget toys, which look like silicone trivets with raised bubbles that make the familiar pop sound when pushed, have been popular for about a year.
• In 2008, the craze was a Japanese toy called Mugen Puchi Puchi (rough translation: Infinite Pop Pop), a battery-operated version with push buttons.

But it’s not all fun and games: Governments all over the world are banning plastic shopping bags and straws, while designer Tom Ford is partnering with Lonely Whale, a foundation with a mission of reducing plastic ocean waste, to award more than $1.2 million in prize money to firms that come up with alternatives to thin-film packaging material used in products like polybags and Bubble Wrap.

At Thrive Market, CEO Nick Green told us that “Bubble Wrap is…like our kryptonite,” since the online supermarket strives to avoid any plastic packaging material.

• As an alternative, the company uses a honeycombed die-cut paper called Geami WrapPak.
• Other plastic-free alternatives to Bubble Wrap include another die-cut paper product, Cushion Lock, from 3M’s Scotch brand; and Bubble Wool, which is made from waste wool, by Woola, an Estonian startup.

It’s a wrap: Sealed Air Corporation, which still holds the trademark on the term “Bubble Wrap,” didn’t start calling it that until after the material had become popular as a packaging material, with its first known commercial use in 1968. Today, the company makes numerous packaging products besides Bubble Wrap.

• Its revenues were $5.5 billion in 2021, a 13% YoY increase.

Since 2015, the company has been offering a version of Bubble Wrap that ships as flat rolls to customers, who then inflate the Bubble Wrap themselves.

It’s more efficient, naturally, because the company isn’t shipping a bunch of air. But the inflatable design means that rather than individual bubbles, the pattern is more continuous, like lower intestines, meaning this variation of Bubble Wrap can’t—gasp—be popped.

When Elon Musk learned about non-popping Bubble Wrap, he responded, naturally, with a tweet: “Clearly a sign of the apocalypse!”