Bubble Wrap Began as a Wallpaper Nobody Wanted

Somewhere near you right now there is probably a sheet of bubble wrap: folded in a drawer, stuffed in a parcel, or waiting for someone to find it and start popping. It is one of the most ordinary things in any home. It was meant to be on the walls.

In 1957, an American engineer named Alfred Fielding and a Swiss chemist named Marc Chavannes were working together in a garage, trying to invent something new for the home. Their idea was a textured wallpaper, modern and a little bit daring, the kind of thing that might suit a stylish living room of the late 1950s. To make it, they ran two plastic shower curtains through a heat-sealing machine.

What came out was not quite what they had in mind. The two layers had sealed together with lots of little pockets of air trapped between them. They put a paper backing on it and offered it as wallpaper. Nobody wanted it. A wall covered in plastic bubbles, it turned out, was not the future people had been waiting for.

The inventors did not give up on their bubbles. They called the material Air Cap and went looking for a job it could do, and by one account they considered hundreds of possible uses. One of the first serious tries was insulation for greenhouses, which seemed sensible for a sheet full of trapped air. It did not work well enough to catch on. In 1960, Fielding and Chavannes founded a company called Sealed Air to keep developing it anyway.

The answer came from a computer. In 1959, IBM had introduced a machine called the 1401, and it needed to travel to customers without being damaged on the way. A Sealed Air salesman, Frederick Bowers, showed IBM what the bubbles could do, and in 1961 the computer began shipping wrapped in them. A failed wallpaper had become the packing material for one of the most delicate products of its day, and protective packaging has never looked back.

Why does a sheet of air protect anything? Each bubble is a tiny sealed cushion. When a parcel is dropped or squeezed, the force pushes on the bubbles first, and the air inside them squashes and springs back, soaking up the blow and spreading it out rather than passing it straight through to whatever is inside. Air is also very light, so the protection adds almost nothing to the weight of a parcel.

And the popping? That is simply what happens when a squeeze is too much for one small cushion: the plastic gives way and the air escapes with a snap. Nobody designed that part. It came free with a wallpaper that never made it onto a single wall, and it has kept people happily busy ever since.