Bubble wrap or as we like to say, crackle wrap was created in 1957, when American mechanical engineer Alfred Fielding and Swiss chemist Marc Chavan tried to create embossed plastic wallpaper for an audience attracted by modernist design, jazz culture and new post-war aesthetic trends.
The idea was not unusual at the time. The post-war housing boom in the US created a large market for new materials in interior decoration, while jazz clubs, abstract art and modernist architecture increased interest in designs that differed from the classic floral wallpaper.
Since the end of the forties, Šavan has been working on embossing relief shapes into thermoplastic foil. However, when the two inventors ran two shower curtains through a heat-sealing machine, instead of a decorative surface, they got a plastic sheet with regularly spaced air pockets.
Crackle foil failed twice before being accepted by IBM
The material was pliable, unusual to the touch and did not attract buyers like wall covering. The first commercial idea therefore quickly failed.
Fielding and Chavan then tried to sell it as insulation for greenhouses. The trapped air did provide some thermal protection, but not enough for the product to compete with existing insulation materials. The second attempt also failed.
The two went on to patent the manufacturing process, and in 1960 they founded the company Sealed Air. The material was originally called Air Cap and later Bubble Wrap. Hundreds of possible applications were considered, but none brought enough money and the company was in a difficult situation in the early sixties.
The revolution was brought by the IBM 1401, a business computer introduced in 1959. It was expensive, sensitive, and sold in much larger numbers than the mainframe computers of the day, so IBM had to find better protection for shipping.
Previous materials, such as crumpled newspapers, sawdust and wood shavings, did not protect precision electronics well enough. Sealed Air salesman Frederik Bauers offered the bubble wrap to IBM engineers, who tested it and accepted it as standard protection for Model 1401 shipments.
The collaboration started in 1961 saved Sealed Air and showed that protective packaging is the true purpose of the product. Soon other companies started to use the foil, so during the next decade it became a common protection for the transport of fragile objects.
Sealed Air later grew into a global company with billions of dollars in revenue, while the original 1960 example of Bubble Wrap is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
According to family lore, the first person to intentionally pop bubbles for fun was Alfred Fielding’s five-year-old son. Thus, the product that failed twice got the unexpected role of one of the most famous ways to relieve stress, reports SD.