'Pop'
Icon Bubble Wrap Celebrates 50Th Birthday
People
have walked to the altar dressed in it, protected their garden
plants with it, even put it on display at highbrow art museums.
Mostly, they like the sound
it makes when they destroy it, piece by piece, which largely
explains the appeal of Bubble Wrap, the stress reducer disguised
as package cushioning that maintains an inexplicable hold on
pop culture.
The product once envisioned
as a new type of wallpaper turns 50 this month, and enthusiasts'
obsession with it has spawned more than 250 Facebook pages devoted
to Bubble Wrap.
Ken Aurichio, communications director for Sealed Air, the Elmwood
Park-based company that manufactures Bubble Wrap, thought he'd
witnessed every form of Bubble Wrap mania until he received
a wedding invitation last year from a woman in Ohio who said
she would wear the product on her trip down the aisle. "I'd
never, never met her before," Aurichio said. "She
must have gotten my name off the Web site." (No, he didn't
attend.)
Like many innovations, Bubble
Wrap initially was conceived for an entirely different purpose.
According to Aurichio, a New York City designer approached inventors
Marc Chavannes and Al Fielding in the late 1950s with a proposal
for creating textured wallpaper.
That idea stalled, but the
product the two men had created in a small lab in New Jersey
found its niche when, according to company lore, Fielding was
flying into Newark Airport and noticed the fluffy clouds that
seemed to cushion the plane's descent.
Fifty years later, Sealed
Air has global revenues of more than $4 billion and legions
of fans who have come up with myriad uses for Bubble Wrap (It's
a wig! It's a mobile home! It's a sleeping bag! It's a flotation
device!).
"It seems like every
day there's something new," said Rohn Shellenberger, the
company's business manager for air cellular products.
Sealed Air's 100,000-square-foot
warehouse, just off Interstate 80 about 15 miles west of Manhattan,
is an obsessive-compulsive's dream, with row upon row of stacked
rolls of Bubble Wrap as big as seven feet in diameter.
The temperature is sweat-inducing,
caused by the machines that process millions of granules of
resin (one box is labeled "Munchy Resin") into clear
plastic sheets at temperatures up to 560 degrees.
Shellenberger pops one myth
about Bubble Wrap; namely, that air is injected into all those
tiny bubbles. Instead, it is trapped between the sheets after
they pass over several rollers, one of which creates the indentations
for the bubbles.
Two apparently disparate
forces conspired to shape Bubble Wrap's growth: The advent of
the transistor - and later the personal computer with all its
accessories - which made the shipping of delicate electronic
components a multibillion-dollar industry; and the Internet,
which provided a forum for fanatics to swap stories and cement
Bubble Wrap as a cultural icon.
Katherine Howard, a Massachusetts
artist, tied Bubble Wrap bows to the chairs for her wedding
last May and had guests participate in a popping contest. Not
surprising for a woman who put up a virtual Bubble Wrap site
in 1996 and is known as the Web's unofficial "Bubble Wrap
Lady."
"We tried to find the most useless thing we could put on
the Internet, and Bubble Wrap is a completely tactile experience,"
Howard said with a chuckle. "But it's something that everybody
enjoys."
It's
difficult to imagine Chavannes and Fielding, both now deceased,
having any inkling that their invention would inspire such silliness
or find its way into movies (Wall-E, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective),
television (Monk) and high culture (Museum of Modern Art exhibit,
2009).
Then
there's the true badge of hipness (for now, at least): A bubble-popping
application for Apple's iPhone.