The crunchy plastic wrapping everyone likes to pop is turning 50.
Bubble Wrap, the protective packaging made by Sealed Air, an Elmwood Park company in the Fortune 500, was invented in Hawthorne in 1960.
Created by Marc Chavannes and Al Fielding, it was first called Air Cap and designed to be a new type of wallpaper. That idea didn’t work, however, so they started to sell it as a greenhouse insulator.
Legend has it Chavannes came up with the idea for its current use during an airplane ride over what was then Newark Airport.
Chavannes looked out the window as the plane descended and noticed the billowy clouds that seemed to be cushioning the plane.
That was when he realized the textured plastic material could be used as a replacement for old newspapers to protect fragile items.
But the product didn’t really take off until the mid-1960s when IBM used it as a cushion for shipments of its 1401 model computers.
Since then, the material has become a pop culture icon that “not only serves to cushion fragile materials, but also provides the added benefit of helping to de-stress and bring smiles to the faces of people of all ages worldwide,” said William Hickey, chief executive of Sealed Air.
The cushioning material has been used to create works of art and clothing, as well as props for TV commercials and movies, such as “Wall-E,” “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “Liar, Liar” and “Naked Gun.”
The Saddle River factory that makes Bubble Wrap will change the material’s clear colour to gold to commemorate its birthday next Monday. A limited run of gold-coloured Bubble Wrap will be made.
Here are some significant events in the material’s history:
- The invention of the material leads to the founding of Sealed Air in 1960.
- Sealed Air reports sales of $4 million in 1969 as Bubble Wrap started to catch on.
- In 1998, comedians Joey Green and Tim Nyberg write about the cushioning material in “The Bubble Wrap Book.”By J.R. Perone / Star-Ledger