August 26, 2019 • 47 mins
Don’t take bubble wrap for granted! Someone had to invent it and you might be surprised to learn where it came from. In this episode of Invention, Robert and Joe discuss the history and future of packing material.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey
you welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and
I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I've got a question for you.
In what way are humans most like cats? Oh? I
don't know, Joe, in what way are humans most like cats? Well,
(00:23):
I'll answer the riddle myself then, since you thought it
was a joke, No, it's not a joke. No, it's
that both actually love packaging material of like gifts and
packages more than what's inside it. Because with the cats,
you know, like if you ever had a cat on
Christmas Day when presents are being open, of course you have. Uh.
I don't know if this is your experience and my experience,
(00:44):
they always want to get in the wrapping paper and
go to war with But with us humans, it's not
the wrapping paper. It's that darn bubble wrap. That stuff
is so intoxicating, the tactile pleasure of it, the gentle
popping sounds. It's like it's a drug from another universe. Well, um,
(01:05):
first of all, on on the cat issue, yes, I
can definitely testify that cats love packaging material. Uh, they
also really love or at least. My cat really loves
uh instruction manuals for the assembly of furniture, um like
Ikea manuals and kind of like Ikea manual or like
a Lego instruction book. When you start, when you pull
(01:26):
everything out of the box, that's right where she goes.
If you have the most comfortable couch in the world,
and then there is an Ikea instruction manual somewhere on
that couch, it's the instruction manual that she will lay on. Well,
I wonder if that's part of the larger trend of
cats always wanting to be between you and what you're doing,
and how they don't want your attention until you're really
(01:47):
trying to focus on something else and then they need
to get on top of that thing and in your
face possibly. And of course they love boxes and all
I understand because they are you know that they're they're
both predator and prey and uh and so they you know,
they want little places to hide out in to hide
from predators, but also you know, places of ambush for
the things that they would be hunting. Do you have
(02:09):
this memory when you were a little kid of like
the early early years of playing with bubble wrap and
just the intense fixation with popping every single bubble on
the sheet. Yeah. I mean I don't remember necessarily like
the feeling like I had to pop every bubble, but
I remember like this vague sense of almost disappointment at
(02:30):
having completely popped all of the bubbles and there being
something like fresh and exciting about a complete unpopped sheet
of bubble wrap. So yeah, I have some fond memories
of it. And as you know, as as a former child,
but also as the parent of a current child, especially
when he was younger, you know, we would we get
some bubble wrap. You give him some bubble wrap and
(02:51):
just just tell him here and go for it, and
he would have fun popping it. Um. It's better than
any twenty toy, It's yeah, yeah, Core. As as we'll discuss,
we see less full on bubble wrap these days, we
see in another type of of packing material that is
plastic inflated with air. We still get a decent amount
(03:14):
of bubble wrap here in the office because we often
get books delivered to us in the office in those
bubble wrap lined envelopes. Oh yeah, I guess we do, um,
which is always kind of silly because I don't, especially
if it's a you know, a review copy book. He
broke my book, and I don't. I don't mind if
it gets beat up a little bit. I mean, especially
since outside of work, when I order a book for myself,
(03:35):
I always order like the whatever the cheapest used copy is,
so you know, I get something in that has like
a weird odor to it and coffee stains. I love
And yeah, I love it when when a book has
been you know, the various package of passages that are
underlined and highlighted and little notes at it in summaries. Um. Yeah,
so I really don't care if it is you know,
(03:55):
if it is you know, completely protected from the you know,
the physical dangers of transit. But but yeah, we still
so we still get a lot of of bubble wrap
like material. In fact, we get so much that it
can be a little you know, overbearing at times. Um,
I feel like once a week I have I'm like
(04:16):
a you know, an executioner in my house going around
to the various inflatable bits and just stabbing them all
to get the air out so I can stuff the
plastic in the and the recycling and then a similar
case with freezer bags for for food that is shipped,
you know, having to to gut those and get all
of the the the the the unfrozen material out of
(04:38):
there so I can stuff those plastic bags into the recycling.
I totally know what you're saying. My childhood fascination with
and love of bubble wrap has in many ways been
replaced by an adult guilt complex about packaging materials. I
feel like, oh, this probably isn't good for the planet.
I've gotten too much stuff shipped to my house and
(04:58):
and I don't know what to do about it. Now
it's here, I guess I just gotta pop this and
try to recycle it if I can. Yeah, So, on
today's episode, as as you can can tell, we're going
to discuss bubble wrap. And before you turn off and
say like, I don't you know that sounds dreary, No, No,
it actually has a surprising origin story which we'll get into,
and we'll discuss what came before bubble wrap, and and
(05:19):
where we've gone, where we're going post bubble wrap, and
what that sort of future holds for us. All right, well,
maybe we should go straight to the origin story. Yeah,
and this is a more recent invention. So this is
not going to be one where you know the the
inventors are lost to the myths of prehistory. No we
know their names. So the story of bubble wrap begins
(05:40):
in the nineteen fifties with a pair of business partners.
Now these were an American inventor named Alfred W. Fielding
and a Swiss chemist named Mark Chavon. Now, Fielding and
Chevon were playing around with an idea for an innovation
in interior decorating, not in packaging material, not in childhood entertainment,
(06:03):
but in interior decor. They wanted to explore new frontiers
in wall paper. Now, wallpaper has gone in and out
of style over the course of the twentieth century, and
actually has gone in and out of style. I guess
before then is it in right now? I feel like
it's a little bit and I I didn't know. I
feel like these days, the modern sensibility, it tends to
(06:23):
be more sort of like solid painted muter color walls.
But I don't know, maybe it's coming back. I don't
know that much about interior design. I feel like I
I've been encountering it more like when when I go to, say,
like a new restaurant or something you know where there's
clearly been a lot of recent energy put into the decor.
I will sometimes find wallpaper and I'll think, oh, my goodness,
(06:44):
this is this is a sign of things to come.
I don't know, well, it used to be more of
a sign of luxury and interior decorating, but then it
became cheaper and more popular in the twentieth century, appearing
in more and more homes. I don't know if it's
coming back, and if it is coming back, I wonder
what that says. But anyway, in nineteen fifty seven, these
two guys Fielding and Chavan, we're trying to see if
(07:08):
they could make a new kind of weird artsy three
D textured wallpaper out of sheets of plastic layered over
paper backing, and so modern accounts of their efforts, including
an article I was reading by David Kindy and smith
Sony in about this invention, but a bunch of other things,
they all identify the beat generation as the target market
(07:31):
of this wallpaper. And I don't know if that goes
back to something that Fielding and Chavan themselves said at
some point, but it's gets repeated a lot. I'm trying
to exact imagine exactly what that means from like a
mass market consumer style point of view. Obviously they weren't
just trying to sell this to Alan Ginsberg and his friends,
because when you think Alan Ginsberg, you think can bubble
(07:51):
at well, I mean maybe maybe, because so I would say,
for some reason, we today tend to think of the
nineteen fifties as an extremely square time in the history
of like American arts and culture. But in reality, it
seems to me like it was exactly the opposite. Mid
century architecture and design, like the late forties through the
(08:12):
early sixties really seems to me to be absolutely crammed
with bizarre experimental styles that would be far too weird
for most new businesses or homeowners today. Uh. And so
that that's sort of the landscape imagining, Like I'm wondering
if this experimental textured wallpaper might have fit in with
elements of the mid century futurist architectural style known as googy,
(08:36):
which if you're trying to picture that, think like classic
architecture and designs in Las Vegas that you can still
see on some of their signs right right the the
the famous Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign is a
prime example of googy. And by the way, googie is
spelled g o O g i e. A word that
pretty much any search engine will try to insist does
(08:58):
not exist. They're like main Google right right now, I
mean googie. Uh and this is googie. So yeah, this
is probably the most readily available example of googy. That's
just going to be in your mind right now. If
you play video games. There's a bunch of googie design
that shows up in the Fallout game because they're going
for that nineteen fifties retro futurist style. There there are
(09:20):
other sort of names for related or overlapping mid century styles,
like mid century Modern, which is I think broader than googie,
or what is sometimes apparently now called ray gun Gothic.
I think that's a coinage by William Gibson. Interesting. Uh, yeah,
I think it is important to This is actually something
that I always have to continually remind myself that the
(09:41):
creative minds of the nineteen fifties, the nineteen forties and
and other decades as well, for the most part, we're
just as as weird and as inventive, if not more so,
than anybody working today. Uh, you know, some of my
favorite artists that I've discovered it, such as Irving nor
It was you know, surrealist, dark surrealist painter, and he
(10:05):
was active, he would have been active at this time
in the nineteen fifties. And you look at his work
now and it looks it's it's difficult, it's uh, you know,
it's it's it's weird and dark and uh and and
and you know, undercutting in a way that you might
not expect from the nineteen fifties if you're just picturing,
like you know, the sort of the atomic family scenario,
(10:25):
the atomic family, the nuclear family family, it's the same thing. Yeah,
you made me think of fallouts. I'm thinking about you know,
the idea more about atomics, I guess. But but also
like there's there are all these other strange styles that
are flourishing at the period, like like the tiki aesthetic. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
this definitely lines up with the same era. So for
(10:47):
those of you are not aware, mid century tiki was
a post War War two aesthetic fad that most memorably
gave us tiki drinks, but also in an entire aesthetic
vibe that's firmly rooted in the cultural appropriation of Polynesian culture,
they drinks themselves. However, as tiki drink master Beach Bumbari
points out in his excellent book Portions of the Caribbean, Uh,
(11:08):
these drinks are firmly products of the Caribbean and Caribbean products,
particularly rum, while the design is assembled from Pilford bits
of Polynesian aesthetics. Now, now, I'm a big fan of
tiki drinks myself. I think they're fun to make, fun
to drink and share. And then the history of of
each individual cocktail tends to be interesting with its sort
of you know, they're they're they're the stories of like
(11:30):
feuding bartenders in the fifties and sixties, etcetera. Um. But
just as the products that make up a tiki drink
are problematic in their roots in Western exploitation of the Caribbean,
so too is the style rooted in the exploitation of
Polynesian people's. So uh, you know, I'm not trying to
ruin tiki for anyone, but I'm just saying imbibe with
(11:51):
a shot of self reflection. And by the way, I'd
love to actually cover tiki and more detail on another episode.
Perhaps we could do an episode on invention of the
my tai. Really yeah, it has an interesting history, Okay,
trade secret swarring, tiki bartenders. Uh yeah, there's a whole
world there. Uh. And of course again Beech Bumbari is
(12:13):
a wonderful authority on all of these, highly recommend his books. Interesting, Well,
maybe we could come back. But so thinking about wallpapers specifically,
I mean connecting it back to the to the teaky aesthetic.
I was looking at a blog post by writer named
Katherine Brooks that was collecting wallpapers throughout history, and she
had a couple of examples of wallpapers selected from the
(12:34):
nineteen fifties, and they are very strange. One has this
complex design with kind of green and black tropical garden motif.
It seems to be evoking sort of like a like
a tiki a fascination. It's got palm trees and stuff.
But then another one of these wallpapers is just one
that shows pine spriggs and it's apparently embossed. It has
some kind of three D texture. So maybe three D
(12:57):
textured wallpapers were already sort of a thing in the
nineteen fifties. But to come back to our inventors Fielding
and Chivon, they were working out of a garage in Hawthorne,
New Jersey, in nineteen fifty seven to come up specifically
with a heat based ceiling process to press together two
layers of plastic shower curtain with paper backing, and unfortunately,
(13:21):
the final product they came up with did not have
the aesthetic properties they were looking for in a wallpaper.
The hot lamination of the flexible plastic ended up trapping
air bubbles between the layers, which doesn't sound like a
great texture for wallpaper. Or maybe it does. I don't
know exactly what it was they were trying to do,
but the popable walls sounds bad. Well, I mean, it's
(13:43):
not great, but it's not horrifying. And it does make
me think of the walls and Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
You know where you had the flavored illustrations on the wallpaper.
I don't remember this part. You have flavored walls. It
was like lickable walls. Nice. This what the snores berries
tastes like Snorm's berries or whatever. Um, so you canberriesberries,
(14:05):
So you can imagine like snawsberry bubble wrap walls where
you could go up and you pop this, uh this
this pimple on the wall and in it emits this
uh this the smell, this odor, if not this taste
of whatever, you know, the you know, the suite happens
to be. Oh okay. So it's like perfume sample walls.
It's like popable or scratch off kind of mechanics, but
(14:28):
for your house. No, we're not saying that's what Fielding
and Chavon had in mind. I don't know exactly what
they were thinking, but they wanted to create this beat wallpaper,
and they did get patents for their process, but the
wallpaper did not really catch on. And Howard Fielding, the
son of Alfred Fielding, was a young kid when his
father brought home a sample of one. At some point
(14:52):
they had this invention that was the layers of plastic
with bubbles in it. And speaking to David Kindy of
Smithsonian Magazine, how Ward Fielding recalls this sort of psycho
tactle tractor beam allure of the plastic bubbles when he
first saw them. He says, I remember looking at the
stuff and my instinct was to squeeze it. I say,
(15:12):
I'm the first person to pop bubble wrap, but I'm
not sure that's true. The adults in my father's firm
likely did so for quality assurance, but I was probably
the first kid. They were really fun to pop. The
bubbles were a lot bigger than so they made a
loud noise. And I think it's always interesting when the
extent to which the people associated with a product or
(15:35):
a company actually talk about or promote it's sort of
off label use. Like this whole thing about the people
who make Q tips. They probably know that people are
sticking those in their ears all the time, but they
don't talk about that because you're not supposed to do that.
You're requested not to stick them in your ears. But
who actually thinks that's not going on? I mean no,
(15:57):
I mean they have other uses to be sure, you know,
it can be used makeup and um, and I use
them sometimes when I'm working on painting miniatures and all.
But that kind of code of silence is not going
on with bubble wrap. In fact, I noticed that whenever
their interviews with people involved with the company that still
makes bubble wrap, or you know, the Sealed Air Corporation,
(16:17):
which we'll get to in a minute, or people who
were involved in the invention of bubble wrap always talk
about the popping. They're like, it's like that. They admit
I like to pop the bubbles too. I don't know
what that is. It seems to be almost part of
their marketing. Yeah, I mean, in a way, this is
not the reasoning, but you can know, you could know.
(16:39):
You could look at it like, well, you're when you
pop all the bubbles and a piece of bubble wrap,
you render it useless, thus requiring the the purchase of
additional bubble wrapping for any packaging you're going to do. Okay, yeah, yeah,
make up make a product that the children will destroy. Well,
maybe we should take a break and then we come back.
(17:00):
We can explore what happened with this failed wallpaper with
the bubbles in it. Alright, we're back. We've been discussing
the history of wallpaper or what initially comes right before
wallpaper in this quest to create this ideal beat generation
(17:20):
wallpaper that has air bubbles in it? What comes before wallpaper?
Or did you mean bubble wrap comes before bubble rap? Okay,
And I guess in a sense it would have been
like what would have been what it would have come after?
Like this is gonna be the next evolutionary step for wallpaper. Okay, yeah,
and instead it becomes the birth of something new. This
was gonna be the wallpaper you put on the side
walls of your like moon Igloe or whatever. But no,
(17:44):
it didn't work out that. It was not successful. It
didn't prove to be a popular product. I don't know
if they ever sold any of it. So the lamination
process was not successful at making a desirable wallpaper. But
they did get patents for their process, and they tried
to see if their system of making bubbly sealed layers
of plastic could be used for other stuff. Well, my
mind instantly turns to fashion. Didn't Barbarella where some one
(18:07):
of her outfits they didn't have like air bubbles in it.
Oh she might have I don't quite remember, but that
would seem to be Yeah, that would make sense. I
know there was at least I kept reading references to
There was one Playboy cover at some point that had
an actress or model dressed in bubble wrap. Uh. So
clearly there's some kind of alternative fashion uses for it.
(18:29):
But one thing that they tried to do when they
were marketing it was as insulation. They tried to so
Fielding and Chavon tried to market it as insulation material
for greenhouses. This failed to attract much interest, apparently just
wasn't great at insulating um. But Fielding and Chavon did
not give up in trying to find a use for
their plastic product. And I think it's interesting that here's
(18:51):
an example of the kind of like supply side drive
in in find in innovation, right where they're like, we've
got this process, we've got this invention, but we don't
know what it does yet. It's the opposite of the
idea that necessity is the mother of invention, right. Um,
So they're like, we know how to make this stuff,
but we don't know if it can do anything useful,
and they're trying to find a use for it. So
(19:13):
they didn't give up, and they continued making business moves
to support the development of this product in the in
the following years. So in nineteen sixty they founded a
company called the Sealed Air Corporation, which still exists. And
it was this year, in nineteen sixty and that Mark
Chavon had his breakthrough insight about a new use for
the textured wallpaper. And this is as told in a
(19:34):
two thousand ten New York Times City Room piece by
James Barron. Apparently, Chavon was on a small propeller plane
flying from Ohio to New York, New Jersey, and the
story is that Chavon was watching out the window as
the plane was coming in toward New Jersey and he
saw clouds and in that moment, in his mind, the
clouds seemed to be cushioning the planes controlled descent through
(19:57):
the atmosphere. It was a soft cushion and of gas.
And according to a manager with the Sealed Air Corporation
named Ron Schellenberger, this was how Chivan realized that bubbly
plastic could be useful for its cushioning properties during the
shipping of products. The lift under the airplane was quote
like bouncing across the bubbles. Okay, I'll allow it. I'm
(20:19):
always a little suspicious of idea origin, story depend upon,
you know, these Eureka moments of observation. Not to say
it doesn't happen, but sometimes it is used to I think,
to just add an artificial sense of myth and mystery. Sure, well,
as I said, this is the story they tell. It's
hard to know if that was really what was going
(20:39):
through his mind. Rather than uh, you know, somebody sitting
in the seat next to him was like, hey, you
should use that bubble wrap to ship products. So they
branded their air filled plastic sheeting as bubble wrap, which
is still a company trademark today. But it's one of
those things like clean X for tissue paper, popsicle for
quiescently frozen treats. I think it's one of those brand
(21:00):
terms that's just sort of become a worldwide generic term
against its will. Technically, some of the stuff we call
bubble wrap is air cushioned packaging material made by other companies.
I was reading a two thousand six article in Forbes
by Monty Burke that reported that counterfeit bubble wrap I guess,
being sold under the trade name but allegedly manufactured in China,
(21:20):
had been found in a home depot in California. Counterfeit
bubble wrap. Like, why would you go to the trouble?
This doesn't bring to mind? You know, we were joking
earlier about pitching a horror story, a horror of franchise
about about bubble wrap, that this is the angle you
could take. Illicit bubble wrap that was created by another
manufacturer and the bubbles, I don't know, contain some sort
(21:43):
of you know, terrible gas that drives people crazy or something.
It's bubble wrap from the todash darkness. There you go.
Is he basically rights itself. So how did it go
from failed kitchen wallpaper and failed insulation two cushioning material
for packaging even after they had this idea. Well, according
to company history, this was mostly due to a relationship
(22:04):
with a single very important customer that Sealed Air acquired
in the early nineteen sixties, and that was IBM. So
in nineteen fifty nine, IBM introduced an extremely successful line
of early computers used by businesses and institutions around the world.
This was the IBM four hundred series, the first major
(22:24):
model uh in which was the fourteen oh one. It
was a variable word length decimal computer that some sources
now refer to as like the Model T of computers
because of its early widespread use, mostly for data processing
by businesses. Obviously, this was before the home computer era,
and the story goes that a marketer named Frederick W.
Bowers saw potential here and he pitched IBM on the
(22:48):
advantages of bubble wrap as a cushioned packing material. For
the fragile, expensive computers and computer parts. It was now
shipping to businesses and institutions around the world, and the
pitch worked. IBM became bubble Wraps first major client, and
then over the following year's bubble Wrap became a standard
cushioning material to protect delicate stuff in transit, and the
(23:08):
company flourished. So we often like to ask on the
show what came before? This is one where it's not
a super complicated at answer. Before bubble Wrap, the most
commonly used packing material to cushion stuff was stuff like
watted up newspaper. This had the advantage, of course, of
being cheap or essentially free if you use the newspapers
people through away, but it came with multiple disadvantages. First
(23:30):
of all, it was not actually very good at cushioning stuff,
especially you know, a newspaper can be compressed, so if
you're shipping something that's both heavy and delicate, it can
kind of compress the newspaper until it's sort of flattened it.
And now it doesn't provide much cushioning, right, I mean,
when you and I've tried to cushion things with newspapers
before and and it really becomes this whole task of
(23:52):
like I can't you know, obviously, just can't throw a
newspaper in there. You have to take each individual page
and you have to watch it up, but don't watch
it up too much and find a like optimal level
of wadding where it's nice and springy, and keep doing that,
uh you know, for you know, however long it takes.
You know, obviously, if you if you spend the money
on some sort of a manufactured packaging material, you can
(24:13):
certainly cut down on your time. Especially even instead of
packaging like the odd box of valuables for your you know,
once in a decade moved instead your packaging objects every
day some sort of product to send out to consumers.
And another big problem with wadded up newspaper is that
it ends up smeering ink everywhere. I hadn't thought about that.
(24:33):
So one of the huge advantages though, of newspaper packaging
is um I don't know if you've experienced this, but
if you order something, particularly if you order something like
via e pay, sometimes you get uh you know, foreign
newspapers in there, and that that can become like a
fun bonus. I a few years back, I ordered some
miniatures to paint, and they came from somewhere in Russia,
(24:54):
so it was packaged. The little figurines were were cushioned
by these wadded up newspapers and when you, uh, you
unlatted them, you saw the you know, the cyrillic on
the page. It was in it for a fun experience. Interesting, Yeah,
bubble wrap, it's you know, I guess you could pop
it and be like, mrs where is this air from
its air from New Jersey, But it's just not the same. Uh. Well.
(25:15):
So ultimately, air filled plastic did prove superior resisting compression
and protecting fragile objects from impacts, and over the years,
the Sealed Air Corporation has done some interesting like marketing
stunts to show off the superior protective capabilities of bubble
wrap over competing materials. One example is that this was
reported in that Forbes piece I was talking about. In
(25:37):
the year two thousand, they entered this big public pumpkin
dropping contest in Iowa, and I'm like, what is that.
I guess that the goal is to keep a falling
pumpkin from being smashed when it hits the ground. I
couldn't find a lot on this but it looks like
they're engineering departments at some universities that have similar contests
where Yeah, and and high schools as well. Sometimes with
eggs are popular. Yeah, throwing some eggs or throwing melons
(26:00):
off the roof, and it becomes a science project to
figure out the best way to cush in it and
protect it from injury, to like make a protective container
or protective landing zone or something with within certain design constraints. Yeah,
it's a pretty great engineering project for his kids because
it involves like doing something totally against the rules, throwing
stuff off the roof of the school, with like just
(26:22):
a fun engineering challenge. How do you keep the inevitable
from happening? Uh? Yeah, so I'm all in favor of it. Well,
the story here is that the engineers from Sealed there
did a demonstration where they dropped an eight hundred and
fifteen pound pumpkin named gord Zilla from my height of
thirty five feet, cushioned only by bubble wrap. CEO William
Hickey told Forbes quote the pumpkins survived the drop. The
(26:44):
problem was that it bounced and then there's no more information.
I'm like, what is that? What is that problem? Then
did it bounce and land on somebody's card and bounce
and turn it? And did it come to life? I
know I was looking around too, because I mean, just
the mention of gord Zilla, I had to to find
more and I wasn't able to find anything. Now, granted,
this is like nearly two decades ago, and I know
(27:06):
that it maybe the videotaping of everything wasn't quite as ubiquitous,
but it seems like if they were going to the
trouble to drop fifteen pound Gordzilla off of a roof,
they would have filmed it, and that that footage would
be probably displayed somewhere. Unless indeed, something really terrible happened,
like it killed somebody or came to life. Well, I'm
(27:29):
gonna feel extremely betrayed if I find out that former
Sealed Air CEO William Hikey is making up details of
the story. I demand proof of Gordzilla. That's what That's
what I am demanding. Are they a publicly traded company.
I think they are. Yeah. I think that the stockholders
should demand proof Gordzilla. The documents. Okay, so the company
(27:52):
still makes bubble wrap. The bubble wrap represents only a
small part of its revenue. Now I've seen estimates maybe
around ten or fift something like that. That's what i've
They've transitioned largely to food packaging. Actually, they own the
Cryovac brand, so there's a lot of food packaging. But
there have been interesting developments. It's not just like, Okay,
we figured out how to make bubble wrap and then
they just coasted on that forever. One example of developments
(28:14):
in the history of bubble wrap is, for example, the
former CEO of Sealed Air, William Hicky we just mentioned.
He told Forbes in two thousand six that Alfred W.
Fielding always wanted to be able to create a way
to put air into the bubble when you needed it
instead of when it was manufactured, right, so that like
(28:35):
you could ship out flat bubble wrap and then it
could be inflated on site. Now, why would that be important?
We'll think about like volume and density and shipping. Imagine
you run a factory that ships out delicate products and
you need to use air cushioning material to pack it.
How do you get the material? Well, if it's getting
shipped to you in trucks or something, the space in
the truck is going to be mostly taken up by
(28:56):
bubbles of air. It's not very efficient. But by the
twenty one century, uh Fielding's dream of on site inflatable
bubble wrap was actually achieved. The Sealed Air Corporation originally
called this stuff new air I b uh, and it
is apparently much more space saving than the original. According
to that two thousand six article, one truckload of the
(29:19):
inflatable bubble wrap is the same as forty truckloads of
the already inflated bubbles. Yeah, I mean it makes sense.
I've also seen this referred to as fill air products. Yeah.
But when you start thinking about this about like the
quantities and the efficiency, you do start to see the
downsides of all this packaging material. Right. There's a claim
(29:40):
in that two thousand six Forbes article that the company
UH that they insisted that at the time they produced
enough bubble wrap every year to circle the Earth at
its equator ten times. They do not say it what width,
though that seems important information. And then is it did
the big bubble, the fat bubble or the little teeny bubble?
I don't know. I mean, I guess it's probably whatever
(30:00):
their most common width of material is. But no matter
what with it is that's a lot of plastic. Yeah,
it is a lot of plastic. And then that that
continues to be one of them the major concerns I
guess with with with platt with bubble wrap, but also
these other like fill air products. One of the articles
I was looking at was an article that was published
(30:23):
in the Atlantic by Boree Lamb that's l a M.
Titled about those air cushions and Amazon packages everywhere and
this is from and In this article, Lamb discusses how
the colossal growth of e commerce has indeed benefited the
packing material industry as often it was a five point
six billion dollar industry and sealed air is the biggest
(30:46):
market shareholder. Uh and uh and at this time there
said she said that bubble wrap itself was only fifteen
percent of the business, with more of an emphasis being
placed on the fill air products. For instance, like you'll
find in Amazon packages, most of your Amazon packages that
you're receiving today, so like one big bubble in in
a piece of plastic. Well, or it's like it's or
(31:08):
it's kind of like it's like the paper towel roll
equivalent right where it's like each segment has clearly been inflated,
and its minimal plastic. Uh. This is the stuff that
after you order anything, you find yourself ritually stabbing all
of the air bladders so that you can recycle the material.
So plastic sacrifice, the plastic sacrifice. So Lamb says that
(31:29):
the fill air products like this are very popular for
several reasons. First of all, economically, it's a cheap way
to package goods, both in terms of material and shipping weight,
and the machines that inflate the material uh and then
again on site such as that the shipping facility. Um,
you know that this these machines don't take up that
much room in the facility, so that's that's another huge advantage.
(31:53):
And as far as the environment goes, uh, it is
preferred over styrofoam, and the plastic is at least recyclable.
Does it get recycled very often? That's that's part of
the problem. So like in my house when we do it,
first of all, I have to ritually sacrifice all of
the air bladders, which takes a little time, but okay,
I do it. And then once you get them sacrificed,
(32:13):
you can't put them in with your or at least
we can't put them in with their normal curb side recycling. Instead,
we have to put in a separate container, and then
I have to take that container periodically to the trunk
of my car. And then once my trunk of once
the trunk of my car is completely filled with plastic bags,
then I remind myself, oh, I need to go to
the grocery store and go to their their area where
(32:36):
they will take plastic bags for recycling. And so yeah,
that's that's a that's a big thing, right, It's not
as easy to recycle it. A lot of people are
probably just throwing these in the garbage, or they're throwing
them maybe into their curbside recycling, which of course is
just gonna end up in the carbage that way as well. Um,
and on top of that, the average person is just
(32:56):
swamped with so much of it it becomes a personal assle,
plus a growing reminder of just how much plastic waste,
to say nothing of cardboard waste we're producing and demanding
all for the convenience of e commerce. Now, Lamb in
this article does point out that you know, we do
there are studies that back up the idea that you're
still depending on less energy in many cases when you're
(33:20):
when you're doing e commerce firstus going to a traditional
brick and mortar store because you know, ultimately the supply
chain exists. No matter what the shape of the supply chain.
I mean, you're still dealing with goods that are produced
somewhere that have to be shipped somewhere else and then
shipped to another location. So you know, when you start
doing the math on all of that, it becomes a
(33:41):
bit complicated. But that being said, just on a personal level, Yeah,
when when you start accumulating a lot of plastic, a
lot of cardboard, you begin to ask questions to megett
to wonder like is this sustainable? Is this? Is this?
Am I making good choices? And and are we making
good choices as a culture? Uh? If this is the
(34:02):
kind of waste we're producing, well, I know that what
I'm about to say is absolutely a secondary concern to
the just massive use of it, whether it's necessary or not.
But I will I noticed that, like we're saying, I
think a lot of times there are plastic filled air
products that are in packages I received that don't seem necessary.
You know, I'll get a package that's a cardboard box
(34:25):
that has inside it's something that just really doesn't seem
very fragile or breakable, and there's filled air plastic inside it. Well,
part of that is that there are standard box sizes,
and you know, whatever you have ordered generally have to
go in a standard sized box. And if there is
space in that box, that space needs to be filled,
they would prefer to fill that with more merchandise, obviously,
(34:46):
but if there's not not additional merchandise, that means there's
going to have to be additional padding via these inflatable
air bladders, because also they don't want it. Otherwise your
item is knocking around in there, which might be fine,
but it also ah might cause the object to be
damaged in some either legitimate or at least perceived manner,
at which point you would then return it, which of
(35:09):
course costs the the company money. So you know, it
becomes a situation where for them, the most reasonable thing
to do is to inflate some air bladders, shove them
in there, and then send you your comic book. Yeah,
maybe it's cheaper to fill a hundred air bladders than
it is to have one customer return a product. Yeah,
I probably. I mean, I don't you know, I don't
have the math on that in front of me, but
(35:30):
it's probably something along those lines. Yeah, I wonder if
sometimes people, Uh, I guess this is probably less the
case now because you've got the big, you know, single
single chamber bladder. But I wonder if there were times
when people used to order cheap products just because they
wanted to get the bubble wrap to pop it. Because
you can't go to the store and buy bubble wrap,
(35:50):
can you? Yeah you can't. Wait, you can. You can
go to can store and you can buy bubble wrap.
Imagine you can buy bubble wrap at some of the
larger stores as well. I'm not saying I've done this,
by the way, but I am shocked that you can
buy bubble rap at the store. I've never heard of this. Yeah,
go for it. It's out there. I mean you can
even I mean, I imagine you can go to crafting
stores to and get some because you have the colorful
(36:11):
bubble wrap as well. Yeah, you blew my mind. All right,
maybe we should take a break and then we come back.
We can talk briefly about bubble wrap psychology. Alright, We're
back this episode of invention is about bubble wrap. We've
discussed where it came from, its origins as a as
(36:34):
the future of wallpaper. Uh, and we've discussed you know,
our our current situation with bubble wrap and other types
of cushioning materials, and you know, given our craze for
e commerce. But now we're coming back to a more
you know, visceral relationship that we have with bubble wrap,
(36:54):
and that is the popping of bubble wrap and why
it is so satisfying, Why is almost everyone drawn to it.
That's a strange thing to have a like near universal
psychological drive for. Yeah, you don't encounter people, or at
least I have not encountered anyone who hates it. Have
you ever heard of anyone who like has a phobia
(37:15):
of bubble wrap? And maybe they are people with balloon phobias, Yeah,
the other are so I mean, there's probably someone, but
you don't hear about people hating bubble wrap. And really
the most negative thing that could be said about the
experience of bubble wrap is that you give a child
some bubble wrap and they can make some shockingly loud
and uh, you know, unexpected noises. They may startle you well,
(37:36):
I have read cases where police were called or say
a military base was shut down or something because sounds
of bubble wrap were popping were mistaken for gunfire, Like yeah,
where that could be the case. Yeah, because it is
a it is a like a popping you know, the
popping cracking sound can can be confusing. There's actually been
a little bit of research on the psychological effects of
(37:58):
popping bubble wrap, and doesn't look like we're going to
get anything super solid or earth shattering, but there have
been a couple of studies. So in nineteen two, a
researcher named Kathleen Dylan published in the journal Psychological Reports
a study called Popping sealed air capsules to Reduce Stress.
This was a small sample of thirty undergraduates participated in
(38:19):
this study to find out whether popping plastic air capsules
like bubble wrap would relieve stress. And study found that
after a session of popping bubbles quote, subjects reported feeling
significantly more energized, less tired, and more calm and according
to Dylan quote, some advantages to this technique over existing
ones include that this technique involves minimum ability essentially no
(38:40):
training or practice, and a little likelihood of paradoxical anxiety
effects that have been shown to a company meditative relaxation
techniques in some subjects of this, the comparative advantage of
therapeutic bubble popping versus just say traditional meditate meditation like
the idea being I guess that if you're trying to
meta take, your mind might be distracted by all the
(39:02):
things you're trying to get away from via meditation, and
therefore the experience could be frustrating and anxiety inducing, whereas
bubble rap is going to like pretty much nail it
every time. It's yeah, it's it's a sure thing. But
I would say the same thing might be true of
just like playing Tetris or something. Yeah, I mean it,
And I could be having covered Tetris. We did two
episodes of it for Stuff to Blow your Mind, and
(39:23):
we really went deep on the psychological effects of it. Uh,
you could see some sort of you know, there are
some obvious parallels. Well, I would say part of the
appeal of a good video game controller, like the A
B buttons on a game Boy that people used to
play Tetris on. Uh, A controller really needs to have
the right button feel and the right kind of button
(39:45):
feel is kind of similar to the feeling of a
sealed air capsule on bubble wrap. It's a good point.
But while I've seen quite a few articles referenced this
study by Dylan in ninety two, I've seen fewer reference
this one from nineteen by Taylor person or Bollock called
could Popping air capsules affect State anxiety and Psychological Reports?
(40:05):
They looked into whether bubble popping has an effect on
test subjects on their level of state anxiety, and the subjects,
again were university students, and the test group popped air
capsules for five minutes. Control group did nothing. Afterwards, the
test group actually showed higher levels of anxiety than the
control group, which was the opposite of the expected effect.
Uh So, I would not try to conclude anything with
(40:28):
high confidence about the psychological effects of bubble popping from
just these two studies, But just the fact that the
studies exist, I think demonstrates that something people have the
intuition that something's going on here, there was something psychologically
significant about the bubble popping activity and why people are
so drawn to it. I don't have any strong evidence
to support this. This is just a sort of hunch
(40:50):
of mine, But I have a hunch that the bubble
popping drive might be rooted in an instinct for grooming
behaviors like you know, picking lice and other bugs, the
kind of like pimple popping, the kind of like small
intense finger you know, fingertip pressure application, kinds of things
(41:11):
that would come along with social grooming behaviors and primates.
This is a great point. Yeah, I've I've thought about
this fair amount with in regards to two pimples and boils,
because if you look around on YouTube, and I suggest
you do, you'll find that there are quite a few
videos of people, um, you know, grooming themselves. I think
there's even like a reality show that came out of this,
(41:33):
like pimple Popper Empty or something like that, Dr pimple
Popper or some boy. I have not watched it, but
I know that it exists. But all this like tends
to show that, like it or not, we have this
fascination with the popping of of of of boils and
pimples and and and and we all know that you're
you're not supposed to really do that. You know, we're
(41:54):
not supposed to just go and start squeezing every odd
mark on our face, or you know, if we get
to boil, you know, or not so much boil, but
say a blister. You're not supposed to mess with it
like that, um, you know, for a variety of reasons.
And yet we have this impulse to do so. And
I wonder if it is tied in with this, um,
this desire for personal grooming, but even social grooming. I
(42:18):
mean I have I have heard, you know, anecdotal reports
of in say locker room environments where they'll be like
a communal experience of dealing with someone's pimples, like like
back or something. Yeah. Uh, this is what comes of
following um reports of of the pro wrestling world. But
(42:40):
but in another area that I was thinking about this too,
is uh, is when it comes to another stress relief device,
that being um, some sort of a squeezeable object. Like
right now, I tend to have a squeezable object, uh,
stress relief squeezy in my hand when we're recording. Not
(43:00):
so much that, you know, because I'm like rapped with
anxiety during recording session, but because like my hands need
to be doing something and if I'm not squeezing this ball,
then I'm going to be messing around with my pin
and dropping in and making a noise. While if I
dropped this, it makes makes basically no sound. But I
want fidgeting with fingers thing in general. Yeah, yeah, but
(43:21):
it but it makes me wonder if this too has
like some root in our experience of the flesh, you know,
like the it is soothing to to squeeze this fleshy
ball because it is like squeezing flesh. That's that's as
far as I've come. I actually looked into I tried
to find some studies on this a while back, thinking
(43:42):
we could do an episode of one of our shows
on squeeze balls, and I really couldn't. I found some
stuff that was specialized towards um, uh, you know, the
treatment of certain certain conditions, but nothing like general about
like the human experience of needing to uh you know,
to manipulate a fleshy ball in your hand. Well, I mean,
(44:02):
another thing I would say is that the tradition of
things like fidget spinners is not new. All kinds of
cultures have small handheld objects that are carried as carried
or or you know, just like messed around with during
rituals or even when you're not doing anything else, maybe
you just walk around with little stones in your hands.
(44:23):
That this is not a culturally uncommon thing. What are
these things for? What is the rosary for? Where does
that come from? Well, part of it is you said,
what are these four? Think of the hands, what are
these hands for? Like you look at human evolution and
and the reason we have this shape here that we have,
the reason we have this this ultimately like less than
(44:43):
healthy posture of standing upright is so that we could
use these hands for things. And then you enter a
modern life experience of not having things to do with
your hands like that. It's it's no wonder that that
would be a little perplexing that you would need to
have something in your fingers because we just went through
this tremendous evolutionary process to be able to use these
(45:06):
hands while we're doing other things. Yeah, within our evolutionary
history is standing there not using your hands for anything?
Is that kind of like standing on one foot? It's
just naturally kind of puts you off balance a little bit. Yeah,
you're really insulting the gods, right, or at least insulting
the evolutionary process if you're not using your hands for
something at all times, at least talk with him, at
(45:27):
least make wild gestures. At least make yourself crazy gloves
with fidget spinners at each fingertip. Tin Spinners. That's my
new band, Tin Spinners. Okay, I could see that working.
I really is. This is one area where I really
wish we had some more solid science on this. I
couldn't you know, I couldn't find anything else really on
the bubble popping drive. And maybe there's some studies out
(45:48):
there that I wasn't able to locate. If so, if
you're you know, experienced in this area, please contact us
with these. I would like some something with more meat
on it. Well, maybe when we do an an Invention
episode on the Blackhead Remover, then we can like the
black Head Gun, then we can we can get into
this more. Okay, I don't know if I want to
find out what that is. My understanding, it's like a
(46:10):
little device for like sucking um um, you know, the
like the darkened you know, material out of your pores. Amazing. Yeah, okay,
that's gotta be it for just a Simpsons joke about it, right?
I mean where they I don't know. I think Aunt
Selma has one, Okay, we're done. That's the end, all right. Well,
if you would like to listen to other episodes of Invention,
(46:31):
you can find them at invention pod dot com. That
is our home page. Of course, you can find the
show just about anywhere else. There's a whole, you know,
jungle of of podcast aggregators and websites, and you know,
if you use those, great, have fun with them. But
if they have you have the opportunity to subscribe to
our show, do that. That really helps us out. And
(46:53):
if you have the ability to leave us some stars
a nice review, whatever the model happens to be, do
that because that also helps to stat as well. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producers, Maya Cole
and Seth Nicholas Johnson. If if you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or
just to say hi, you can email us at contact
(47:15):
at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio is
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey
you welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and
I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I've got a question for you.
In what way are humans most like cats? Oh? I
don't know, Joe, in what way are humans most like cats? Well,
(00:23):
I'll answer the riddle myself then, since you thought it
was a joke, No, it's not a joke. No, it's
that both actually love packaging material of like gifts and
packages more than what's inside it. Because with the cats,
you know, like if you ever had a cat on
Christmas Day when presents are being open, of course you have. Uh.
I don't know if this is your experience and my experience,
(00:44):
they always want to get in the wrapping paper and
go to war with But with us humans, it's not
the wrapping paper. It's that darn bubble wrap. That stuff
is so intoxicating, the tactile pleasure of it, the gentle
popping sounds. It's like it's a drug from another universe. Well, um,
(01:05):
first of all, on on the cat issue, yes, I
can definitely testify that cats love packaging material. Uh, they
also really love or at least. My cat really loves
uh instruction manuals for the assembly of furniture, um like
Ikea manuals and kind of like Ikea manual or like
a Lego instruction book. When you start, when you pull
(01:26):
everything out of the box, that's right where she goes.
If you have the most comfortable couch in the world,
and then there is an Ikea instruction manual somewhere on
that couch, it's the instruction manual that she will lay on. Well,
I wonder if that's part of the larger trend of
cats always wanting to be between you and what you're doing,
and how they don't want your attention until you're really
(01:47):
trying to focus on something else and then they need
to get on top of that thing and in your
face possibly. And of course they love boxes and all
I understand because they are you know that they're they're
both predator and prey and uh and so they you know,
they want little places to hide out in to hide
from predators, but also you know, places of ambush for
the things that they would be hunting. Do you have
(02:09):
this memory when you were a little kid of like
the early early years of playing with bubble wrap and
just the intense fixation with popping every single bubble on
the sheet. Yeah. I mean I don't remember necessarily like
the feeling like I had to pop every bubble, but
I remember like this vague sense of almost disappointment at
(02:30):
having completely popped all of the bubbles and there being
something like fresh and exciting about a complete unpopped sheet
of bubble wrap. So yeah, I have some fond memories
of it. And as you know, as as a former child,
but also as the parent of a current child, especially
when he was younger, you know, we would we get
some bubble wrap. You give him some bubble wrap and
(02:51):
just just tell him here and go for it, and
he would have fun popping it. Um. It's better than
any twenty toy, It's yeah, yeah, Core. As as we'll discuss,
we see less full on bubble wrap these days, we
see in another type of of packing material that is
plastic inflated with air. We still get a decent amount
(03:14):
of bubble wrap here in the office because we often
get books delivered to us in the office in those
bubble wrap lined envelopes. Oh yeah, I guess we do, um,
which is always kind of silly because I don't, especially
if it's a you know, a review copy book. He
broke my book, and I don't. I don't mind if
it gets beat up a little bit. I mean, especially
since outside of work, when I order a book for myself,
(03:35):
I always order like the whatever the cheapest used copy is,
so you know, I get something in that has like
a weird odor to it and coffee stains. I love
And yeah, I love it when when a book has
been you know, the various package of passages that are
underlined and highlighted and little notes at it in summaries. Um. Yeah,
so I really don't care if it is you know,
(03:55):
if it is you know, completely protected from the you know,
the physical dangers of transit. But but yeah, we still
so we still get a lot of of bubble wrap
like material. In fact, we get so much that it
can be a little you know, overbearing at times. Um,
I feel like once a week I have I'm like
(04:16):
a you know, an executioner in my house going around
to the various inflatable bits and just stabbing them all
to get the air out so I can stuff the
plastic in the and the recycling and then a similar
case with freezer bags for for food that is shipped,
you know, having to to gut those and get all
of the the the the the unfrozen material out of
(04:38):
there so I can stuff those plastic bags into the recycling.
I totally know what you're saying. My childhood fascination with
and love of bubble wrap has in many ways been
replaced by an adult guilt complex about packaging materials. I
feel like, oh, this probably isn't good for the planet.
I've gotten too much stuff shipped to my house and
(04:58):
and I don't know what to do about it. Now
it's here, I guess I just gotta pop this and
try to recycle it if I can. Yeah, So, on
today's episode, as as you can can tell, we're going
to discuss bubble wrap. And before you turn off and
say like, I don't you know that sounds dreary, No, No,
it actually has a surprising origin story which we'll get into,
and we'll discuss what came before bubble wrap, and and
(05:19):
where we've gone, where we're going post bubble wrap, and
what that sort of future holds for us. All right, well,
maybe we should go straight to the origin story. Yeah,
and this is a more recent invention. So this is
not going to be one where you know the the
inventors are lost to the myths of prehistory. No we
know their names. So the story of bubble wrap begins
(05:40):
in the nineteen fifties with a pair of business partners.
Now these were an American inventor named Alfred W. Fielding
and a Swiss chemist named Mark Chavon. Now, Fielding and
Chevon were playing around with an idea for an innovation
in interior decorating, not in packaging material, not in childhood entertainment,
(06:03):
but in interior decor. They wanted to explore new frontiers
in wall paper. Now, wallpaper has gone in and out
of style over the course of the twentieth century, and
actually has gone in and out of style. I guess
before then is it in right now? I feel like
it's a little bit and I I didn't know. I
feel like these days, the modern sensibility, it tends to
(06:23):
be more sort of like solid painted muter color walls.
But I don't know, maybe it's coming back. I don't
know that much about interior design. I feel like I
I've been encountering it more like when when I go to, say,
like a new restaurant or something you know where there's
clearly been a lot of recent energy put into the decor.
I will sometimes find wallpaper and I'll think, oh, my goodness,
(06:44):
this is this is a sign of things to come.
I don't know, well, it used to be more of
a sign of luxury and interior decorating, but then it
became cheaper and more popular in the twentieth century, appearing
in more and more homes. I don't know if it's
coming back, and if it is coming back, I wonder
what that says. But anyway, in nineteen fifty seven, these
two guys Fielding and Chavan, we're trying to see if
(07:08):
they could make a new kind of weird artsy three
D textured wallpaper out of sheets of plastic layered over
paper backing, and so modern accounts of their efforts, including
an article I was reading by David Kindy and smith
Sony in about this invention, but a bunch of other things,
they all identify the beat generation as the target market
(07:31):
of this wallpaper. And I don't know if that goes
back to something that Fielding and Chavan themselves said at
some point, but it's gets repeated a lot. I'm trying
to exact imagine exactly what that means from like a
mass market consumer style point of view. Obviously they weren't
just trying to sell this to Alan Ginsberg and his friends,
because when you think Alan Ginsberg, you think can bubble
(07:51):
at well, I mean maybe maybe, because so I would say,
for some reason, we today tend to think of the
nineteen fifties as an extremely square time in the history
of like American arts and culture. But in reality, it
seems to me like it was exactly the opposite. Mid
century architecture and design, like the late forties through the
(08:12):
early sixties really seems to me to be absolutely crammed
with bizarre experimental styles that would be far too weird
for most new businesses or homeowners today. Uh. And so
that that's sort of the landscape imagining, Like I'm wondering
if this experimental textured wallpaper might have fit in with
elements of the mid century futurist architectural style known as googy,
(08:36):
which if you're trying to picture that, think like classic
architecture and designs in Las Vegas that you can still
see on some of their signs right right the the
the famous Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign is a
prime example of googy. And by the way, googie is
spelled g o O g i e. A word that
pretty much any search engine will try to insist does
(08:58):
not exist. They're like main Google right right now, I
mean googie. Uh and this is googie. So yeah, this
is probably the most readily available example of googy. That's
just going to be in your mind right now. If
you play video games. There's a bunch of googie design
that shows up in the Fallout game because they're going
for that nineteen fifties retro futurist style. There there are
(09:20):
other sort of names for related or overlapping mid century styles,
like mid century Modern, which is I think broader than googie,
or what is sometimes apparently now called ray gun Gothic.
I think that's a coinage by William Gibson. Interesting. Uh, yeah,
I think it is important to This is actually something
that I always have to continually remind myself that the
(09:41):
creative minds of the nineteen fifties, the nineteen forties and
and other decades as well, for the most part, we're
just as as weird and as inventive, if not more so,
than anybody working today. Uh, you know, some of my
favorite artists that I've discovered it, such as Irving nor
It was you know, surrealist, dark surrealist painter, and he
(10:05):
was active, he would have been active at this time
in the nineteen fifties. And you look at his work
now and it looks it's it's difficult, it's uh, you know,
it's it's it's weird and dark and uh and and
and you know, undercutting in a way that you might
not expect from the nineteen fifties if you're just picturing,
like you know, the sort of the atomic family scenario,
(10:25):
the atomic family, the nuclear family family, it's the same thing. Yeah,
you made me think of fallouts. I'm thinking about you know,
the idea more about atomics, I guess. But but also
like there's there are all these other strange styles that
are flourishing at the period, like like the tiki aesthetic. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
this definitely lines up with the same era. So for
(10:47):
those of you are not aware, mid century tiki was
a post War War two aesthetic fad that most memorably
gave us tiki drinks, but also in an entire aesthetic
vibe that's firmly rooted in the cultural appropriation of Polynesian culture,
they drinks themselves. However, as tiki drink master Beach Bumbari
points out in his excellent book Portions of the Caribbean, Uh,
(11:08):
these drinks are firmly products of the Caribbean and Caribbean products,
particularly rum, while the design is assembled from Pilford bits
of Polynesian aesthetics. Now, now, I'm a big fan of
tiki drinks myself. I think they're fun to make, fun
to drink and share. And then the history of of
each individual cocktail tends to be interesting with its sort
of you know, they're they're they're the stories of like
(11:30):
feuding bartenders in the fifties and sixties, etcetera. Um. But
just as the products that make up a tiki drink
are problematic in their roots in Western exploitation of the Caribbean,
so too is the style rooted in the exploitation of
Polynesian people's. So uh, you know, I'm not trying to
ruin tiki for anyone, but I'm just saying imbibe with
(11:51):
a shot of self reflection. And by the way, I'd
love to actually cover tiki and more detail on another episode.
Perhaps we could do an episode on invention of the
my tai. Really yeah, it has an interesting history, Okay,
trade secret swarring, tiki bartenders. Uh yeah, there's a whole
world there. Uh. And of course again Beech Bumbari is
(12:13):
a wonderful authority on all of these, highly recommend his books. Interesting, Well,
maybe we could come back. But so thinking about wallpapers specifically,
I mean connecting it back to the to the teaky aesthetic.
I was looking at a blog post by writer named
Katherine Brooks that was collecting wallpapers throughout history, and she
had a couple of examples of wallpapers selected from the
(12:34):
nineteen fifties, and they are very strange. One has this
complex design with kind of green and black tropical garden motif.
It seems to be evoking sort of like a like
a tiki a fascination. It's got palm trees and stuff.
But then another one of these wallpapers is just one
that shows pine spriggs and it's apparently embossed. It has
some kind of three D texture. So maybe three D
(12:57):
textured wallpapers were already sort of a thing in the
nineteen fifties. But to come back to our inventors Fielding
and Chivon, they were working out of a garage in Hawthorne,
New Jersey, in nineteen fifty seven to come up specifically
with a heat based ceiling process to press together two
layers of plastic shower curtain with paper backing, and unfortunately,
(13:21):
the final product they came up with did not have
the aesthetic properties they were looking for in a wallpaper.
The hot lamination of the flexible plastic ended up trapping
air bubbles between the layers, which doesn't sound like a
great texture for wallpaper. Or maybe it does. I don't
know exactly what it was they were trying to do,
but the popable walls sounds bad. Well, I mean, it's
(13:43):
not great, but it's not horrifying. And it does make
me think of the walls and Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
You know where you had the flavored illustrations on the wallpaper.
I don't remember this part. You have flavored walls. It
was like lickable walls. Nice. This what the snores berries
tastes like Snorm's berries or whatever. Um, so you canberriesberries,
(14:05):
So you can imagine like snawsberry bubble wrap walls where
you could go up and you pop this, uh this
this pimple on the wall and in it emits this
uh this the smell, this odor, if not this taste
of whatever, you know, the you know, the suite happens
to be. Oh okay. So it's like perfume sample walls.
It's like popable or scratch off kind of mechanics, but
(14:28):
for your house. No, we're not saying that's what Fielding
and Chavon had in mind. I don't know exactly what
they were thinking, but they wanted to create this beat wallpaper,
and they did get patents for their process, but the
wallpaper did not really catch on. And Howard Fielding, the
son of Alfred Fielding, was a young kid when his
father brought home a sample of one. At some point
(14:52):
they had this invention that was the layers of plastic
with bubbles in it. And speaking to David Kindy of
Smithsonian Magazine, how Ward Fielding recalls this sort of psycho
tactle tractor beam allure of the plastic bubbles when he
first saw them. He says, I remember looking at the
stuff and my instinct was to squeeze it. I say,
(15:12):
I'm the first person to pop bubble wrap, but I'm
not sure that's true. The adults in my father's firm
likely did so for quality assurance, but I was probably
the first kid. They were really fun to pop. The
bubbles were a lot bigger than so they made a
loud noise. And I think it's always interesting when the
extent to which the people associated with a product or
(15:35):
a company actually talk about or promote it's sort of
off label use. Like this whole thing about the people
who make Q tips. They probably know that people are
sticking those in their ears all the time, but they
don't talk about that because you're not supposed to do that.
You're requested not to stick them in your ears. But
who actually thinks that's not going on? I mean no,
(15:57):
I mean they have other uses to be sure, you know,
it can be used makeup and um, and I use
them sometimes when I'm working on painting miniatures and all.
But that kind of code of silence is not going
on with bubble wrap. In fact, I noticed that whenever
their interviews with people involved with the company that still
makes bubble wrap, or you know, the Sealed Air Corporation,
(16:17):
which we'll get to in a minute, or people who
were involved in the invention of bubble wrap always talk
about the popping. They're like, it's like that. They admit
I like to pop the bubbles too. I don't know
what that is. It seems to be almost part of
their marketing. Yeah, I mean, in a way, this is
not the reasoning, but you can know, you could know.
(16:39):
You could look at it like, well, you're when you
pop all the bubbles and a piece of bubble wrap,
you render it useless, thus requiring the the purchase of
additional bubble wrapping for any packaging you're going to do. Okay, yeah, yeah,
make up make a product that the children will destroy. Well,
maybe we should take a break and then we come back.
(17:00):
We can explore what happened with this failed wallpaper with
the bubbles in it. Alright, we're back. We've been discussing
the history of wallpaper or what initially comes right before
wallpaper in this quest to create this ideal beat generation
(17:20):
wallpaper that has air bubbles in it? What comes before wallpaper?
Or did you mean bubble wrap comes before bubble rap? Okay,
And I guess in a sense it would have been
like what would have been what it would have come after?
Like this is gonna be the next evolutionary step for wallpaper. Okay, yeah,
and instead it becomes the birth of something new. This
was gonna be the wallpaper you put on the side
walls of your like moon Igloe or whatever. But no,
(17:44):
it didn't work out that. It was not successful. It
didn't prove to be a popular product. I don't know
if they ever sold any of it. So the lamination
process was not successful at making a desirable wallpaper. But
they did get patents for their process, and they tried
to see if their system of making bubbly sealed layers
of plastic could be used for other stuff. Well, my
mind instantly turns to fashion. Didn't Barbarella where some one
(18:07):
of her outfits they didn't have like air bubbles in it.
Oh she might have I don't quite remember, but that
would seem to be Yeah, that would make sense. I
know there was at least I kept reading references to
There was one Playboy cover at some point that had
an actress or model dressed in bubble wrap. Uh. So
clearly there's some kind of alternative fashion uses for it.
(18:29):
But one thing that they tried to do when they
were marketing it was as insulation. They tried to so
Fielding and Chavon tried to market it as insulation material
for greenhouses. This failed to attract much interest, apparently just
wasn't great at insulating um. But Fielding and Chavon did
not give up in trying to find a use for
their plastic product. And I think it's interesting that here's
(18:51):
an example of the kind of like supply side drive
in in find in innovation, right where they're like, we've
got this process, we've got this invention, but we don't
know what it does yet. It's the opposite of the
idea that necessity is the mother of invention, right. Um,
So they're like, we know how to make this stuff,
but we don't know if it can do anything useful,
and they're trying to find a use for it. So
(19:13):
they didn't give up, and they continued making business moves
to support the development of this product in the in
the following years. So in nineteen sixty they founded a
company called the Sealed Air Corporation, which still exists. And
it was this year, in nineteen sixty and that Mark
Chavon had his breakthrough insight about a new use for
the textured wallpaper. And this is as told in a
(19:34):
two thousand ten New York Times City Room piece by
James Barron. Apparently, Chavon was on a small propeller plane
flying from Ohio to New York, New Jersey, and the
story is that Chavon was watching out the window as
the plane was coming in toward New Jersey and he
saw clouds and in that moment, in his mind, the
clouds seemed to be cushioning the planes controlled descent through
(19:57):
the atmosphere. It was a soft cushion and of gas.
And according to a manager with the Sealed Air Corporation
named Ron Schellenberger, this was how Chivan realized that bubbly
plastic could be useful for its cushioning properties during the
shipping of products. The lift under the airplane was quote
like bouncing across the bubbles. Okay, I'll allow it. I'm
(20:19):
always a little suspicious of idea origin, story depend upon,
you know, these Eureka moments of observation. Not to say
it doesn't happen, but sometimes it is used to I think,
to just add an artificial sense of myth and mystery. Sure, well,
as I said, this is the story they tell. It's
hard to know if that was really what was going
(20:39):
through his mind. Rather than uh, you know, somebody sitting
in the seat next to him was like, hey, you
should use that bubble wrap to ship products. So they
branded their air filled plastic sheeting as bubble wrap, which
is still a company trademark today. But it's one of
those things like clean X for tissue paper, popsicle for
quiescently frozen treats. I think it's one of those brand
(21:00):
terms that's just sort of become a worldwide generic term
against its will. Technically, some of the stuff we call
bubble wrap is air cushioned packaging material made by other companies.
I was reading a two thousand six article in Forbes
by Monty Burke that reported that counterfeit bubble wrap I guess,
being sold under the trade name but allegedly manufactured in China,
(21:20):
had been found in a home depot in California. Counterfeit
bubble wrap. Like, why would you go to the trouble?
This doesn't bring to mind? You know, we were joking
earlier about pitching a horror story, a horror of franchise
about about bubble wrap, that this is the angle you
could take. Illicit bubble wrap that was created by another
manufacturer and the bubbles, I don't know, contain some sort
(21:43):
of you know, terrible gas that drives people crazy or something.
It's bubble wrap from the todash darkness. There you go.
Is he basically rights itself. So how did it go
from failed kitchen wallpaper and failed insulation two cushioning material
for packaging even after they had this idea. Well, according
to company history, this was mostly due to a relationship
(22:04):
with a single very important customer that Sealed Air acquired
in the early nineteen sixties, and that was IBM. So
in nineteen fifty nine, IBM introduced an extremely successful line
of early computers used by businesses and institutions around the world.
This was the IBM four hundred series, the first major
(22:24):
model uh in which was the fourteen oh one. It
was a variable word length decimal computer that some sources
now refer to as like the Model T of computers
because of its early widespread use, mostly for data processing
by businesses. Obviously, this was before the home computer era,
and the story goes that a marketer named Frederick W.
Bowers saw potential here and he pitched IBM on the
(22:48):
advantages of bubble wrap as a cushioned packing material. For
the fragile, expensive computers and computer parts. It was now
shipping to businesses and institutions around the world, and the
pitch worked. IBM became bubble Wraps first major client, and
then over the following year's bubble Wrap became a standard
cushioning material to protect delicate stuff in transit, and the
(23:08):
company flourished. So we often like to ask on the
show what came before? This is one where it's not
a super complicated at answer. Before bubble Wrap, the most
commonly used packing material to cushion stuff was stuff like
watted up newspaper. This had the advantage, of course, of
being cheap or essentially free if you use the newspapers
people through away, but it came with multiple disadvantages. First
(23:30):
of all, it was not actually very good at cushioning stuff,
especially you know, a newspaper can be compressed, so if
you're shipping something that's both heavy and delicate, it can
kind of compress the newspaper until it's sort of flattened it.
And now it doesn't provide much cushioning, right, I mean,
when you and I've tried to cushion things with newspapers
before and and it really becomes this whole task of
(23:52):
like I can't you know, obviously, just can't throw a
newspaper in there. You have to take each individual page
and you have to watch it up, but don't watch
it up too much and find a like optimal level
of wadding where it's nice and springy, and keep doing that,
uh you know, for you know, however long it takes.
You know, obviously, if you if you spend the money
on some sort of a manufactured packaging material, you can
(24:13):
certainly cut down on your time. Especially even instead of
packaging like the odd box of valuables for your you know,
once in a decade moved instead your packaging objects every
day some sort of product to send out to consumers.
And another big problem with wadded up newspaper is that
it ends up smeering ink everywhere. I hadn't thought about that.
(24:33):
So one of the huge advantages though, of newspaper packaging
is um I don't know if you've experienced this, but
if you order something, particularly if you order something like
via e pay, sometimes you get uh you know, foreign
newspapers in there, and that that can become like a
fun bonus. I a few years back, I ordered some
miniatures to paint, and they came from somewhere in Russia,
(24:54):
so it was packaged. The little figurines were were cushioned
by these wadded up newspapers and when you, uh, you
unlatted them, you saw the you know, the cyrillic on
the page. It was in it for a fun experience. Interesting, Yeah,
bubble wrap, it's you know, I guess you could pop
it and be like, mrs where is this air from
its air from New Jersey, But it's just not the same. Uh. Well.
(25:15):
So ultimately, air filled plastic did prove superior resisting compression
and protecting fragile objects from impacts, and over the years,
the Sealed Air Corporation has done some interesting like marketing
stunts to show off the superior protective capabilities of bubble
wrap over competing materials. One example is that this was
reported in that Forbes piece I was talking about. In
(25:37):
the year two thousand, they entered this big public pumpkin
dropping contest in Iowa, and I'm like, what is that.
I guess that the goal is to keep a falling
pumpkin from being smashed when it hits the ground. I
couldn't find a lot on this but it looks like
they're engineering departments at some universities that have similar contests
where Yeah, and and high schools as well. Sometimes with
eggs are popular. Yeah, throwing some eggs or throwing melons
(26:00):
off the roof, and it becomes a science project to
figure out the best way to cush in it and
protect it from injury, to like make a protective container
or protective landing zone or something with within certain design constraints. Yeah,
it's a pretty great engineering project for his kids because
it involves like doing something totally against the rules, throwing
stuff off the roof of the school, with like just
(26:22):
a fun engineering challenge. How do you keep the inevitable
from happening? Uh? Yeah, so I'm all in favor of it. Well,
the story here is that the engineers from Sealed there
did a demonstration where they dropped an eight hundred and
fifteen pound pumpkin named gord Zilla from my height of
thirty five feet, cushioned only by bubble wrap. CEO William
Hickey told Forbes quote the pumpkins survived the drop. The
(26:44):
problem was that it bounced and then there's no more information.
I'm like, what is that? What is that problem? Then
did it bounce and land on somebody's card and bounce
and turn it? And did it come to life? I
know I was looking around too, because I mean, just
the mention of gord Zilla, I had to to find
more and I wasn't able to find anything. Now, granted,
this is like nearly two decades ago, and I know
(27:06):
that it maybe the videotaping of everything wasn't quite as ubiquitous,
but it seems like if they were going to the
trouble to drop fifteen pound Gordzilla off of a roof,
they would have filmed it, and that that footage would
be probably displayed somewhere. Unless indeed, something really terrible happened,
like it killed somebody or came to life. Well, I'm
(27:29):
gonna feel extremely betrayed if I find out that former
Sealed Air CEO William Hikey is making up details of
the story. I demand proof of Gordzilla. That's what That's
what I am demanding. Are they a publicly traded company.
I think they are. Yeah. I think that the stockholders
should demand proof Gordzilla. The documents. Okay, so the company
(27:52):
still makes bubble wrap. The bubble wrap represents only a
small part of its revenue. Now I've seen estimates maybe
around ten or fift something like that. That's what i've
They've transitioned largely to food packaging. Actually, they own the
Cryovac brand, so there's a lot of food packaging. But
there have been interesting developments. It's not just like, Okay,
we figured out how to make bubble wrap and then
they just coasted on that forever. One example of developments
(28:14):
in the history of bubble wrap is, for example, the
former CEO of Sealed Air, William Hicky we just mentioned.
He told Forbes in two thousand six that Alfred W.
Fielding always wanted to be able to create a way
to put air into the bubble when you needed it
instead of when it was manufactured, right, so that like
(28:35):
you could ship out flat bubble wrap and then it
could be inflated on site. Now, why would that be important?
We'll think about like volume and density and shipping. Imagine
you run a factory that ships out delicate products and
you need to use air cushioning material to pack it.
How do you get the material? Well, if it's getting
shipped to you in trucks or something, the space in
the truck is going to be mostly taken up by
(28:56):
bubbles of air. It's not very efficient. But by the
twenty one century, uh Fielding's dream of on site inflatable
bubble wrap was actually achieved. The Sealed Air Corporation originally
called this stuff new air I b uh, and it
is apparently much more space saving than the original. According
to that two thousand six article, one truckload of the
(29:19):
inflatable bubble wrap is the same as forty truckloads of
the already inflated bubbles. Yeah, I mean it makes sense.
I've also seen this referred to as fill air products. Yeah.
But when you start thinking about this about like the
quantities and the efficiency, you do start to see the
downsides of all this packaging material. Right. There's a claim
(29:40):
in that two thousand six Forbes article that the company
UH that they insisted that at the time they produced
enough bubble wrap every year to circle the Earth at
its equator ten times. They do not say it what width,
though that seems important information. And then is it did
the big bubble, the fat bubble or the little teeny bubble?
I don't know. I mean, I guess it's probably whatever
(30:00):
their most common width of material is. But no matter
what with it is that's a lot of plastic. Yeah,
it is a lot of plastic. And then that that
continues to be one of them the major concerns I
guess with with with platt with bubble wrap, but also
these other like fill air products. One of the articles
I was looking at was an article that was published
(30:23):
in the Atlantic by Boree Lamb that's l a M.
Titled about those air cushions and Amazon packages everywhere and
this is from and In this article, Lamb discusses how
the colossal growth of e commerce has indeed benefited the
packing material industry as often it was a five point
six billion dollar industry and sealed air is the biggest
(30:46):
market shareholder. Uh and uh and at this time there
said she said that bubble wrap itself was only fifteen
percent of the business, with more of an emphasis being
placed on the fill air products. For instance, like you'll
find in Amazon packages, most of your Amazon packages that
you're receiving today, so like one big bubble in in
a piece of plastic. Well, or it's like it's or
(31:08):
it's kind of like it's like the paper towel roll
equivalent right where it's like each segment has clearly been inflated,
and its minimal plastic. Uh. This is the stuff that
after you order anything, you find yourself ritually stabbing all
of the air bladders so that you can recycle the material.
So plastic sacrifice, the plastic sacrifice. So Lamb says that
(31:29):
the fill air products like this are very popular for
several reasons. First of all, economically, it's a cheap way
to package goods, both in terms of material and shipping weight,
and the machines that inflate the material uh and then
again on site such as that the shipping facility. Um,
you know that this these machines don't take up that
much room in the facility, so that's that's another huge advantage.
(31:53):
And as far as the environment goes, uh, it is
preferred over styrofoam, and the plastic is at least recyclable.
Does it get recycled very often? That's that's part of
the problem. So like in my house when we do it,
first of all, I have to ritually sacrifice all of
the air bladders, which takes a little time, but okay,
I do it. And then once you get them sacrificed,
(32:13):
you can't put them in with your or at least
we can't put them in with their normal curb side recycling. Instead,
we have to put in a separate container, and then
I have to take that container periodically to the trunk
of my car. And then once my trunk of once
the trunk of my car is completely filled with plastic bags,
then I remind myself, oh, I need to go to
the grocery store and go to their their area where
(32:36):
they will take plastic bags for recycling. And so yeah,
that's that's a that's a big thing, right, It's not
as easy to recycle it. A lot of people are
probably just throwing these in the garbage, or they're throwing
them maybe into their curbside recycling, which of course is
just gonna end up in the carbage that way as well. Um,
and on top of that, the average person is just
(32:56):
swamped with so much of it it becomes a personal assle,
plus a growing reminder of just how much plastic waste,
to say nothing of cardboard waste we're producing and demanding
all for the convenience of e commerce. Now, Lamb in
this article does point out that you know, we do
there are studies that back up the idea that you're
still depending on less energy in many cases when you're
(33:20):
when you're doing e commerce firstus going to a traditional
brick and mortar store because you know, ultimately the supply
chain exists. No matter what the shape of the supply chain.
I mean, you're still dealing with goods that are produced
somewhere that have to be shipped somewhere else and then
shipped to another location. So you know, when you start
doing the math on all of that, it becomes a
(33:41):
bit complicated. But that being said, just on a personal level, Yeah,
when when you start accumulating a lot of plastic, a
lot of cardboard, you begin to ask questions to megett
to wonder like is this sustainable? Is this? Is this?
Am I making good choices? And and are we making
good choices as a culture? Uh? If this is the
(34:02):
kind of waste we're producing, well, I know that what
I'm about to say is absolutely a secondary concern to
the just massive use of it, whether it's necessary or not.
But I will I noticed that, like we're saying, I
think a lot of times there are plastic filled air
products that are in packages I received that don't seem necessary.
You know, I'll get a package that's a cardboard box
(34:25):
that has inside it's something that just really doesn't seem
very fragile or breakable, and there's filled air plastic inside it. Well,
part of that is that there are standard box sizes,
and you know, whatever you have ordered generally have to
go in a standard sized box. And if there is
space in that box, that space needs to be filled,
they would prefer to fill that with more merchandise, obviously,
(34:46):
but if there's not not additional merchandise, that means there's
going to have to be additional padding via these inflatable
air bladders, because also they don't want it. Otherwise your
item is knocking around in there, which might be fine,
but it also ah might cause the object to be
damaged in some either legitimate or at least perceived manner,
at which point you would then return it, which of
(35:09):
course costs the the company money. So you know, it
becomes a situation where for them, the most reasonable thing
to do is to inflate some air bladders, shove them
in there, and then send you your comic book. Yeah,
maybe it's cheaper to fill a hundred air bladders than
it is to have one customer return a product. Yeah,
I probably. I mean, I don't you know, I don't
have the math on that in front of me, but
(35:30):
it's probably something along those lines. Yeah, I wonder if
sometimes people, Uh, I guess this is probably less the
case now because you've got the big, you know, single
single chamber bladder. But I wonder if there were times
when people used to order cheap products just because they
wanted to get the bubble wrap to pop it. Because
you can't go to the store and buy bubble wrap,
(35:50):
can you? Yeah you can't. Wait, you can. You can
go to can store and you can buy bubble wrap.
Imagine you can buy bubble wrap at some of the
larger stores as well. I'm not saying I've done this,
by the way, but I am shocked that you can
buy bubble rap at the store. I've never heard of this. Yeah,
go for it. It's out there. I mean you can
even I mean, I imagine you can go to crafting
stores to and get some because you have the colorful
(36:11):
bubble wrap as well. Yeah, you blew my mind. All right,
maybe we should take a break and then we come back.
We can talk briefly about bubble wrap psychology. Alright, We're
back this episode of invention is about bubble wrap. We've
discussed where it came from, its origins as a as
(36:34):
the future of wallpaper. Uh, and we've discussed you know,
our our current situation with bubble wrap and other types
of cushioning materials, and you know, given our craze for
e commerce. But now we're coming back to a more
you know, visceral relationship that we have with bubble wrap,
(36:54):
and that is the popping of bubble wrap and why
it is so satisfying, Why is almost everyone drawn to it.
That's a strange thing to have a like near universal
psychological drive for. Yeah, you don't encounter people, or at
least I have not encountered anyone who hates it. Have
you ever heard of anyone who like has a phobia
(37:15):
of bubble wrap? And maybe they are people with balloon phobias, Yeah,
the other are so I mean, there's probably someone, but
you don't hear about people hating bubble wrap. And really
the most negative thing that could be said about the
experience of bubble wrap is that you give a child
some bubble wrap and they can make some shockingly loud
and uh, you know, unexpected noises. They may startle you well,
(37:36):
I have read cases where police were called or say
a military base was shut down or something because sounds
of bubble wrap were popping were mistaken for gunfire, Like yeah,
where that could be the case. Yeah, because it is
a it is a like a popping you know, the
popping cracking sound can can be confusing. There's actually been
a little bit of research on the psychological effects of
(37:58):
popping bubble wrap, and doesn't look like we're going to
get anything super solid or earth shattering, but there have
been a couple of studies. So in nineteen two, a
researcher named Kathleen Dylan published in the journal Psychological Reports
a study called Popping sealed air capsules to Reduce Stress.
This was a small sample of thirty undergraduates participated in
(38:19):
this study to find out whether popping plastic air capsules
like bubble wrap would relieve stress. And study found that
after a session of popping bubbles quote, subjects reported feeling
significantly more energized, less tired, and more calm and according
to Dylan quote, some advantages to this technique over existing
ones include that this technique involves minimum ability essentially no
(38:40):
training or practice, and a little likelihood of paradoxical anxiety
effects that have been shown to a company meditative relaxation
techniques in some subjects of this, the comparative advantage of
therapeutic bubble popping versus just say traditional meditate meditation like
the idea being I guess that if you're trying to
meta take, your mind might be distracted by all the
(39:02):
things you're trying to get away from via meditation, and
therefore the experience could be frustrating and anxiety inducing, whereas
bubble rap is going to like pretty much nail it
every time. It's yeah, it's it's a sure thing. But
I would say the same thing might be true of
just like playing Tetris or something. Yeah, I mean it,
And I could be having covered Tetris. We did two
episodes of it for Stuff to Blow your Mind, and
(39:23):
we really went deep on the psychological effects of it. Uh,
you could see some sort of you know, there are
some obvious parallels. Well, I would say part of the
appeal of a good video game controller, like the A
B buttons on a game Boy that people used to
play Tetris on. Uh, A controller really needs to have
the right button feel and the right kind of button
(39:45):
feel is kind of similar to the feeling of a
sealed air capsule on bubble wrap. It's a good point.
But while I've seen quite a few articles referenced this
study by Dylan in ninety two, I've seen fewer reference
this one from nineteen by Taylor person or Bollock called
could Popping air capsules affect State anxiety and Psychological Reports?
(40:05):
They looked into whether bubble popping has an effect on
test subjects on their level of state anxiety, and the subjects,
again were university students, and the test group popped air
capsules for five minutes. Control group did nothing. Afterwards, the
test group actually showed higher levels of anxiety than the
control group, which was the opposite of the expected effect.
Uh So, I would not try to conclude anything with
(40:28):
high confidence about the psychological effects of bubble popping from
just these two studies, But just the fact that the
studies exist, I think demonstrates that something people have the
intuition that something's going on here, there was something psychologically
significant about the bubble popping activity and why people are
so drawn to it. I don't have any strong evidence
to support this. This is just a sort of hunch
(40:50):
of mine, But I have a hunch that the bubble
popping drive might be rooted in an instinct for grooming
behaviors like you know, picking lice and other bugs, the
kind of like pimple popping, the kind of like small
intense finger you know, fingertip pressure application, kinds of things
(41:11):
that would come along with social grooming behaviors and primates.
This is a great point. Yeah, I've I've thought about
this fair amount with in regards to two pimples and boils,
because if you look around on YouTube, and I suggest
you do, you'll find that there are quite a few
videos of people, um, you know, grooming themselves. I think
there's even like a reality show that came out of this,
(41:33):
like pimple Popper Empty or something like that, Dr pimple
Popper or some boy. I have not watched it, but
I know that it exists. But all this like tends
to show that, like it or not, we have this
fascination with the popping of of of of boils and
pimples and and and and we all know that you're
you're not supposed to really do that. You know, we're
(41:54):
not supposed to just go and start squeezing every odd
mark on our face, or you know, if we get
to boil, you know, or not so much boil, but
say a blister. You're not supposed to mess with it
like that, um, you know, for a variety of reasons.
And yet we have this impulse to do so. And
I wonder if it is tied in with this, um,
this desire for personal grooming, but even social grooming. I
(42:18):
mean I have I have heard, you know, anecdotal reports
of in say locker room environments where they'll be like
a communal experience of dealing with someone's pimples, like like
back or something. Yeah. Uh, this is what comes of
following um reports of of the pro wrestling world. But
(42:40):
but in another area that I was thinking about this too,
is uh, is when it comes to another stress relief device,
that being um, some sort of a squeezeable object. Like
right now, I tend to have a squeezable object, uh,
stress relief squeezy in my hand when we're recording. Not
(43:00):
so much that, you know, because I'm like rapped with
anxiety during recording session, but because like my hands need
to be doing something and if I'm not squeezing this ball,
then I'm going to be messing around with my pin
and dropping in and making a noise. While if I
dropped this, it makes makes basically no sound. But I
want fidgeting with fingers thing in general. Yeah, yeah, but
(43:21):
it but it makes me wonder if this too has
like some root in our experience of the flesh, you know,
like the it is soothing to to squeeze this fleshy
ball because it is like squeezing flesh. That's that's as
far as I've come. I actually looked into I tried
to find some studies on this a while back, thinking
(43:42):
we could do an episode of one of our shows
on squeeze balls, and I really couldn't. I found some
stuff that was specialized towards um, uh, you know, the
treatment of certain certain conditions, but nothing like general about
like the human experience of needing to uh you know,
to manipulate a fleshy ball in your hand. Well, I mean,
(44:02):
another thing I would say is that the tradition of
things like fidget spinners is not new. All kinds of
cultures have small handheld objects that are carried as carried
or or you know, just like messed around with during
rituals or even when you're not doing anything else, maybe
you just walk around with little stones in your hands.
(44:23):
That this is not a culturally uncommon thing. What are
these things for? What is the rosary for? Where does
that come from? Well, part of it is you said,
what are these four? Think of the hands, what are
these hands for? Like you look at human evolution and
and the reason we have this shape here that we have,
the reason we have this this ultimately like less than
(44:43):
healthy posture of standing upright is so that we could
use these hands for things. And then you enter a
modern life experience of not having things to do with
your hands like that. It's it's no wonder that that
would be a little perplexing that you would need to
have something in your fingers because we just went through
this tremendous evolutionary process to be able to use these
(45:06):
hands while we're doing other things. Yeah, within our evolutionary
history is standing there not using your hands for anything?
Is that kind of like standing on one foot? It's
just naturally kind of puts you off balance a little bit. Yeah,
you're really insulting the gods, right, or at least insulting
the evolutionary process if you're not using your hands for
something at all times, at least talk with him, at
(45:27):
least make wild gestures. At least make yourself crazy gloves
with fidget spinners at each fingertip. Tin Spinners. That's my
new band, Tin Spinners. Okay, I could see that working.
I really is. This is one area where I really
wish we had some more solid science on this. I
couldn't you know, I couldn't find anything else really on
the bubble popping drive. And maybe there's some studies out
(45:48):
there that I wasn't able to locate. If so, if
you're you know, experienced in this area, please contact us
with these. I would like some something with more meat
on it. Well, maybe when we do an an Invention
episode on the Blackhead Remover, then we can like the
black Head Gun, then we can we can get into
this more. Okay, I don't know if I want to
find out what that is. My understanding, it's like a
(46:10):
little device for like sucking um um, you know, the
like the darkened you know, material out of your pores. Amazing. Yeah, okay,
that's gotta be it for just a Simpsons joke about it, right?
I mean where they I don't know. I think Aunt
Selma has one, Okay, we're done. That's the end, all right. Well,
if you would like to listen to other episodes of Invention,
(46:31):
you can find them at invention pod dot com. That
is our home page. Of course, you can find the
show just about anywhere else. There's a whole, you know,
jungle of of podcast aggregators and websites, and you know,
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(46:53):
if you have the ability to leave us some stars
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that because that also helps to stat as well. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producers, Maya Cole
and Seth Nicholas Johnson. If if you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or
just to say hi, you can email us at contact
(47:15):
at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of I
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Invention News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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