In 1957, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes created something that would change the shipping industry for good and make e-commerce stores like Amazon possible: Bubble Wrap. It has been used by companies and people around the world for packing and popping ever since. The trapped little air bubbles that make up a section of Bubble Wrap were in fact invented by chance. When the men fed two pieces of a plastic shower curtain through a heat-sealing machine, they were trying to create a type of wallpaper. They were naturally let down with the results, but they didn’t give up. They thought of more than 400 different uses for their soft, air-filled material, such as for use in greenhouse walls, but none brought them much success. Then, in 1960, IBM saw how useful Bubble Wrap could be in protecting its new, very expensive computers during shipping. A deal was made. By the mid-1960s, Fielding and Chavannes’s packing material had become a shipping essential, which today protects millions of packages a year from damage.