A BRIEF HISTORY OF PACKING MATERIALS
History of the Peanut
Let’s get one thing straight at the outset, packaging is a secondary use of peanuts. They were conceived on July 5, 1939 by a frustrated psychiatrist. Dr. Sig Kwaque was walking home, despondent, head down, when he spotted the remains of one of those black snake fireworks thingies (that’s a technical term). The little gray cells went wild. Plastic! He immediately called a friend that owned Plastics Inc. and VIOLA, he had little foam curlies(Tech term).. By using one or more of these little styrofoam doohickeys(TT) laid on a piece of black paper he had invented a 3 dimensional Rohrschact test! The S shaped one’s represented the id, the bowlies(TT), the ego. He added the colors as a stimulus. (Just look at one or more and see what you come up with! Tsk, Tsk, get your mind out of the gutter!) Reinvigorated, he invested his life savings, wrote articles in all the psychiatric journals, was ridiculed and went belly up. Meanwhile, his friend at Plastics Inc. was stuck with zillions of these styrofoam thingamajigs. Not wanting to lose any more money warehousing them, he sold them to a shrewd entrepreneur for, you got it, peanuts. The rest is history!
History of Bubble-wrap
What part of Bubble-wrap don’t you see? All you see is the plastic packaging, but there is also the bubble or more correctly, the bubblette. Bubblettes, or bubblewogs, are immature bubbles taken from their sanctuaries. Bubblettes have evolved to live in the chambers created when oil is pumped out of the earth. In this idyllic surrounding they absorb nutrients and mature into full grown bubbles and then seek a place to float upward to the earth’s surface and freedom. Famous places that the bubbles use are the paint pots in Yellowstone and the La Brea Tar Pits. Impatient groups known as bubble-gangs are what cause Old Faithful and volcanoes.
Imagine you are a little bubblette peacefully hangin’ out in your wispy underground cavern and suddenly- RAT-A-TAT-TAT! Oh no, it’s the robot jackhammers! Another bubble mine! You are suddenly sucked out of your home and spit onto a plastic sheet where, quivering like a bowl of jello, you are smothered by another plastic sheet from above. WHOOSH-in an instant you are encapsulated. It’s not pretty.
We are wasting a valuable resource. Think what the world would be like without bubbles. Flat Cokes. No Alka-seltzer. Bubbling brooks, nope. Bubbly personalities, history. A bubbleless Shakespere: rising orb, rising orb, toil and trouble, cauldron boil and cauldron fester? Doesn’t work much less rhyme.