By Bob Tita
Fame came and went quickly for West Scranton Intermediate
School.
Last May, more than 700 students, teachers and staff from the
Scranton, Pa., school sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the gym floor and
popped bubbles on Bubble Wrap packaging for two straight minutes,
setting a world record for the number of people popping.
Less than three weeks later, a school in Elk River, Minn., broke
West
Scranton's record with 942 poppers. Organizers rolled out sheets
of Bubble Wrap on the school parking lot and instructed
participants wearing grade-specific colored T-shirts to stomp on
bubbles in addition to snapping them with their fingers.
"When they were all lined up in the parking lot it was like a
jumping rainbow and the noise was tremendous," said Tricia Downey,
of the Twin Lakes Elementary School's parent teacher organization
who helped organize the event.
Alas, all glory is fleeting. Oral Roberts University broke Twin
Lakes' record in January, with 1,011 students, faculty, and
staff.
The nearly irresistible urge to burst Bubble Wrap from newly
arrived packages has morphed into one of the most hotly contested
mass-participation records certified by Guinness World Records.
Since the original record was established in 2013, it has been
broken seven times--all by schools, including one from the
Australian island of Tasmania.
"Bubble Wrap is universal," said Alex Angert, records manager in
New York for Guinness, who attributes the trend to the relative
simplicity of the task, and the ubiquity of the material. "You just
need people and a lot of Bubble Wrap."
The popping passion comes as Bubble Wrap's starring role as a
packing material has faded somewhat. The product was born in
Hawthorne, N.J., in the 1950s when engineers Alfred Fielding and
Marc Chavannes fused two plastic shower curtains with pockets of
air between, creating a textured pattern.
After pitching their invention unsuccessfully as wallpaper and
insulation, they settled on shipping wrap, founding Sealed Air
Corp. in 1960. They got their big break a few years later when
International Business Machines Corp. began using the product to
cushion computer equipment.
But as package shipping exploded in the past two decades,
alternatives have popped up. Sealed Air in the late 1990s developed
inflatable plastic air pillows for online retailers like Amazon.com
Inc. that take up less room in a warehouse than Bubble Wrap
rolls--but aren't as fun to burst. Bubble Wrap accounted for less
than 2% of Sealed Air's $7.8 billion in sales last year.
Bubble Wrap's non-packaging life has remained vibrant, however.
Designers use it to make jackets, hats, and wedding dresses. A
website, virtual-bubblewrap.com, lets users pop on their PCs with
taps of their mouse buttons.
YouTube videos abound showing Bubble Wrap exploits, including
one that earned Los Angeles comedy magician Eric Buss induction
last year into Sealed Air's Bubble Wrap Hall of Fame. Mr. Buss
attached a 12-inch wide roll of the stuff onto a homemade reel that
he bolted to the front of a BMX bike. The wrap spooled out under
the tires as he rode, creating a torrent of rapid-fire snaps.
The popping records started two years ago when Sealed Air teamed
up with a school in its birth city for Bubble Wrap Appreciation
Day, an annual event the company organizes. Hawthorne High School
established the record in January 2013 with 366 students
popping.
Challengers began surfacing about a year later. First a
University of Florida team topped Hawthorne. Bramley Church of
England Primary School, in Hampshire, U.K., grabbed the record
next, followed by Gonzaga College SJ, a Catholic boys secondary
school in Dublin, which was beat a couple of weeks later by
Riverside Primary School in Tasmania.
Ms. Downey in Minnesota said the idea arose for her during an
Internet search for an activity that the entire school could do.
"Who doesn't play with" Bubble Wrap? she said. "It's instant
gratification with a noise."
Twin Lakes organizers got Sealed Air to donate a trailer of
Bubble Wrap--70 rolls with 17,500 feet of wrap--for their May 22
attempt at the record. "With 70 bales in the cafeteria, it was hard
to study," said Ms. Downey.
Simple as it seems, the popping record requires intensive
planning and strict adherence to a set of detailed rules devised by
Guinness. Tulsa, Okla.-based Oral Roberts's poppers were issued
entry passes to the school's basketball arena that were
electronically scanned to maintain control over the number of
participants. Each popper was issued 2-foot squares of Bubble Wrap.
Stewards were assigned to monitor groups of 50 participants to make
sure they were popping.
Sophomore Nick Conroy of Tulsa said many participants initially
popped judiciously. But as the two minutes ticked down, the action
accelerated. "It just exploded at the very end," said the
20-year-old cinematography major. "It was almost like a thunder
shock wave through the whole stadium."
To prepare West Scranton's students, teacher Lisa Michaels
developed separate slide presentations for sixth, seventh and
eighth-graders providing a guide for participating within
Guinness's precise protocols.
"It was the longest two minutes of my life," she said.
As the big day drew near, Ms. Michaels grew increasingly worried
that another group would leapfrog West Scranton with more
participants. She checked the Internet daily for news of a new
record. Shortly before her school's event, Ireland's Gonzaga
College broke the record with 550 people.
West Scranton managed to field 733 bubble poppers, and it needed
all of them. Before Guinness certified its attempt, Riverside
Primary in Australia managed to slip into the record book, albeit
briefly, with 647 people.
"If we knew that the numbers were going to increase the way they
did, we would have gotten the adjacent high school" involved, said
Colin Pearson, a teacher and assistant principal at Riverside.
While West Scranton's record didn't hold for long either, Ms.
Michaels is sanguine about the brevity of its reign.
"It doesn't take away from it," she said. "Even if you have it
for 10 minutes you're still the world-record holder. You have
bragging rights."
Write to Bob Tita at robert.tita@wsj.com
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