Interestingly, when it was created in 1957 by engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, the original plan was to cover walls with a 3-dimensional textured pattern:
Only three years later it was discovered to be a superb packing material. Bubble wrap itself is made of low-density polyethylene (LDPE), a polymer of ethylene monomers that has some branching.
Branching around polyethylene reduces strands of it to pack closely, and this decreases its density.
Images from http://faculty.uscupstate.edu/llever/Polymer%20Resources/Topology.htm by David Whisnant
More recently, other amazing uses for bubble wrap have emerged. One example is from Bradley Hart, an artist in New York who injects different colors of paint into the bubbles to create portraits and landscapes:
Is there a place for bubble wrap in a chemistry lab? Most definitely! Professor George Whitesides and colleagues from Harvard University came up with some clever applications. Because the material is so cheap (about 60 cents per square meter) and the same area can have up to 5000 bubbles, the team discovered that the bubbles can safely hold liquid samples. This lead to a number of experiments testing the reliability of these plastic bubble holders:
Bubbles of Allura Red and rhodamine B dye - a test to see if liquid reagents can be stored and tested for absorbance measurements.
Image from dx.doi.org/10.1021/ac501206m; Anal. Chem. 2014, 86, 7478-7485.
Samples of E. coli grown in yeast and tryptone medium. Bubbles can be used to grow colonies of bacteria and microorganisms.
Image from dx.doi.org/10.1021/ac501206m; Anal. Chem. 2014, 86, 7478-7485.
A bubble can act as an electrochemical cell! Here 2 carbon electrodes are used to measure the current from different concentrations of ferrocyanide.
According to Professor Whitesides, bubble wrap can be repurposed to carry out a few chemistry and biology experiments in labs that normally cannot afford conventional test tubes and petri dishes.
Can you think of other unusual applications for bubble wrap? Test it out!
For further reading:
Adaptive Use of Bubble Wrap for Storing Liquid Samples and Performing Analytical Assays; David K. Bwambok, Dionysios C. Christodouleas, Stephen A. Morin, Heiko Lange, Scott T. Phillips, and George M. Whitesides; dx.doi.ord/10.1021/ac501206m; Anal. Chem. 2014, 86, 7478-7485.
