A wallpaper specialist is the best way to get the absolute best, most luxurious and most beautiful wall coverings that match the particular colour scheme and style you are going for.

It is thus rather unusual to explore what was, at least in the world of wallpaper styles, an abject and quickly abandoned failure.

However, almost everyone has at some point come into contact with this failed attempt at a textured wall covering, as it turned out to have a rather large periphery market.

The story starts in 1957 with a pair of engineers based in New Jersey who were fairly close friends.

Marc Chavannes and Alfred Fielding were trying to seal two shower curtains together, which had the consequence of creating a sheet of bubbles due to the trapped air between the two layers.

In the wake of the Beat Generation and the rise in popularity of textured wallpaper, they wanted to try and create something new in the field by sealing plastic bubbles onto a paper background.

This initial pitch did not find a market, although given the truly surreal wallpaper designs of the 1960s, it might have been just a few years too early to catch on as a novelty.

When that failed, the bubbled sheets were then sold in the slightly adjacent market of greenhouse insulation, but whilst some gardeners do use the material as a form of cheap insulation today, there are better materials for the purpose.

This led the two and their company Sealed Air into a difficult position, but somewhat serendipitously, the computer company IBM was looking for materials that could help protect the sensitive components of their 1401 business computer.

This material was soon rechristened as Bubble Wrap and became famous for protecting computer parts.

What was meant to be a quirky wallpaper texture has become the go-to material for safely protecting postal packages in transit.