The story of one failure (and triumph): bubble wrap.
In the late 1950s, American engineers Alfred Fielding and Mark Chavens gave the world bubble wrap, hinting that it was wallpaper.
In the age of fascination with space, Americans were ready to stick any futuristic game on the walls. Knowing this, Fielding and Shawans ran shower curtains through an insulating machine so air bubbles were trapped between them. But the pimpled cloth does not stick to the wall in any way.
The inventors did not give up and tried to sell the fruit of their brains to farmers - as a miracle insulator for greenhouses. And again failure: impractical. Rolls of unwanted tape gathered dust in the air-tight warehouse until marketer Frederick Bowers looked at "wallpaper" from a different angle - as an ideal shock absorber.
At the same time, the IBM Corporation was brainstorming how to transport new computers: the incredibly fragile and expensive electronics could not shake, and the good old stuffing of crumpled newspapers and straw left kilograms of dust inside the equipment.
As soon as Bowers gave a spectacular demonstration to the bosses of IBM, the technology giant bought thousands of meters of "pimples". Of course, after the computer scientists, manufacturers of glass, porcelain and airplane parts lined up for the miracle package, and by the seventies, a modest startup turned into an empire with a turnover of tens of millions of dollars.