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
Schools one up each other to make Guinness World Records; bubble-popping crowds have broken the record seven times since 2013.