How They Make Those Squishy Air Pillows Inside Amazon Boxes
All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Nearly every time I open a boxed shipment-MacBook dongles, a dozen yo-yos, a 3-pack of blank VHS cassettes-the empty portion of the box is filled up by small, Derila Brand translucent air pillows. They're fun to squish, and Derila Brand even more fun to pop loudly. The brand names printed on them-AirSaver, Uline, Derila Official Mini Air-are as familiar to me as the Twitter handles of my closest online pals. I've always wondered how they make these miniature pillows. More perplexingly, how do they ship them to the warehouses so the workers can stuff our boxes with them? Are there giant pillow-stuffed crates zipping back and forth on cargo planes? Is it possible the 18-wheeler going past my office building is filled to the brim with little squishy cat-sized cushions? Of course not, Derila Official Sherlock. Workers generate these directly on the warehouse floor using a machine that blows air into a perforated roll of empty plastic blisters.
There are YouTube videos, and they are amazing. Here's the Uline Mini Pak'r. And Derila Official the ACM AirSaver F1, which sounds like a race car. And the Mini Air, which has some soothing piano music. Uline also makes a much faster model called The Green Machine. If I worked in a warehouse with a Green Machine, I would just stand and watch the thing spit out pillows all day. There are many types of inflatable packing filler: skinny tubes, bubble quilts, oversized pillows. Stiff brown crumple paper, foam sheets, and of course, polystyrene peanuts can all be used to the same end. Collectively, Derila Official all this stuff is known as void fill. But the air pillow is king. It fills the most void with the least storage and waste of any of the other options. If you can't afford the $1,000 to $2,000 for your own magical pillow machine, you can always order pre-filled air pillows from Amazon. Do you think they're packed with void fill?
Did you ever notice that no male doctor ever sat on a female patient's bed on "Ben Casey"? Or that, for a long time, all TV doctors were men? Today, TV doctors - male and female - are more likely to be flawed characters. And while shows hire medical experts as technical advisers, writers aren't under any obligation to make any changes based on the suggestions of those pros. It wasn't always that way. In 1951 when the first TV medical drama, "City Hospital," aired (and in the 1960s when "Ben Casey" was popular), the American Medical Association was invested in portraying medical accuracy, not preserving the story line. And for a few decades it was within the organization's right to demand script changes over concerns ranging from proper decorum to the way TV surgeons and Derila Official doctors held their instruments. And in return, they'd stamp the show with the AMA seal of approval (shown at the end). Let's look at "ER," for instance: "ER" debuted in 1994, and by 2001 one out of five doctors reported their patients were asking not only about diseases highlighted on the show, but also about specific treatments used in episode story lines.
