When was transparent tape invented

By the early s, two-toned cars were the rage, and that created a major headache for the automotive industry. To craft this duo-tone look, one portion of the car had to be masked off while the other was painted. The problem was nobody knew how to do this well. So automakers and auto body shops improvised. They glued old newspapers to the body and windows with library pastes, homemade glues or surgical adhesive tape. This helped create a sharp demarcation between the two colors, but the adhesives stuck so firmly that trying to remove them often ruined the paint job.

At the time, 3M primarily manufactured sandpaper and other abrasives. One of Dick Drew's jobs was taking samples of waterproof sandpaper another 3M invention to nearby auto body shops for testing. One morning in he walked into one of these shops and overheard "choicest profanity I'd ever known.

Drew had seen this occur on many other visits, but this time he spoke up. He could, he said, produce a tape that would end the painter's torment.

It was a brash pledge since, as one historian noted, " Drew could back this promise with neither experience nor know-how. He didn't even know exactly what was needed, but he had the optimism of youth. Still, Drew hardly seemed like an innovator.

Growing up in St. Paul, Minn. Using this talent, he earned enough to pay for engineering classes at the University of Minnesota. But the demands of playing in bands at night and taking classes during the day proved too much. He dropped out of school after eighteen months and took a correspondence course in machine design. In , he was hired by 3M and all too soon he was trying to figure out how to deliver on his impulsive promise to that auto painter.

Using the adhesive used in 3M's waterproof sandpaper as a starting point, Drew spent two years experimenting with vegetable oils, various resins, chicle, linseed, and glue glycerin. Eventually he developed a formula containing a good grade of cabinetmaker's glue, which was kept sticky with the addition of glycerin. For a backing, he settled on treated crepe paper. Serendipity fascinated Dick Drew. It is, he said, "the gift of finding something valuable in something not even sought out.

Flaxlinum Company, a St. Paul insulation firm, contracted to insulate several hundred railroad refrigerator cars, but there was a complication. The insulated bats needed to be wrapped and sealed with something moisture-proof so they could be used in the refrigerated cars. The company thought Scotch Brand Masking Tape would work. It didn't. Drew, now technical director of 3M's Product Fabrication Laboratory, plunged in.

He and his team worked diligently, but after numerous attempts came up empty handed. Nothing, it seemed, was sufficiently watertight. In the meantime, DuPont had developed cellophane, a moisture-proof packaging material. Scotch tape could repair items almost invisibly, giving household goods longer lives at a time when replacing them was out of the question.

By , 3M had started marketing Scotch tape in the familiar snail-shaped package to allow for easy tape dispensing. Over the decades, Drew and other 3M inventors developed a wide range of other tapes. In , Scotch brand tapes introduced their tartan design and in the s, mascot Scotty McTape appeared in print and television advertising. In , 3M released Scotch brand Magic Tape. The new tape was frosty on the roll, but it nearly disappeared when applied.

Magic tape had a matte surface that could be written on, unlike previous transparent tapes, and it resisted yellowing with age. When American consumers were polled in , they voted Scotch tape as the most indispensible household product. In the early twenty-first century the company was producing 5. For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia. But he only lasted 18 months in the engineering program. He took a correspondence course in machine design, and was soon hired as a lab tech by the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, which was then in the business of manufacturing sandpaper.

That was another household must-have: masking tape. In the s, two-tone cars were trendy. Workers needed to mask off part of the car while they painted the other, and often used glued-on newspaper or butcher paper for the job.

But that was difficult to get off, and often resulted in a sticky mess. Drew walked into an auto body shop one day and heard the " choicest profanity I'd ever known " coming from frustrated workers. So he promised a better solution. He spent the next two years developing a tape that was sticky yet easy to remove. Scotch Brand Cellulose Tape was invented five years later.

Made with a nearly invisible adhesive, the waterproof transparent tape was made from oils, resins, and rubber; and had a coated backing. Drew, a young 3M engineer, invented the first waterproof, see-through, pressure-sensitive tape, thus supplying an attractive, moisture-proof way to seal food wrap for bakers, grocers, and meat packers.

Drew sent a trial shipment of the new Scotch cellulose tape to a Chicago firm specializing in package printing for bakery products. The response was, "Put this product on the market!

However, Americans in a depressed economy discovered they could use the tape to mend a wide variety of things like torn pages of books and documents, broken toys, ripped window shades, even dilapidated currency. Besides using Scotch as a prefix in its brand names Scotchgard, Scotchlite and Scotch-Brite , the company also used the Scotch name for its mainly professional audiovisual magnetic tape products, until the early s when the tapes were branded solely with the 3M logo.

In , 3M exited the magnetic tape business, selling its assets. John A Borden, another 3M engineer, invented the first tape dispenser with a built-in cutter blade in Scotch Brand Magic Transparent Tape was invented in , an almost invisible tape that never discolored and could be written on. Scotty McTape, a kilt-wearing cartoon boy, was the brand's mascot for two decades, first appearing in The familiar tartan design, a take on the well-known Wallace tartan, was introduced in In , Soviet scientists showed that triboluminescence caused by peeling a roll of an unidentified Scotch brand tape in a vacuum can produce X-rays.

In , American scientists performed an experiment that showed the rays can be strong enough to leave an X-ray image of a finger on photographic paper.