An interesting story of scotch tape

A Xerox is any photocopier, aspirin is any acetylsalicylic acid tablet, and a Jeep is any off-road vehicle — no matter how hard the companies that created these products have tried to persuade the public that these are, in fact, trademarks. Among the brands that over time have become generic terms for an entire category of products with similar consumer qualities is Scotch. For more than 70 years, 3M has been trying to convince the world that products under this name are made only by 3M.

Yet throughout all those decades, millions of people have continued to believe that scotch tape means any transparent adhesive tape.

In 1902, Edgar Ober, a modest businessman from Minnesota, heard that deposits of corundum had been found near the town of Two Harbors — a mineral second in hardness only to diamond and an ideal raw material for producing sandpaper. Soon afterward, Ober and four partners founded Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, the company known today as 3M. The partners set to work with confidence, but it soon became clear that the mineral they intended to mine was not corundum at all, but a low-grade form of anorthosite. If the company had tried to make sandpaper from it, it would have gone bankrupt very quickly.

So, after closing the mine, Ober and his associates moved to Duluth, where they began producing abrasives from corundum mined by other companies. But this arrangement did not satisfy the businessmen either, and in 1910 Minnesota Mining moved to St. Paul, where 3M’s headquarters remain to this day.

Along with Minnesota Mining, 23-year-old William McKnight also moved from Duluth to St. Paul. A graduate of business college, he had been hired by the company in 1907 as a junior bookkeeper. He rose rapidly through the ranks, and by 1914 had become general manager. Under his leadership, Minnesota Mining quickly gained momentum, and on August 11, 1916, speaking at a regular shareholders’ meeting, Edgar Ober announced: “Gentlemen, we have all been waiting for this day, doubting whether it would ever come at all. Today, we are finally free of debt. The future looks inviting. Over the past two years, our business has doubled, and for the first time we have money left to pay dividends — six cents per share.”

A new stroke of fortune — in fact, two of them — came in 1921. Minnesota Mining acquired from one of its competitors an exclusive licence to produce a unique sandpaper with absolute resistance to moisture, called Wetordry. Its use allowed automobile factories and repair shops to introduce wet sanding, sharply reduce dust emissions, and thereby lower the number of lung diseases among workers. The innovation did not go unnoticed: demand for Minnesota Mining’s products doubled. That same year, the company hired a man named Richard Drew, who had previously earned his living playing banjo in an orchestra that performed at dance halls in St. Paul.

In his youth, Dick Drew dreamed of becoming a mechanic and even built a miniature railway in the yard of his house. But this socially useless achievement did little to help him succeed in the study of mechanics: when Dick turned 20, he was disgracefully expelled from the University of Minnesota after studying there for only one year. The young experimenter then enrolled in the International Correspondence School. One day, returning home from a dance hall, he noticed a Minnesota Mining job advertisement. The company urgently needed laboratory assistants to study complaints and suggestions from consumers of its products. When he got home, Dick wrote his résumé on the college’s letterhead — not even hiding the fact that he had been expelled from the university — and sent it to the company’s personnel department. A few weeks later, 21-year-old Richard Drew was hired. His job was to study feedback about sandpaper supplied to nearby auto repair shops.

Two years passed. Little had changed in Dick’s life: he was still a laboratory assistant. Then one day, while testing Wetordry in an auto service shop, he heard a torrent of furious swearing behind him. Fortunately, the problem was not the sandpaper. A painter working near a brand-new Packard had simply ruined the car’s paint. The reason was this: two-tone automobile paintwork was coming into fashion. While the painter applied one colour, the other, already finished surface had to be covered with something. Old newspapers fastened with office glue, or medical cloth-backed adhesive tape, were used for this purpose. But neither worked properly: the cloth let paint seep through, while glue-coated paper stuck to the body and had to be scraped off together with the paint.

Suddenly Dick very much wanted to retrain from mechanic to chemist. He reported the problem he had discovered to the company’s management and volunteered to solve it, although he had not the slightest idea how it could be done. Nevertheless, he managed to convince his superiors that such research was worthwhile — and that he should be the one to lead it. Dick was given money for experiments and even assistants. It took Drew and his team almost three years to create a water-resistant tape that would adhere evenly and reliably to a car body and not damage the paint when removed. Their first product was a paper tape on which, for the sake of economy, adhesive was applied only along the edges. Customers nicknamed it “Scotch,” a word that in America at the time implied being stingy or overly economical. When, in 1925, a more advanced adhesive paper tape appeared, the company — having, incidentally, added more glue — gave it the name Scotch. Samples of the tape were sent to automobile manufacturers in Detroit. Soon, three trucks arrived from America’s automotive capital to collect the new product. That is how the now world-famous Scotch trademark was born. Dick Drew had only one thing left to invent: the product that people would come to call “scotch tape” itself — transparent adhesive tape on a polymer base.

Dick Drew began developing the new type of adhesive tape in 1929, after DuPont first presented samples of a new transparent material made from pulp, called cellophane. This waterproof film was immediately embraced by food manufacturers, and one of them asked 3M to invent an equally waterproof tape for sealing cellophane packaging for meat, candy, and bread. It took Dick Drew only a year to solve the problem. The adhesive applied to cellophane had to allow the tape to sit tightly on the roll without leaving sticky residue on the next layer. At the same time, the tape had to adhere securely to the surface that needed sealing. Drew later said that he was a cook, not a chemist: in search of the perfect adhesive, he tried everything from vegetable oil to glycerin. In the end, he settled on a colourless mixture of resin and rubber. It was excellent in every respect except one: it was impossible to spread evenly over the cellophane backing. The cellophane curled, split, or tore. At the end of every working day, a truck would pull up to Dick’s laboratory to remove piles of cellophane ruined during the experiments. But Dick solved this problem as well. His idea was simple: before applying adhesive to the cellophane, coat it with an extremely thin layer of primer.

On September 8, 1930, Minnesota Mining sent an experimental batch of the new tape to Chicago’s Shellmar Products Corporation, which produced cellophane packaging for confectionery. Three weeks later, a reply came back: “There should be no hesitation about spending money to launch this product into production and promote it on the market. It is obvious that the company will be able to achieve sufficient sales volume.”

William McKnight, who had succeeded Edgar Ober as company president in 1929, had no intention of hesitating over the cost of launching the product or promoting it. But he decided not to advertise the remarkable qualities of the new Scotch for sealing cellophane packaging — by that time, a more economical and convenient method had already been invented for that purpose: heat-sealing cellophane. Instead, he chose to emphasize its “Scotch” essence. The U.S. economy had already been in a depression for a year, later known as the Great Depression. Americans had become astonishingly thrifty and careful with money — almost like true Scots. Suddenly, everyone became concerned with extending the life of old things. And here, transparent adhesive tape proved more useful than anyone could have imagined. People began using it to mend torn book pages and wallpaper, repair clothing and toys, and even “restore” broken fingernails. These were precisely the uses on which William McKnight focused the advertising campaign for the new product.

McKnight hit the mark. 3M became one of the few companies to prosper during the Great Depression. While others were calculating losses, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing’s sales, production capacity, and workforce were growing. Without cutting back on advertising, McKnight significantly increased the funds invested in the development of new products. “That period became the golden age of our research,” he later said. And it truly was. In 1920, the company produced only sandpaper. By 1937, sandpaper accounted for just 37% of its sales. The remaining 63% came from paper and cellophane adhesive tapes, roofing materials, and adhesives. At the same time, the company developed numerous variations of each product. There were 10,000 abrasive materials alone. New products under the Scotch brand also appeared.

After paper and cellophane adhesive tapes, Dick Drew’s students invented electrical insulating tape, decorative tape, double-sided adhesive tape, coloured tape for marking, and many other products. The word Scotch was always present in their names. In 1947, the company began producing Scotch amateur audio recording tape; in 1954, Scotch videotape followed. In 1962, an adhesive tape made of acetate appeared. On the roll, it looks opaque, but when applied, it becomes invisible. It can also be written on, and it does not yellow over time.

The cellophane tape itself continued to improve. One problem Drew never solved was that Scotch was difficult to peel from the roll. When a piece of tape was cut, the loose end immediately stuck back down, making it hard not only to pull away from the roll but even to find. The free end of the tape therefore had to be attached to something. In addition, scissors always had to be close at hand to cut it. After a year and a half of testing, 3M sales manager John Borden invented a device that held the loose end of the tape on the roll and allowed pieces to be cut off easily.

The range of uses for Dick Drew’s cellophane tape continued to expand. Farmers began using it to patch cracked turkey eggs. Motorists used it to wrap pump handles and protect their hands in severe frost. Seamstresses used it instead of thread when basting fabric pieces together. Carpenters applied it to plywood along the cutting line to prevent splintering. Young women used it to attach corsages to evening dresses. Veterinarians used it to splint broken birds’ legs. Parents sealed medicine jars so children could not open them, and covered electrical outlets so toddlers would not poke their fingers or objects into them. Some mothers even began covering mosquito bites with tape so that children would not scratch the wounds.

Perhaps nothing can replace adhesive tape when one needs to collect tiny shards of broken glass or quickly fasten something together for a short time. True, the tape itself can sometimes leave a sticky trace on a surface, and there is only one way to remove it: press a fresh piece of tape against the surface and pull it away quickly. At 3M, however, they insist that their Scotch does not leave sticky residue — well, almost does not. That, they say, is what tapes made by other companies do.