Scotch Tape Exists Because 1920s Car Painters Kept Ruining Their Own Work

US1760820 was granted to Richard G. Drew and assigned to Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing — 3M. It covers pressure-sensitive adhesive tape, and it exists because of a fashion in automobile paint.

In the mid-1920s, two-tone cars were the thing. Producing them meant masking off one section of the body while spraying the other, and the available materials were terrible for the job: butcher paper, newspaper, and glues strong enough to hold but strong enough that peeling them off pulled the fresh paint with them. Auto body shops routinely ruined finished work at the final step.

Richard Drew was a young lab assistant at 3M — a company that at the time made sandpaper, not tape — and he was delivering sandpaper samples to a St. Paul auto shop when he heard the painters cursing over exactly this. He told them he would find something better.

Two years and a nickname

3M's leadership was not enthusiastic. Drew was told more than once to get back to improving sandpaper. He worked on the adhesive problem anyway, on and off, for about two years — a period that later became a founding story for 3M's culture of tolerating unsanctioned side projects.

The problem was a genuine balancing act. The adhesive had to grip firmly enough to seal a crisp paint line, then release cleanly without lifting the finish or leaving residue. Too weak and paint bled under the edge; too strong and you were back where you started.

Drew's masking tape reached the market in 1925. The origin of the "Scotch" name is the part everyone remembers: in an early version, to economize, adhesive was applied only along the outer edges of the backing rather than across the whole width. A frustrated painter, finding the tape falling off in the middle, is said to have told Drew to take it back to his "Scotch" bosses and tell them to put more adhesive on it — using the word as a slur about stinginess. The name stuck, and 3M eventually embraced it as a brand.

Then cellophane

Drew's second act was bigger. In 1930, working with the newly available DuPont material cellophane, he developed a transparent version of the tape. The intended market was industrial — sealing the cellophane wrappers that food producers were adopting.

What actually happened was the Great Depression. Households, unable to replace things, used the clear tape to repair everything: torn book pages, cracked toys, broken window shades, split seams, documents, currency. Sales that had been projected for factories came instead from families mending what they already owned.

Scotch Tape became one of the most recognizable consumer products in the world, and 3M — a sandpaper company — became a materials-science conglomerate largely on the strength of what a junior employee did after being told to stop.

See the original

The full text and figures of US1760820 are on patents.us.