Sticky Business

AMONG THOSE HUMBLE inventions that have moved into everyone’s lives and that no one can remember ever being without, probably none occupies such a warm spot in our affections as Scotch tape—or, as its developer called it, Scotch Brand cellophane tape. Millions of miles of it are pressed down every year by people in every walk of life all over the world for all manner of surprising uses—none of which were dreamed of by its originators, who thought of it only as a handy means of sealing packages. But the success of those originators was no fluke, for they were part of a company that had learned to live by its creative wits. It had been forced to do so, in fact, because it was an organization originally founded to market something that turned out to be utterly worthless.

The organization was the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, familiarly known as 3M. The full name is portentous, but its beginnings were distinctly unprepossessing. It was founded in 1902 by a group of businessmen in the small community of Two Harbors, Minnesota, on the northwest shore of Lake Superior not far from Duluth. Someone had claimed to have found nearby a rich vein of corundum, a substance that was known for its abrasive qualities (one variety is emery), and 3M’s founders could hardly wait to get their hands on it and begin marketing it. The turn of the century was a time of high expectation in northern Minnesota, whose Mesabi Range, with its vast ironore deposits, was already making fortunes. And in the runaway expansion of U.S. industry then under way the need for abrasives was limitless: the manufacturers of everything from furniture to household goods to those new contraptions motorcars required increasing amounts of sandpaper and similar smoothers. The Two Harbors proto-magnates could almost taste the dollars.

In their enthusiasm and naiveté, however, they neglected to get the answers to two questions. First, what was the current state of the abrasives industry? Second, did those nearby hills really contain corundum? A survey of the industry would have revealed that an inventor named Edward Goodrich Acheson had already, in 1891, devised an artificial abrasive of silicon and carbon called Carborundum that would provide formidable competition to any product 3M might try to sell. That was bad enough, but it was nothing compared with the answer to the second question. A competent test of the ore they were about to mine would have revealed that it was not corundum at all but a low-grade anorthosite, a look-alike that was unfit for effective abrasive work.

Unaware of these damaging facts, the Minnesotans plunged ahead and rapidly ran through the small amount of capital they had been able to raise. Sales of their “corundum” proved virtually nonexistent. At this point an investor in St. Paul named Edgar B. Ober stepped in to help them by persuading a friend, the St. Paul businessman and civic leader Lucius Pond Ordway, to invest $39,000. This was enough to give Ober and Ordway control of the company, which soon abandoned trying to sell bulk “corundum” and went into the business of making sandpaper outright. As the truth slowly dawned on the investors that their highly touted mineral was of no value, they gradually converted to using garnet and other minerals. Ordway kept pouring money in until he had invested more than two hundred thousand dollars, but sales remained sluggish. No doubt about it, this enterprise was a loser.

IT WOULD PROBABLY HAVE IN deed sunk without a trace if a young South Dakota farm boy named William L. McKnight had not been hired in 1907 as an assistant bookkeeper. Quiet and shy, McKnight looked out at the world with eyes that seemed little more than horizontal slits—as if, in the words of one chronicler, “he were continually peering into an oncoming Dakota blizzard.” He was immensely creative, more than anyone else, and responsible for 3M’s eventual success. A hard worker, McKnight proved so dependable and perceptive that he rapidly advanced until in 1909, not quite twenty-two years old, he was appointed head of the Chicago sales office. There he instituted an innovative tactic previously unknown in the abrasives business. Instead of merely calling on front-office executives in a company, salesmen were to talk to the men in the shop and find out what they actually needed. Business soon picked up, emboldening McKnight to make two other recommendations that 3M espoused: the company should sell only products that were good enough to warrant a special price, and it should stay out of competitive markets. Gradually the company—which moved to St. Paul—began to pay off its debts. It also promoted McKnight to general manager.

McKnight had one other key idea: To make sure the company was making only products that were demonstrably superior, 3M should set up something few companies possessed at the time, a testing laboratory. Again the higher-ups said okay. The new facility was hardly bigger than a closet, but it soon paid off when the company in 1914 came out with Three-M-Ite, a cloth treated with aluminum oxide. Used for sanding metal parts, it was flexible and could reach surfaces no other paper or cloth could. The automobile industry loved it. By 1916 Minnesota Mining was out of debtand able to declare a modest dividend.

Five years later, in 1921, it announced another revolutionary new abrasive that had resulted from an innocentsounding letter the company received from an inventor in Philadelphia named Francis Okie. He was asking whether he might purchase some samples of raw abrasives. Intrigued, the company made inquiries and learned that Okie had developed a waterproof adhesive and was thinking of manufacturing sandpaper that could be used wet, even underwater. This was something no other company offered, and in no time at all 3M’s executives had persuaded him to sell all his patent rights to them and come onto the staff in St. Paul. They also improved on Okie’s design by waterproofing the paper itself and introducing a waterproof binder to cover the adhesive. Not only did the new product, called Wetordry, do a better job of sanding than dry paper in many cases, as it prevented burning and would also not cut too deeply, but because it produced no dust, it represented a huge advance in health and safety for workers. It could be used with oil too. Again the automakers were delighted.

It was Wetordry, as a matter of fact, that led in circuitous fashion to Scotch tape. For by the 1920s Minnesota Mining had enlarged on McKnight’s earlier sales technique (he was a vicepresident of the company now) by encouraging its laboratory assistants to visit factories and shops to find out how 3M’s products were working out. The assistant given responsibility for Wetordry’s quality control was a young man named Richard G. Drew, who had been hired because although he had no business experience and was earning a living playing the banjo, he had been taking a correspondence course in mechanical engineering and had thought to apply for a 3M job on International Correspondence School stationery. The lab chief liked his gumption and took him on. One day in 1925 Drew was visiting a St. Paul auto-body shop to run some tests on Wetordry when he heard a worker give vent to a remarkable and bitter string of profanity.

The auto industry had recently introduced two-tone finishing on its cars, and the difficulty of producing a clean demarcation line between the colors was sending auto-body painters into fits of rage. The paint was sprayed on, and when one area of the car was being sprayed, the rest had to be masked off. Old newspapers were used for masking, and they were anchored with library paste, cloth-backed surgical tape, or paper tape coated with glue, none of which did the job. The clothbacked tape allowed paint to seep through, ruining the neat line, while the paste and glue-coated paper stuck too tightly and had to be scraped or ripped off, botching the finish beneath.

Drew, being a loyal 3M hand, instantly assured the infuriated painter that he would come up with a tape that would do the job satisfactorily, even though he had no idea how he would do it. When he reported his rash promise to his bosses, they told him to go ahead and put up some money for experiments.

Coming up with a tape that was water-resistant and that stuck firmly but did not mar the underlying paint finish when removed took Drew and his helpers three years. For a while they marketed a paper tape that almost did the trick; the automakers went along with it but continued to complain. This interim tape is worth noting for one reason. To save on glue, 3M coated only its edges, prompting customers to joke that the company was being overly “Scotch,” or parsimonious. Alert to the promotional possibilities of the line, 3M (while adding more glue) decided to advertise its product as Scotch Brand tape.

The final development in the masking-tape story occurred when Drew one day happened on a supply of crepe paper stored on the plant’s top floor. The paper was pockmarked, the way paper towels are, and Drew knew right away that it might be the ideal backing he was looking for, since the sticky side of the tape would not adhere too firmly to the roughened surface. Tests proved he was right, and the result was the masking tape everyone knows today.

To be sure, this was not the cellophane tape that was to prove such a bonanza for Minnesota Mining. But it led directly to it because it put 3M in the tape business and encouraged people to come to the company with problems that they thought could be solved with some new tape product. In 1929 a company that sold slabs of insulating material asked 3M to suggest a way to seal the wrapped slabs against the moisture that built up in dank refrigerator railcars, and one day while Drew was trying various tape combinations, another lab member came to him with a question. Minnesota Mining was considering wrapping packages of Scotch Brand masking tape in cellophane, the shiny clear wood-pulp-based material recently introduced by Du Pont, and the worker wondered whether Drew had any ideas about how to seal them. Food companies at that time were beginning to use cellophane to wrap such disparate substances as meat, candy, bread, and chewing gum, but they had no sure way to seal the packages for satisfactory shelf life. Right then the proverbial light bulb went on in Drew’s head. Why not coat strips of cellophane itself with adhesive and use it as a sealer? The material was totally moistureproof.

THIS TIME DREW NEEDED ONLY about a year to perfect the new tape, but the task was far from easy. No one had tried applying adhesive to cellophane; how would it perform? The adhesive would have to hold the tape firmly to itself in its roll but then unwind without leaving a sticky residue on the surface beneath and stick securely to the new surface to be sealed. Several adhesives seemed to do the trick, but coating them evenly on the cellophane backing proved endlessly frustrating. The cellophane would curl unpredictably, split, or break just when a roll was being completed. At the end of the day the heaps of ruined cellophane had to be carted away by truck. And although Drew eventually found a way to coat the cellophane backing evenly by first applying a primer coat, he still had to come up with an adhesive that was colorless. During this time the insulation maker grew impatient and went elsewhere with its problem, but now many food companies were awaiting 3M’s solution.

Finally 3M decided on an adhesive made of resin and rubber, which was colorless and made a smooth coat. Special machinery, with sharper blades, was devised to prevent the cellophane’s splitting and breaking. On September 8, 1930, with all problems solved, 3M sent a roll of the new tape to a company that specialized in printing cellophane for wrapping bakery goods. Less than three weeks later the printer reported that the tape was indeed “an ideal means of sealing moistureproof packages for cakes, cookies, etc.” Then it added, “You should have no hesitancy in equipping yourself to put this product on the market economically as it will be quite evident that there will be a sufficient volume of sales to justify the expenditure.”

The volume was certainly sufficient, to put it mildly (but mostly not for sealing cellophane, because a cheaper heat-sealing process had recently been devised). Although the United States that year was heading into the Great Depression, the new tape caught on so fast that 3M sailed through the difficult years easily. In theory cellophane tape was a luxury, but people found it allowed them to make old things do, saving them both time and money, and it rapidly became the nation’s favorite mending tape. Aside from its prime use in sealing packages, it could mend book pages and sheet music, blue-prints, wallpaper, clothing, window curtains and shades, toys, dollar bills, even broken fingernails. People began to wonder how they had ever gotten along without it.

It did have one serious problem, one that threatened the product’s long-term acceptance. There seemed to be no easy way to unwind it from the roll. When a piece was cut off, which required scissors and often produced a bad cut or the wrong length, the loose end would flip back down, becoming not only hard to find but annoyingly difficult to pick loose. Storekeepers had to keep customers waiting while they tried repeatedly to pry the end loose, and everyone’s patience was wearing thin. 3M designed a makeshift dispenser that held the roll of tape but did not solve the problem of the loose end. Finally after a year and a half the answer was supplied not by someone in the laboratory but by John A. Borden, who happened to be the sales manager of the company’s new cellophane-tape division. It incorporated a serrated knife along with a metal strip that would hold the end of the tape, and it was an instant success. It changed Scotch Brand cellophane tape from a fad that might have waned and disappeared into a permanent fixture of daily living.

WITH THEIR masking tape and cellophane tape proving so successful, the proprietors of Minnesota Mining over the years have added all sorts of other tapes to their line: plastic electrician’s tape, cloth tapes for decorative and other purposes, tapes with adhesive on both sides, surgical tapes for closing wounds, colored tapes for identifying objects of differing uses. The company’s expertise led after World War II to audiotapes and, in more recent years, tapes for video.

Meanwhile, the humble cellophane tape that Richard Drew developed goes right on. There has been one significant improvement. In 1961 the company introduced Scotch Brand Magic Tape, which was made of acetate rather than cellophane and was dubbed “magic” because although it appears frosted while on the roll, it virtually disappears upon application. It also can be written on and does not yellow with age. And while a number of other companies now make adhesive cellophane and acetate tapes to compete with 3M’s and the term Scotch tape threatens to become generic, 3M steadfastly proclaims and protects its trademark. Recently, however, it abandoned “Scotch Brand” and now refers simply to Scotch™ Tapes.

Over the years people have devised uses for the tape that go far beyond mending and sealing. Farmers discovered early on that they could use it to patch cracked turkey eggs for hatching and that if they wrapped it around pump handles in freezing weather, it served as insulation, sparing their hands. Home sewing enthusiasts used it for basting, for holding buttons in place while they were being sewed on, for securing the thread end to its spool, and for setting hemlines. Carpenters found that when sawing plywood, they could put down a layer of tape on both sides of the cut line to prevent splintering. Homeowners used it to keep plaster walls from cracking when they hammered picture hooks in, to attach electrical cords to base moldings and ivy to walls, to hold shelf paper in place, to outwit dexterous mice by covering mousetrap cheese with it, to cover the bottoms of ashtrays to prevent them from scratching table surfaces, and to attach an ornament to a Christmas tree when its hook was mislaid. Parents used it to seal the tops of medicine jars so that tots could not open them and to cover electrical outlets so the youngsters could not poke objects into them, to apply to mosquito bites so children could not scratch them, and to wrap around shoelace ends to make lacing easier. Teen-age girls found tape handy for attaching corsages to evening dresses. Naturalists discovered that it was just the thing for splinting birds’ leg breaks. Among innumerable industrial uses, cellophane tape proved highly efficient for wrapping the inner ribs of Goodyear blimps to ward off corrosion.

Furthermore, the ability of the tape’s adhesive to pick up very small items has yielded an entire separate category of uses. Nothing beats Scotch tape for picking up tiny slivers of broken glass, for cleaning the residue of a messy erasure job, and even for removing spots from walls. Wrapped around your hand with the gummy side out, it efficiently cleans lint off a garment. And when the tape itself has left a coating of adhesive or a few small remnants on a surface, there is only one remedy: press fresh tape onto it and lift briskly.

The chances are, in fact, that even as you read these lines, someone somewhere in the world is thinking up yet another use for it.