When a small manufacturer of sandpaper was looking for a lab technician in 1921, they received an intriguing application. 22-year-old Richard Gurley Drew had dropped out of engineering college after a year. He had a correspondence course in machine design on his resume, could drive a tractor and play the banjo. Someone at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, a simple local company at the time, decided to hire Richard immediately. You now know them better as 3M, and the young Mr. Drew was to play a major role in getting them from sandpaper to the innovation powerhouse that they came to be.
Richard was an observant fellow and the 1920s were the height of the classic American automobile. Two colour body work was all the rage back then and those fancy paint jobs needed a lot of good sandpaper. During one of his visits to an auto shop, he noticed how much trouble the workers were having masking out the areas to create the two tone paint. They were using baker’s paper and glue which always resulted in fuzzy lines due to the paint leaking under the edges. Richard had an idea and went off to carry out some experiments.
Using a variety of adhesives and crepe paper he set out to create self-adhesive masking paper which could be used for cleaner automotive paint jobs. After much trial and error and after having settled on a pressure-sensitive adhesive and coated paper, Richard took his prototype “masking tape” over to some auto shops to test out.
His initial test strips had adhesive only at the edges to hold them down and they kept falling off the body work. A worker at the shop was exasperated by this and said something along the lines of “Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and ask them to put more adhesive on it!”, (Scotch being a pejorative to mean stingy). Taking the sound technical advice but remembering the comment, Richard Drew invented the first masking tape and it was released under the Scotch Brand.
From Automobiles to a Household Staple – The popular Scotch Tape
5 years later, in 1930, he went on to develop the first transparent cellulose tape and 3M was well on its way to becoming a household name. It did help that at the time, going through the great depression, people were trying to save money and discovered that Scotch transparent tape was a great cheap and temporary fix for all sorts of broken things. The Scotch name and connotation was a positive under the circumstances and it took America by storm. Soon Scotch tape was in every kitchen drawer.
Image Courtesy – Wikimedia Commons
Richard Gurley Drew started off that expansion and oversaw the development of many of the big developments at 3M for the next few decades. He was put in charge of their Products Fabrication Laboratory, with a group of creative engineers and misfits pushing the boundaries of materials and what was possible. In those years they invented reflective materials for road signs, respirators and face masks during WW2 and so many of the then exotic solutions which we now take for granted.
Richard would continue to consult for the company into the 1960s and when he passed in 1980, there were likely several Scotch branded products in every home. Look into your stationery stash now and you’re likely to have a glue or a post-it note or something that was born of this legacy. As I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, you really should never bad mouth a banjo player, or their bosses. They dance to their own tune, and they just might change the world if your insult sticks.
Read other interesting stories of stationery and its origin on the links below,
- We test out the masking tape which has come a long way from the American automobile and car design industry in the 1920s to being every social media artists’ favourite stationery tool. – https://inkymemo.com/masking-tape-test/
- This is a list of some of the best quotes and thoughts about the simple wonder of the pencil. Enjoy these pencil quotes and share with like minded stationery loving souls. – https://inkymemo.com/pencil-quotes-for-stationery-lovers/
