Cellophane adhesive tape

Scotch tape emerged because Richard Drew had already solved the adhesive problem once and DuPont had just made cellophane commercially available. The invention was less about inspiration than about an engineer recognizing that two existing solutions could be combined.

Richard Gurley Drew joined 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1921, when the company was a modest sandpaper manufacturer. Born in 1899, Drew had dropped out of the University of Minnesota's engineering program after eighteen months, preferring to play banjo in dance halls. But at 3M, he found his calling in adhesive chemistry. In 1925, while testing 3M's Wetordry sandpaper at auto body shops, Drew noticed painters struggling with the two-tone paint jobs fashionable during the Roaring Twenties. The border between colors was maddeningly difficult to manage cleanly. Drew spent two years developing masking tape—a two-inch tan paper strip with pressure-sensitive adhesive.

The first version had adhesive only along its edges, not the middle, to save material costs. When the tape fell off a car during its first trial, the frustrated auto painter growled at Drew: 'Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!' The 'Scotch' jab—meaning cheap—stuck as the brand name for all Drew's subsequent tape inventions.

By 1930, Drew had mastered pressure-sensitive adhesives. Meanwhile, DuPont had acquired rights to cellophane from the French inventor Jacques Brandenberger and was producing it commercially in the United States. Cellophane was marketed primarily for food packaging—transparent, moisture-resistant, but needing to be sealed somehow. Drew recognized that his adhesive technology could be applied to cellophane itself, creating a transparent tape.

On September 8, 1930, 3M sent its first roll of cellophane tape to a prospective client. The adhesive—a mixture of rubber, oils, and resins—was waterproof and stable across a wide range of temperatures and humidity. But what made Scotch tape revolutionary was timing: the Great Depression. American consumers, forced to repair rather than replace broken items, discovered hundreds of uses for transparent tape. Mending torn book pages, wrapping packages, repairing broken toys, sealing envelopes—the applications multiplied beyond anything Drew or 3M anticipated.

While other companies folded during the 1930s, 3M thrived on Drew's invention. The company's culture transformed as a result. Executive William McKnight, observing how Drew's undirected experimentation had produced two profitable products, developed the famous '15 percent rule'—allowing engineers to spend 15 percent of their work hours on passion projects without management approval. This policy, born directly from Drew's success, would later produce Post-it Notes and dozens of other 3M innovations.

The tape's enabling effect extended far beyond household repair. In 2004, physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov used Scotch tape to exfoliate graphite crystals, producing graphene—a single atom-thick layer of carbon with remarkable properties. This 'Scotch tape method' won them the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. A product designed to seal cellophane food wrap had become an essential tool for nanoscience.

Today, 3M sells enough Scotch tape annually to circle Earth 165 times. The company that a frustrated painter inadvertently named now operates in over 70 countries, its culture of exploratory innovation traceable directly to Drew's banjo-playing dropout who understood that solving one adhesive problem creates the knowledge to solve others.