Owner 3M | Website scotchtape.com | |
 | ||
Product type Pressure-sensitive tape Country St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S. Introduced 1930; 87 years ago (1930) | ||
Scotch Tape is a brand name used for pressure-sensitive tapes manufactured by 3M as part of the company's Scotch brand. Their magnetic recording tape products were also sold under the Scotch brand.
Contents
History
The precursor to the current tapes was developed in the 1930s in St. Paul, Minnesota by Richard Drew to seal a then-new transparent material known as cellophane.
Trade names
Although it is a trademark and a brand name, Scotch tape is sometimes used as a generic term. The Scotch brand includes many different constructions (backings, adhesives, etc.) and colors of tape.
The use of the term Scotch in the name was a pejorative meaning "stingy" in the 1920s and 1930s. The brand name Scotch came about around 1925 while Richard Drew was testing his first masking tape to determine how much adhesive he needed to add. The bodyshop painter became frustrated with the sample masking tape and exclaimed, "Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!" The name was soon applied to the entire line of 3M tapes.
Scotty McTape, a kilt-wearing cartoon boy, was the brand's mascot for two decades, first appearing in 1944. The familiar tartan design, a take on the well-known Wallace tartan, was introduced in 1945.
The Scotch brand and Scotch Tape are registered trademarks of 3M. Besides using Scotch as a prefix in its brand names (Scotchgard, Scotchlite, and Scotch-Brite), the company also used the Scotch name for its (mainly professional) audiovisual magnetic tape products, until the early 1990s when the tapes were branded solely with the 3M logo. In 1996, 3M exited the magnetic tape business, selling its assets to Quantegy (which is a spin-off of Ampex).
X-rays
In 1953, Soviet scientists showed that triboluminescence caused by peeling a roll of an unidentified Scotch brand tape in a vacuum can produce X-rays. In 2008, American scientists performed an experiment that showed the rays can be strong enough to leave an X-ray image of a finger on photographic paper.