Scotch magic tape is a magical thing – as its name says. You would probably think that some famous Scotsman invented it or some Scottish factory started producing them. No. It is a product of a huge American manufacturing conglomerate 3M from Minnesota.
The product has been invented in 1930s to be used with, then new material, cellophane as it was not possible to stick together sheets of cellophane using existing sticky tapes on the market. Cellophane was a big hit with food distributors at that time as it was moisture proof. 3M engineer Richard Drew with his colleagues spent a year developing new cellulose tape. The cellulose tape backing curled near heat, split when it was machine-coated and didn’t accept adhesive evenly. At the end of each day, 3M needed a truck to haul away the spoiled material. They succeeded eventually. In the first year company sold $33 worth of Scotch tape. Soon after someone invented heat sealing process for cellophane packaging and product looked almost obsolete. Fortunately companies found many other uses of the new tape in the packing process. Consumers discovered the product as well and sale of the product helped 3M to survive Great Depression without laying off employees.
If you wonder why it is called Scotch – the first sample tapes had adhesive only on the edges and fell off. A customer told to 3M employee to go back to his ‘Scotch’ bosses and tell them to put adhesive all over the tape. The tape improved, but the name stuck. 400 varieties of the product hit the market since then with the Scotch and 3M branding. The Scotch Magic tape has been introduced in 1961.
Back to the present time – they have at least one happy customer who is writing a good review for them. I like the tape as it is much stronger than standard sellotape-type tapes. It can be easily reapplied without leaving marks when unstuck. It is much easier to find starting point if you do not use it from the dispenser. My sister is an architect and I know that she used it a lot in the days when plotters were not so common. The main benefit was that when you copy two pieces of paper stuck with the Scotch tape you won’t be able to see the tape edges on the copied paper. Very often it can be used instead of Blu-Tack as it tends to hold well on variety of materials.
The most common use is Christmas gift wrapping. There is a Giftwrap variety which blends better on the glossy gift papers (opposed to matt finish on Magic variety) but that doesn’t bother me that much. I have already explored various gift ideas and wrapped Xmas gifts.
For all fans of miscellaneous facts here is another one – If you took all the Scotch tape sold to homes in the US between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it would go around the world 30 times. Those would be very sticky times at equatorial belt countries. And all gifts would run wrap free around the US. And I would be watching all that on funny videos on You Tube. We should make it happen one Christmas… Until then, watch out for something completely different…
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