Tape me up, Scotchy!

Richard Gurley Drew was not a likely candidate for success. When, in 1921, the 22 year-old replied to the newspaper add for a lab technician, two skills on his resumé were playing the banjo and knowing how to drive a tractor. For education, Drew could only say that he had taken one year of Engineering at the University of Minnesota and was taking a random correspondence course for machine design. Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing must have been desperate, because they hired him.

Drew was put in charge of perfecting sandpaper, the "manufacturing" that 3M had begun when the "mining" failed. One day, as he visited a body shop to test the sandpaper, he heard some workers swearing. He investigated and learned that the tape used by the painters to make the 1920s two-tone look was too strong and tended to take off paint when it was removed.

Drew, ever creative, reasoned that tape is like sandpaper without the sand. Surely he could make a better tape than what the painters were using. He went to work on his idea. His boss supported this quest for a while, but as the stacks of rejected sandless paper grew he told Drew to return to improving the sandpaper, like he had been hired to do. Drew agreed, but one day later he suddenly thought of a new way to persecute the paper and scurried back to his pet project. In the middle of his experimenting his boss walked into the room. Drew didn't stop working and His boss left without a word. Shortly later Drew perfected his masking tape.

Next, Drew needed a paper-making machine to mass produce the tape. His boss considered funding it but ultimately refused. However, as part of his job Drew had been given permission to make purchases of up to $100. He quickly wrote up a massive number of $99 purchase orders. He confessed this to his boss- several weeks later as he was showing him the new machine sitting in his lab. That demonstration must have been rather tense, but Drew kept his job. They named the tape "Scotch," and it was a huge success.

Five years later another Minnesota company needed a waterproof tape. Drew ordered 100 yards of cellophane, a new product from DuPont, and started experimenting. He slowly built massive piles of rejected tape. He finally created a sample product, which the company rejected. Drew kept working anyway, and about a year later he sent a sample to a prospective client. The new transparent tape, made primarily for food packing companies, soon found thousands of commercial and household uses. During the great depression people found that it could repair everything from books to toys to dollar bills.

Drew was placed in charge of a group of creative individuals at 3M and continued to work there for another 40 years. By the time he retired he had his name on more than 30 patents. His leadership led to the 400 different types of tape now produced by 3M. He continued as a consultant for product development even after his retirement and died in 1980, the same year that 3M introduced Post-It notes to the world.

Today we buy enough Scotch tape each year to go around the planet 165 times. Drew has been named to the Minnesota Inventors Hall of Fame, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and 2007 his creation of cellophane tape was named a "National Historic Chemical Landmark" by the American Chemical Society. In 2004 the tape was also named a "Humble Masterpiece" by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Probably his greatest achievement was the legacy that he left at 3M. His coworker Art Fry said that, "He always encouraged his people to pursue ideas... He said, 'if it's a dumb idea, you'll find out. You'll smack into that brick wall, then you'll stagger back and see another opportunity that you wouldn't have seen otherwise.'" (quote from the Minnesota Science and Technology Hall of Fame website)

Sources:
http://www.msthalloffame.com/richard_drew.htm
http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventions/a/Scotch_Tape.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Drew_(inventor)
http://www.livescience.com/mysteries/070921_llm_scotch_tape.html
http://ww2.startribune.com/news/variety/influential2k/10.html
http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/drew.html
http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/329.html