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Contact Information. Your Message. Newsletter Policy. In , Drew joined the 3M company located in St. Paul, Minnesota. At the time, 3M only made sandpaper. Drew was product testing 3M's Wetordry brand sandpaper at a local auto body shop, when he noticed that auto painters were having a hard time making clean dividing lines on two-color paint jobs.
Richard Drew was inspired to invent the world's first masking tape in , as a solution to the auto painters' dilemma. The brand name Scotch came about while Drew was testing his first masking tape to determine how much adhesive he needed to add.
The body shop 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! Scotch Brand Cellulose Tape was invented five years later.
Made with a nearly invisible adhesive, the waterproof transparent tape was made from oils, resins, and rubber; and had a coated backing. Drew, a young 3M engineer, invented the first waterproof, see-through, pressure-sensitive tape, thus supplying an attractive, moisture-proof way to seal food wrap for bakers, grocers, and meat packers. Drew sent a trial shipment of the new Scotch cellulose tape to a Chicago firm specializing in package printing for bakery products.
The response was, "Put this product on the market! However, Americans in a depressed economy discovered they could use the tape to mend a wide variety of things like torn pages of books and documents, broken toys, ripped window shades, even dilapidated currency.
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 s when the tapes were branded solely with the 3M logo.
In , 3M exited the magnetic tape business, selling its assets. John A Borden, another 3M engineer, invented the first tape dispenser with a built-in cutter blade in Scotch Brand Magic Transparent Tape was invented in , an almost invisible tape that never discolored and could be written on.
Scotty McTape, a kilt-wearing cartoon boy, was the brand's mascot for two decades, first appearing in People used Scotch tape for everything from mending ripped clothing to capping milk bottles to fixing the shells of broken chicken eggs.
At a time when many companies were going under, tape sales helped 3M grow into the multibillion-dollar business it is today. Through Drew, McKnight came to understand that letting researchers experiment freely could lead to innovation. He developed a policy known as the 15 percent rule, which allows engineers to spend 15 percent of their work hours on passion projects. Give people the room they need. The 15 percent rule has deeply influenced Silicon Valley culture—Google and Hewlett Packard are among the companies that give their employees free time to experiment.
The Scotch tape story is now a classic business school lesson, a parable of the value of instinct and serendipity, which Drew once called , "the gift of finding something valuable in something not even sought out.
After his tape successes, Drew was tapped to lead a Products Fabrication Laboratory for 3M, where he was given free rein to develop new ideas.
He and his team would file 30 patents, for inventions from face masks to reflective sheeting for road signs. He would also become known as a great mentor, someone who helped young engineers hone their instincts and develop their ideas. Drew retired from 3M in and died in , at the age of In , he was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
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