Scotch Tape (Same thing as duct tape)

Scotch Tape is a brand name used for certain pressure sensitive tapes manufactured by 3M as part of the company's Scotch brand.The precursor to the current tapes was developed in the 1930s in Minneapolis, Minnesota by Richard Drew to seal a then-new transparent material known as cellophane.^[1]Although it is a trademarked brand name, Scotch tape is commonly used in the United States, Canada, Italy and elsewhere as a generic term for transparent adhesive tape. (The Australian, Irish, New Zealand, and UK equivalent of Scotch tape is Sellotape.) The Scotch brand includes many different constructions (backings, adhesives, etc.) and colors of tape.

The use of the term Scotch in the name was pejorative in the 1920s and 1930s: in 1925, a customer complained that 3M was manufacturing its masking tape too cheaply, and told company engineer Richard Drew to "take this tape back to your stingy Scotch bosses and tell them to put more adhesive on it."^[2]

Scotty McTape, a kilt-wearing cartoon boy, was the brand's mascot for two decades, first appearing in 1944.^[3] The familiar tartan design, a take on the well-known Wallace tartan, was introduced in 1945.^[3]

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.^[4] In 1996, 3M exited the magnetic tape business, selling its assets to Quantegy (which is a spin-off of Ampex).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.^[5] In 2008, American scientists performed an experiment that showed the rays can be strong enough to leave an X-ray image of a finger onphotographic paper.^[6]