Scotch Tape Day Date in the current year: January 31, 2025

Pressure-sensitive adhesive tape (PSA tape), also known as pressure-sensitive tape, self-stick tape, sticky tape, or simply tape, is a type of adhesive tape that adheres to surfaces with light pressure without the use of solvents or heat to activate it. Scotch tape is one of the best-known brands of PSA tape, but it is not the oldest.

Pressure-sensitive adhesives were invented in the mid-19th century for medical use. In 1845, a surgeon named Dr. Horace Day combined India rubber, pine gum, turpentine, litharge, and turpentine extract of cayenne pepper and applied the mixture to strips of cloth to create a self-adhesive surgical patch, which he used in his practice.

In 1874, Robert Wood Johnson and George John Seabury founded the company that would become Johnson & Johnson and began manufacturing a new type of medical adhesive bandage. Their product was the first successful commercially produced PSA tape.

Scotch tape, however, had nothing to do with medicine; we have the automotive industry to thank for its creation. Scotch tape was invented by Richard Gurley Drew, who worked for 3M at the time. Now a multinational conglomerate, 3M was then a modest manufacturer of sandpaper products.

While testing 3M’s new products in auto shops, Drew observed body shop painters creating two-tone paint jobs that were popular in the 1920s. They taped butcher paper to the cars they painted to create a smooth border between the two colors, but when they peeled off the paper, the adhesive damaged the fresh paint and the damaged areas had to be touched up, increasing costs.

Drew then created a PSA tape with a gentle adhesive that would not damage the paint; today it is known as masking tape or painter’s tape. An early prototype of Drew’s masking tape had adhesive along the edges but not in the middle. It fell off the car during the first tests, frustrating the auto shop painter, who exclaimed: “Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!”, using the term “Scotch” in its pejorative sense of “cheap” or “stingy”.

The nickname stuck to both 3M’s line of masking tapes and Drew’s new invention, a transparent cellophane self-adhesive tape that was sold as Scotch tape. Scotch tape was created in 1930, and two years later another 3M engineer, John A. Burden, invented the first tape dispenser. The new product quickly became popular due to the Great Depression: people used the versatile tape to repair household items such as clothing, curtains, books, etc. as they could not afford to replace them.

Today, Scotch tape is used as a generic term for PSA tape in the United States and some other countries because of the brand’s popularity. Scotch Tape Day is unofficially celebrated on January 31 to honor this amazing invention and its versatility.