Scotch tape

[Zombie_61]

 

[BobHufford]

When in town we live a couple of miles from a 3M adhesives plant. When the wind is just right ... mmmm ... Scotch Tape.

 

[Edward Reed]

I added this tiny very early stamped metal scotch tape dispenser to my collection. came with what was left of a used post war tin reel of tape (hence the red/green on that piece) but these early blue ones are hard to come by. incidentally it is shown in a WWII army signal corps photo of a soldier's footlocker so it serves double duty for my vintage type of collecting.

 

[Edward Reed]

also added a nice early 7 1/2 lbs. cast iron Whale Tail with the paper Scotch Cellulose Tape tag still on it with the matching patent number.

 

[Edward Reed]

not the earliest version but a pretty early Scotch tape tin. It still has a bit of the mucky, melty, sticky, gooey, oozy cellulose tape inside!

 

[Zombie_61]

not the earliest version but a pretty early Scotch tape tin. It still has a bit of the mucky, melty, sticky, gooey, oozy cellulose tape inside!

Yeah, but at least it requires no Moistening.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The original adhesive contained oils and natural rubber -- neither of which bear up particularly well with the passing years. It was also a sort of a light amber color as it came off the roll, which seems to have -- ah -- darkened a bit with age.

They weren't allowed to call it "Cellophane" tape without paying a royalty to duPont, which owned the "Cellophane" trademark, but the plastic backing is in fact duPont Cellophane, a product which has its own chemical problems as it ages.

All this, of course, is a further lesson in why you find so many old books with noxious brown stains marking where the torn pages were mended with Scotch Cellulose Tape.

 

[Fading Fast]

...
All this, of course, is a further lesson in why you find so many old books with noxious brown stains marking where the torn pages were mended with Scotch Cellulose Tape.

Mystery solved, thank you Lizzie. Quite familiar with that in old books.

 

[Edward]

Scotch tape has long been on salein the UK - indeed, I've had several rolls of it over the years - but the generic term here is "Sellotape" after a different brand. Similarly all vacuum cleaners are "Hoovers",any personal cassette player was quickly known as a Walkman (a Sony trademark), and some kids will refer to any mp3 player they comesacross as an ipod. IT's something of a testament to the strength of abrandwhen it becomes a generic - though ironically many companies hate it as it can also sometimes be considered to lead to "trademark dilution", i.e. if your TM is used as a generic frequently enough, a court may decide it has become a generic, and decline to protect it. Fro this reason, Google a few years ago went to war against "To Google" being used as a verb for searching the web.

We used to have a convenience store over in the next town called "McDuck's," complete with a big cutout logo of Uncle Scrooge on the front of the building to advertise its low gas prices. It was there for almost 30 years, and the Disney people never caught wind of it. Hoot mon.

Surprising - Disney have sure been tough on that sort of thing in recent years. IKEA are another one, they hit a funiture sohp in London selling itself as "I can't believe it's not IKEA!" or something along those lines.

There is an Essex-based cement merchant that had for many years called itself "Jim'll Mix IT", with it's logo beingf a parody of the "Jim'll Fix IT" TV show. Weirdly, the BBC never went for them (it was widely known about), though they got a lot of social pressure when SAville was exposed as a paedophile. Initially they refused to back down and stop using the logo, but I think the market forced them to in the end.

I've got three boxes of 7-inch tape reels (mostly Scotch #212), from the days when reel-to-reel tapes were my main collecting medium, which started in 1973, my freshman year in college. I haven't had a working deck in 20 years, and I'm sure these tapes would be in terrible, perhaps unplayable, condition. But I can't just throw them away... even though what I long considered their most essential, special material - dozens of hours of live Grateful Dead recordings - has now been rendered obsolete since nearly every show the Dead ever played is now available free to stream from archive.org!

Still, I can't throw them away!

You might be able to sell 'em to a hifi buff. Apparently some of them have now moved on from vinyl and consider reel to reel tape to offer the best / purest audio experience... (I also suspect it has a lot to do with how cool the old rtr machines look, plus Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.) I'm told that some record labels will do some albums on rtr still if you order them custom, though it works out at a couple of hundred dollars per album!

I also heard some years ago about a poor chap who was writing a ‘cultural history of Australia’. He was constantly being told: ‘that’s going to be a short book’! Extremely unfair, as we all know. ...

I recall a chancter played by Angus Deayton in One Foot in the Grave in a skit where he was o the phone complaining about a faulty globe he'd been delivered. The line was "While I can see the obvious cultural advantage of a world with two Europes and no Australia, that's hadly the point, is it?"