Duct tape born for World War II
During World War II, a woman named Vesta Stoudt worked in an ordnance factory in the United States. Her daily work was to pack ammunition. Due to professional reasons, Vesta Stoudt discovered that there was a problem with the sealing method of the ammunition box at that time, which made it inconvenient to disassemble.
It turned out that the U.S. military puts ammunition in a sealed box in order to prevent moisture. It takes a while for the soldiers to open it. Sometimes when it is difficult to open the box due to emergency, the soldiers have to pry open forcibly.
At that time, Vesta Stoudt was over fifty years old, and her son was serving in the navy. She must have been inspired by her concerns about his son’s safety. She hoped to reduce the time for dismantling the ammunition boxes, and to fight for the soldiers to win on the battlefield. hope. After all, fighting is a matter of race against time, and you can't fight against the enemy. At present, the soldiers are still dismantling the ammunition box.
In the end, she came up with a way to use a plain weave strip to make tape. If it was used to close the ammunition box, it would be more convenient for soldiers to open it. This idea also made her the later "mother of duct tape."
However, Vesta Stoudt's idea was not adopted by the leader, but she did not give up. In February 1943, Vesta Stoudt wrote a letter to then-U.S. President Roosevelt, in which he detailed the tape he had conceived and the reason why the ammunition box closure method had to be updated.
Unexpectedly, Roosevelt saw the letter and adopted her suggestion.
This idea was transferred to the Wartime Production Committee at the time, and they handed over the technical development of this tape to Johnson & Johnson.
In the end, Johnson & Johnson developed a tape that could be torn directly by hand, which later became duct tape. It used cloth as the base material, so it was also a duct tape.
Unexpectedly, after this tape arrived on the front line, the soldiers used many new uses. The butt of the gun broke? It's okay. Wrap it with tape, the gauze wrapping the wound is difficult to fix? It's okay, wrap the tape...In short, duct tape has become a "magazine".
Now we know that the invention of duct tape originated in the war. It was originally only used by the military, but because it was so practical, it began to enter thousands of households after the war and became a daily civilian tape.
