Second World War
Duck-Tape – Vera Stoudt wanted to help soldiers and invented the practical repair tape
Duck Tape is used for possible and im-possible tasks.
©Wikipedia/Commons
Vera Stoudt was annoyed by the poor packaging of ammunition boxes. She developed a waterproof tape with fabric reinforcement. When nobody wanted to listen to her, she turned directly to the US President.
Many men are convinced that all of life’s problems can be solved with three helpers: WD40, cable ties and duck tape. Very few people know that they have a woman to thank for the fiber-reinforced adhesive tape, in fact a concerned mother.
Vesta Stoudt of Illinois did everything to help the US win the war. Her two sons served in the armed forces in 1943, and she worked in a munitions factory near Amboy, Illinois. That’s when she noticed that the ammunition was badly packed. She put so-called rifle grenades in packages. Always eleven pieces in a box. To protect these boxes from penetrating moisture, a strip of paper was stuck around the seam of the lid. Then the box was dipped in wax. But unpacking wasn’t easy, the paper was too weak to separate the wax cover, it just tore off. This was unacceptable when reloading in combat and under fire.
Directly to the President
Then Stoudt had an idea that saved the day: Why wasn’t a waterproof fabric strap made to close the boxes? This would give the tape the strength it needs. As a reminder, in 1943 there were no flexible films made of plastic like the ones used today. Stoudt turned to her superiors, but rebuffed them. They told her, “Oh, forget it. Don’t be silly. The government knows what they’re doing.” “Well, the government can make mistakes just as easily as anyone else,” Stoudt countered.
And she didn’t give up. On February 10, 1943, she wrote a letter directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She described the problem and presented her solution – including technical sketches. She wrote: “I suggest we use a strong fabric tape to close the seams and make a tab out of it. It works well, I’ve shown it to various government inspectors. Everyone said it was fine but I could them never get her to produce the tape.”
Mass production in a few weeks
The President actually read the letter and then forwarded it to the powerful War Production Board. This authority coordinated the entire armaments industry in the United States. She hired Industrial Tape Corporation to manufacture the product. Mass production started just a few weeks later. The tape consisted of a woven fabric coated with a rubber-based adhesive on one side and a polyethylene coating on the other.
The plastic polyethylene was developed by Imperial Chemical Industries in the 1930s and made the tape waterproof. The fabric itself was strong and withstood tensile stress, but ripped easily. The tape was already very popular among soldiers during the war. You could patch almost anything with it, at least for a while.
Has nothing to do with the duck
There are various legends about the origin of the name. The soldiers thought it was called duck tape because it was waterproof like duck feathers. In fact, the name was derived from “doek” – cloth. This is what a waterproof fabric from the Netherlands was called in the USA, from which seaman’s clothing was made.
After the war, the tape was no longer made in army olive. It now got a pewter gray color because it was used to insulate ventilation pipes. It was then that the term “duct” tape became common. Gaffer tape and duct tape are further developments with fiber-reinforced plastics. Today the tape is produced in countless gradations and names for different applications with different adhesive strengths and tear strengths. All of these products can be traced back to Vesta Stoudt. She was honored with the Chicago Tribune’s Worker Award for her work, but she didn’t become rich. She had no patent for her brilliant idea.
The most spectacular deployments came on two Apollo missions. In 1970, three astronauts had to retreat to the lunar module as a “lifeboat”. Using the tape, they were able to round the square carbon dioxide filters on the abandoned command module to fit into the lunar module’s canisters. In 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts used the duct tape to repair their lunar rover.