Duct Tape: From Vesta Stoudt's Letter to FDR to Saving Apollo 13

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The original duck tape had no glue at all. The name comes from the Dutch word doek, a heavy woven cloth, and around 1902 strips of it were wrapped around the Manhattan Bridge's steel cables to protect them from salt air. The sticky version arrived in 1943, when ordnance plant worker Vesta Stoudt saw that the wax-dipped paper tape sealing ammunition boxes cost soldiers precious seconds under fire. Ignored by her supervisors, she wrote directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This episode follows what happened next. Roosevelt forwarded her letter to the War Production Board, and the Revolite division of Johnson and Johnson produced a three-layer tape of cotton duck cloth, polyethylene, and rubber adhesive that tore by hand and shed water. After the war it turned silver, got wrapped around heating ducts, and picked up a new name, even though it is terrible at that job. The story runs from suburban basements to the Moon and to the panic buying of 2003.

• In 1930 a mechanics magazine printed a home recipe for heavy tape: soak cloth strips in boiling rosin and rubber melted from old inner tubes.
• A 1998 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory test found standard duct tape failed on heated ducts, and California later wrote it out of its building codes.
• Jack Kahl bought a small Ohio tape company in the 1970s, renamed the product Duck Tape, put a yellow cartoon duck on it, and won almost half the US market.
• On Apollo 13, astronauts used tape, flight manual cardboard, and plastic bags to fit square carbon dioxide canisters into a round socket. Engineer Ed Smylie said he knew they would survive once the tape was confirmed aboard.
• In February 2003, Homeland Security advice to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape emptied store shelves, though sealing a room at home was nearly impossible.