40 Fun Facts About Duct Tape

Which fruit did artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-tape to an art fair wall for his work Comedian?

A banana bought at a Miami grocery store for about 30 cents was all there was to see. Buyers really paid for a certificate and display instructions, so the fruit and the tape can be swapped whenever needed.

Apollo 13's crew used duct tape to rig a filter adapter that scrubbed which gas from the cabin air?

Carbon dioxide was building up because the command module's square filters would not fit the lunar module's round sockets. Plastic covers torn from procedure manuals and duct tape bridged the gap.

Factory worker Vesta Stoudt pitched a waterproof cloth tape in a wartime letter to which US president?

Franklin Roosevelt received the letter, complete with her diagrams, and passed the idea on to be made. Stoudt had gone to the top only after her own factory bosses ignored the suggestion.

A 2002 trial at a US military clinic found duct tape beat freezing for removing which skin growths?

Warts cleared up in 85% of the patients who wore duct tape over them, against 60% of those treated with liquid nitrogen. Later trials were less convincing, so the evidence is rated inconclusive.

Which Discovery Channel series built a working cannon, sailboat and trebuchet to test duct tape?

MythBusters came back to duct tape again and again, even hanging a car from it and spanning a dry dock with a bridge made of nothing else. The team also paddled a canoe built from it.

Consumer Reports said duct tape fixed the dropped-call antenna flaw on which Apple smartphone?

iPhone 4 owners were losing calls, and Apple's own answer was close in spirit to the tape. Steve Jobs promised every owner a free case to cover the antenna.

Which 1980s TV hero keeps a flattened roll of duct tape in his pocket alongside a Swiss Army knife?

MacGyver refuses to carry a gun, so he improvises his way out of trouble with everyday items and a genius-level grasp of applied physics. The roll is flattened so that it fits the pocket.

Which US government department told households in 2003 to stock duct tape and plastic sheeting?

Homeland Security listed the two items in a disaster supply kit, meant for sealing a room against chemical or biological agents. Press reports described a surge in demand for the tape.

Duck brand's long-running scholarship contest asks teenagers to wear which duct tape creations?

Prom outfits made of Duck Tape are the whole point of the Stuck at Prom contest. It reached its 21st year in 2021, with nearly $25,000 in scholarships and prizes on offer.

Finns give duct tape, the cure-all of the toolbox, a slang name honouring which biblical figure?

Jesus is the namesake of jeesusteippi, one of several Finnish slang names for the tape. Another is hopeateippi, which simply means silver tape.

Vesta Stoudt's wartime idea for a waterproof cloth tape was meant to seal which factory-packed items?

Ammunition boxes were closed with thin paper tape whose pull tabs wore off, leaving soldiers struggling to open them under fire. Stoudt's answer was a tab made of strong cloth tape.

Which healthcare firm, already a maker of surgical tape, developed duct tape for the US military?

Johnson & Johnson handed the job to its Revolite division, which had made cloth medical tapes since 1927. The team designed the new tape to be ripped by hand, not cut with scissors.

What colour was the duct tape issued to US troops in the 1940s, before silver became standard?

Olive drab, the standard army shade, coloured the wartime tape. The silver look arrived in the 1950s, when builders wanted a tape that matched tin ductwork.

Apollo 17 astronauts used duct tape, spare maps and clamps to rebuild which part of their Moon rover?

A fender had been knocked off by a hammer, so the wheel sprayed the crew with Moon dust. The taped replacement held so well that an auto body association made the astronauts honorary members.

Which university has wrapped its bronze warrior statue in duct tape to foil pranksters from rival UCLA?

USC covers the bronze warrior during rivalry week because UCLA fans used to paint him in their own blue and gold. Students also keep an all-night vigil around the statue.

Speed tape, a foil lookalike often mistaken for duct tape, makes quick repairs to which vehicles?

Aircraft can carry patches of speed tape because its adhesive holds at high speed, which is where the name comes from. Airlines try to keep it off parts that passengers can see, so as not to cause concern.

Gorilla Tape, a thicker duct tape launched in 2005, comes from a firm best known for which product?

Glue made the Gorilla name in the 1990s, after founder Mark Singer saw Indonesian furniture makers using a Danish polyurethane adhesive. The tape's sticky layer is twice as thick as ordinary duct tape's.

Which dinosaur names the tougher, weather-resistant duct tape sold by the makers of Duck Tape?

T-Rex Tape was introduced by Shurtape, the North Carolina firm that owns the Duck brand, and is pitched as stronger and more weather-resistant than the ordinary kind.

Which industrial giant released a clear duct tape in 2004?

3M inventor Richard Drew came up with masking tape in the 1920s after watching car painters struggle with two-tone paint jobs. The clear duct tape of 2004 was strengthened with white fiberglass mesh.

US troops in Vietnam used duct tape, nicknamed 100-mph tape, to repair which helicopter parts?

Rotor blades were patched or balanced with it in the field, one of the stories behind the nickname. The other is that the tape was supposed to hold in winds of that speed.

Which powdered metal, mixed into the plastic coating, gives duct tape its silvery-grey colour?

Aluminum powder is blended into the plastic film as a pigment. Other pigments in the same film give the tape its many other colours.

Which plastic, already coating the cotton cloth of the wartime original, waterproofs duct tape?

Polyethylene is bonded to a thin fabric mesh, so the tape shrugs off water yet tears by hand. The sticky side is a separate layer of rubber-based adhesive.

Which matte film-set tape did cinematographer Ross Lowell create by reworking Permacel duct tape?

Gaffer tape, as Lowell's invention is known, comes away without leaving residue and has a dull finish that does not reflect the lights. He needed it to hold a lamp mount to a window.

Which US state, home to the lab that found duct tape fails on heating ducts, banned it for that job?

California prohibits the tape on ducts, and a 1998 test at its Lawrence Berkeley lab showed why. Of every sealant the researchers tried, only duct tape failed.

Which Canadian comedy series about a handyman at Possum Lodge spawned the film Duct Tape Forever?

The Red Green Show ran for 300 episodes, with Steve Smith's title character forever singing the tape's praises. In the film, the lodge enters a duct tape sculpture contest with a giant goose.

Which Garrison Keillor radio show ran spoof commercials for the American Duct Tape Council?

A Prairie Home Companion filled its variety hours with adverts for sponsors that never existed, the tape council among them. Another was a society of sound effects specialists.

Which Canadian band put a song called Duct Tape Heart on their pinball-themed 2015 album Silverball?

Barenaked Ladies gave the song a video filmed at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. The album's cover shows a steel ball on a pinball table, a nod to singer Ed Robertson's collection of the machines.

German speakers call duct tape Panzerband, a nickname built on the word for which military vehicle?

Tank is the usual meaning of Panzer, though the word can also mean armour, so the nickname suggests toughness. German speakers also know the product as Universalklebeband, roughly all-purpose sticky tape.

Vesta Stoudt, the factory worker whose idea led to duct tape, had two sons in which US force?

The Navy had two of her eight children in 1943, so she took a factory job to do her part for her sons and their fellow servicemen.

The 2003 US duct tape alert followed the national terror threat level rising to which colour?

Orange stood for a high risk of attack on a scale of five colour-coded levels. Officials cited recent intelligence reports when they raised it.

What name do tape makers give the very thin fabric gauze sandwiched inside duct tape for strength?

Scrim can be made from cotton, polyester, nylon, rayon or fiberglass mesh. Theatres use a material of the same name for the thin screens that make an actor appear or vanish under changing light.

Which Ohio firm, led by Jack Kahl, put a yellow cartoon duck on its rolls and trademarked Duck Tape?

Manco mailed greeting cards carrying the duck to 32,000 hardware managers four times a year. From a near-zero customer base, the firm came to control 40% of the American duct tape market.

Which German giant, the maker of Loctite and Persil, owned Duck Tape from 1998 to 2009?

Henkel put the business up for sale in 2009, and its tape supplier Shurtape bought it to keep an estimated $75 million in orders.

Which Austin songwriter, a close friend of Townes Van Zandt, was nicknamed the Duct Tape Messiah?

Blaze Foley earned the name by decorating his clothes with the tape. After he was shot dead in 1989, friends covered his casket with it at the funeral.

Which US wartime agency received Vesta Stoudt's forwarded letter and set a firm to work on her tape?

War Production Board officials wrote back to tell her the change had been approved as an idea of exceptional merit. She later received the Chicago Tribune's War Worker Award for her persistence.

NASA's Jerry Woodfill said duct tape had flown on every mission since early in which programme?

Gemini, the two-seat programme that came before the Moon landings, started the habit. Woodfill was working in Mission Control when the tape helped to save a crew in 1970.

NASA engineers gave which nickname to the duct-taped air filter adapter built aboard Apollo 13?

The mailbox was built by Jack Swigert and Fred Haise from instructions that took an hour to read up from the ground. Its parts included plastic covers ripped from the procedure manuals.

Which Ohio city, home to the makers of Duck Tape, calls itself the Duck Tape Capital of the World?

Avon, in Lorain County, has celebrated the title with a three-day Duck Tape Festival, complete with a parade of floats. The mayor counted 50,000 visitors in one year.

Which auction house sold Maurizio Cattelan's duct-taped artwork Comedian for more than $6 million?

Sotheby's had estimated the piece at $1 million to $1.5 million. The winning bidder, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, ate the work's centrepiece at a press conference nine days later.

Which reference work dates the phrase duck tape to 1899 but finds duct tape in print only from 1965?

Oxford English Dictionary editors call the newer spelling perhaps an alteration of the older one. The first duck tape was plain cotton strip with no adhesive on it at all.