[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the
zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

Arthur C. Clarke

 

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and
posthumously.

Thomas Sowell

 

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Bernard Berenson 

 

We laugh a lot. That's for sure. Sure beats the alternative, doesn't it?

Betty White, Mark Twain Prize, 2010

 

Venice would be a fine city if it were only drained.

Ulysses S. Grant

 

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Pablo Picasso

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Duct tape (or duck tape?)

 

Though duck tape is known earlier - the Oxford English Dictionary has an
example of that term from 1902 - it's a different material. That duck tape
isn't the triple-layer, silver-coloured, sticky-backed stuff but plain
cotton tape. The woven fabric has been called duck for four centuries,
though it was originally made from linen, not cotton (its name is from Dutch
doek, linen or linen cloth). It was a lighter and finer material than
canvas, often used for seamen's trousers and sometimes for sails on small
craft. Duck tape was widely used at one time for the vertical binding tapes
of venetian blinds.

 

Accounts that have appeared on various web pages and in a column by William
Safire in the New York Times in March 2003 all tell the same story about the
origin of duct tape (so much so that they probably derive from a common
source). The story is that the original material was developed by the
Permacel division of Johnson & Johnson in 1942 as a waterproof sealing tape
for ammunition boxes in the US Army. The story says that because the fabric
backing was made from cotton duck and because it repelled moisture "like
water off a duck's back", it became known to soldiers as duck tape.

 

Research by Gary Kiecker, a former marketing director for Scotch tapes at 3M
Company, shows that the story of its origin is untrue. The tapes used by the
US Army during the war for sealing ammunition cases and other uses were
off-the-shelf brands, including Johnson & Johnson's Jonflex and Utilitape.
The latter was a moisture-proof cloth tape introduced in 1933.

 

Despite being widely held, the story about these wartime materials being
called duck tape is also entirely false: no mention of them is known in any
document of the wartime period that anyone investigating the matter has
looked at. The story might have grown up because there are a few examples of
duck tape appearing in contemporary documents that specify construction
methods. This was actually the older cotton tape, usually painted over to
preserve it.

 

After the war, J&J sold their tape for sealing joints in air-conditioning
ducts. To match the ducting it was coloured silver. We may guess that it
became known informally among heating engineers as duct tape, though the
term didn't appear in print at the time. In the late 1950s, a new product
was introduced with a third layer of waterproof polyethylene film. This is
the product that in various qualities we know today as duct tape. The first
unequivocal reference found to a tape that sounds like the modern material
is this announcement in a trade journal:

 

DUCT TAPE

Duro-Dyne Corp.

Farmingdale, N.Y.

A new duct tape for sealing ductwork and insulation on heating and air
conditioning installations is available in this firm's aluminum cloth series
(high count, high strength cloth) and in its aluminum reinforced fiber
series.

- Heating and Air Conditioning Contractor, Volume 49, 1957.

 

The term duct tape has never been trademarked, though several compound terms
that include it have - it seems that it had become generic before anybody
thought of registering it.

 

The other term, duck tape, has a different history. Apart from a one-off
instance in the Oxford English Dictionary of duck tape from 1971 (which
looks like a case of what's called elision - the collision of the two ts in
the middle of duct tape causes the first one to be lost.), the first mention
of duck tape in the adhesive sense is from the 1980s. It was a trademark of
Henkel Consumer Adhesives (now owned by ShurTech Brands), dating from 1982,
who sold it under that name in several countries. John Kahl, the CEO of
Henkel, was reported by Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe in March 2003 as
saying that his father chose the name after noticing that duct tape sounded
like duck tape when his customers asked for it.

 

To summarize. As names for the self-adhesive tape, duct tape came first,
given informally to a material used by heating engineers after the Second
World War and later transferred to a more sophisticated version, and the
duck tape version is elision in rapid speech, capitalized on by a
manufacturer long after the duct tape name became commonplace.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

How did the Dutch in Amsterdam mobilize to defeat the invading Spanish
during the winter of 1572-73?

A: The ice-locked Dutch routed the Spanish on skates.

 

What did the real Butch Cassidy do after escaping to Bolivia wit his
partner-in-crime, the Sundance Kid?

A: Cassidy whose real name was Robert LeRoy Parker, reportedly returned to
the U,S, and went into the adding machine manufacturing business.

 

Who was the first American congressman to don a uniform following the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941?

A: President-to-be Lyndon Johnson, who served in the Navy.

 

In the military world, what is EGADS?

A: The signal used when it's necessary to destroy a missile in flight. EGADS
is an acronym for Electronic Ground Automatic Destruct System.

 

Why was actor Paul Newman disqualified from the Navy's pilot-training
program during World War II?

A: Newman's dazzling blue eyes are colorblind.

 

What was the name of the barbaric German tribe that overran Gaul, Spain and
North Africa and sacked Rome in the fifth century?

A: The Vandals.

 

Why was infantryman (and actor-to-be) James Arness picked to go first when
the troops aboard his landing craft splashed ashore during the Allied attack
at Anzio during World War II?

A: At 6 feet 6, he was the tallest man in his outfit--and his commanding
officer wanted to know just how deep the water was.