The Secret History of Everything from Scotch Tape to the Ampersand

Scotch tape

Bet you thought that Scotch tape was invented in Scotland and that’s why it has its name, right? In fact, Scotch tape is an American invention. (Yeah, go America! We’re number one, we’re number one. Take that Belize!) The inspiration for Scotch tape was the fact that spray painting in the 1920s was, as it is now, very, very freaking difficult to paint an inset area green while keeping the area around it white. Voila and eureka, as the French say, Scotch tape came to the rescue. It is said that 57% of all Scotch tape used today is done so for exactly the same reasons. The reason that it is called Scotch tape is a not a pretty one. When it was first introduced people complain that the makers were being Scotch with the adhesive. Today we would say they were being, um, a tad frugal. I told you it wasn’t pretty.

The Queen Mary cruise ship.

Everybody loves a good cruise on the ocean and everybody loves a good scary story, which makes the Queen Mary a not very good destination for you ghost hunters looking to head out to sea on a ship that doesn’t make trips anymore. Did you know that the Queen Mary was actually intended to be called the Queen Victoria, after the ageless wonder who ruled over Britannia for most of the 19th century. In fact, when you think about it, the very idea of naming a ship Queen Mary is kind of illogical since no great queen named Mary ever ruled over England. The closest was Mary, Queen of Scots, and she may as well have never existed. So then they do the Ghost Hunters crew and other ghost hunters routinely make trips to track down the ghosts on the famous cruise ship? Well, it seems that one day the chairman of the Cunard line of shipbuilders paid a little visit to King George V and announced that they intended to name their new ship after England’s most noble queen. This news delighted King George V to no end: his consort was Mary, a queen with no power. Legend has it that King George’s response was “Her Majesty will be so pleased.” As we in America later found out, when a king named George gets confused, it doesn’t pay to set him straight. And so, the Ghost Hunters crew looked for apparitions aboard the Queen Mary rather than the Queen Victoria.

Kodak

You may be forgiven for thinking that the most famous film company in history is in the tradition of Hasbro in being a combination of two different words or names. In fact, Kodak was not named after people named Kochinski and Herrendak. George Eastman (not to be confused with the character played by Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun), the alleged inventor of the Kodak camera, plucked the name Kodak out of thin air because it was “short, vigorous, could not be misspelt and, to satisfy trademark laws, meant nothing.” I think he may be wrong about part of that, but nonetheless Kodack remains a brand name recognized around the world.

The Ampersand

Ever wonder just how the symbol & came to represent the connective tissue of language? In fact, the ubiquitous ampersand is a holdover from the glory days of ancient Rome. The ampersand, and did you even know that & was called an ampersand, was made by merging the letters e and t (as in et tu, Brute) to create shorthand for and. According to those who know better than I, the ampersand first made an appearance in writing in AD 70. And did you know that it is a symbol that is used to represent and in many other languages besides English?

Red Square

The famous landmark in Moscow is most closely associated with the reds known as Soviet Bolsheviks. In fact, the name of Red Square does not trace back to the 1917 revolution, but from a specific Russian word, krasnaya, which translates roughly into beautiful red. Red Square has been called that since the Dark Ages.