Hasta La Ideas

Are you kidding me?

Heading over this morning to the high-end shopping strip of West Broadway, where every store seems to have huge windows, we see what’s in the photo above. I have a hard time believing a few lousy strips of blue painter’s tape can hold a window together. In fact meteorologist Chris Landsea, who is the Science and Operations Officer at the National Hurricane Center, writes “[taping windows] is a waste of effort, time, and tape. It offers little strength to the glass and NO protection against flying debris.”

While I think whomever did the blue tape job was wasting their time, I think Landsea might be misguided—not in his stating of what tape won’t do, but in his understanding of why people tape their windows. I’d always assumed people taped their windows—with sturdier duct or gaffer’s tape, that is—in an effort to keep the glass itself from disintegrating into shard-like projectiles upon shattering. I never understood it to make the glass stronger or somehow serve as a protective net from flying debris impacting the glass.

That being said, I still suspect tape doesn’t work at all; the paragraph above is my interpretation of what window-tapers think they’re accomplishing.

So the question is, how did window-taping start? Clever marketing from 3M or a local retailer? Interestingly enough, the taping of windows was done by the Brits in World War II as part of ARP (Air Raid Precautions) measures during the German bombing Blitz. As you can see from the images below, the taping was rather more thorough than the half-assery pictured up top.

Explains a gent named Peter Johnson writing on a UK website about life in the 1900s,

[During the Blitz] each house was given some rolls of gummed brown sticky paper about 3 inches wide. These were for sticking to the inside of all the windows from corner to corner in a diagonal pattern to prevent shards of glass from flying into the rooms in a bomb blast.

What no one mentions, however, was whether this actually worked.

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