How Duct Tape Sealed My Place in History
By Max Sherman
Sunday, September 13, 1998; Page C01
"Daddy is famous," declared my 5-year-old. "Famous" is
something Sabrina
can relate to, unlike "scientist," which is what Daddy
really is.
While my daughter might have had some vague understanding
of the
purpose of my scientific work--"saving electricity"--she
now thinks that
Daddy's job is to have his name in the paper and on the
radio.
I owe this to what appears to be one of the foundations
of American society:
duct tape. Yes, I am talking about that gray sticky roll
of stuff you probably
have in your house, car, boat, truck or garage. You may
have heard about
me this month, or at least about my work, because I was
credited with
finding out that duct tape is not really very good for
sealing ducts. The story
of my findings spread globally, breaking through all the
other news barriers,
appearing in more places than I care to count. It was a
duct tape feeding
frenzy.
Yes, I really am a scientist and, yes, I really am "doing
science." I study
energy efficiency in buildings. This task has involved
testing the
effectiveness of duct sealants. Anyone who has dealt with
old ducts in an
attic will not be surprised to hear about failing duct
tape. Although I have
always used duct tape, it was not part of my boyhood
ambition to make a
career out of it. While getting my PhD in physics from
Berkeley, such
dreams involved winning a Nobel Prize or discovering a
new element, a new
planet, a new particle or new energy sources, rather than
finding flaws in
duct tape.
I decided early in my career to work on the scientific
aspects of energy and
environmental issues. My colleagues and I have been
working on the
important, but hardly Einsteinian, problems of why so
much energy is wasted
in the heating and cooling ducts of houses. Over the past
two years, we have
used the resources of the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory to build
an apparatus capable of doing accelerated testing of
different kinds of duct
sealants. We exposed the sealants to rapid changes in
heat, cold and
pressure in ranges typical of extremes found in houses.
While most of the
sealants passed our test, duct tape failed, often in just
a few days.
The sound bite I provided for this, which was grabbed by
the media, was
that "it failed reliably and often catastrophically." I
admit to selecting those
words for their impact: "Catastrophically" is technically
quite accurate, but
sounds like something more dramatic than tape falling off
quickly.
Because our findings were so clear-cut, we wanted to
publish them promptly
for the benefit of our sponsors, so we chose the journal
Home Energy
(July/August 1998 issue) rather than the more hidebound
scientific
publications we usually pick. "Can Duct Tape Take the
Heat?" can be found
online at www.homeenergy.org/898ductape.title.
Almost as soon as our published results became available
on the Web in
July, my life took on a different character. It started
quietly, with a call from
Better Homes and Gardens, which was preparing a duct tape
piece
mentioning my research for its September issue.
Perversely, a July 27 story in USA Today indirectly
triggered the frenzy that
followed. USA Today gave the credit for this research to
the Lawrence
Livermore Lab rather than the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. To
the labs, this is
like confusing a Republican from North Carolina with a
Democrat from
Massachusetts. (The Berkeley Lab is the older and more
diverse, while
Livermore Lab does the classified nuclear weapons work.)
The Berkeley Lab public relations office sprang into
action, taking a press
release it had been preparing in a more leisurely fashion
and expediting it--so
that such a mistake would not happen again.
That's when phones started ringing. I was a little taken
aback when I got a
call from a reporter who "covers duct tape for the Wall
Street Journal." It
occurred to me that this was a rather specialized
position, until he informed
me that he did other things as well.
In the next week came the Sacramento Bee and San Jose
Mercury News. I
got an appreciation for what good science editors and
writers do at
metropolitan papers. Most of the other coverage was
derived from these
two stories, because they were distributed on the wire
services. Carrie
Peyton of the Bee came to our lab to interview us and see
the apparatus and
the results. Glennda Chui of the Mercury News came down
to the
conference where I was presenting the results.
The few days which followed are still a blur. I was
interviewed (by phone)
by MSNBC, NPR, CBS, the Associated Press and several
others that I
can't remember. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
"As It Happens"
radio program did a story with my Canadian co-author,
Iain Walker, followed
by a listener call-in on duct tape the following day.
Soon I was doing several interviews daily, answering
questions like: "How
did it get its name?" (I don't know.) "What can you use
it for?" (Anything but
ducts.) "Do you use duct tape?" (All the time, just not
on ducts.)
It gives one a bit of a swelled head to have two
producers from NPR
fighting over which show you should be on, or to put the
Associated Press
on hold while you talk to CBS.
Early one morning while I was at the conference, my wife
Jan got a phone
call asking for me. When the caller then asked for Iain
Walker, who would
not normally be at my home at that hour, she was a bit
concerned. But when
the caller asked if she knew anything about duct tape,
she realized what was
going on.
What Jan did not realize was that as soon as she said she
knew a little of the
results, she was put on Alaskan radio--live. The
Anchorage newspaper
reported that a pillar of Alaskan culture was under
attack; it appears that
Alaskans take their duct tape quite seriously.
There is a sort of duct tape cult, which I became aware
of when we started
this research. Web sites and books abound, glorifying the
many uses of duct
tape. Few mention ducts at all. The cults appear
harmless, but my wife is
concerned over my notoriety. So she has forbidden me from
opening any
packages sealed with duct tape, meeting with duct tape
manufacturers
unchaperoned, or having anything to do with the state of
Montana.
My friends and relatives have since called in from all
over the country.
There was a bit of "You got a PhD in physics so you could
what? Study duct
tape?" Or "Real scientists don't do duct tape." Or "You
wasted your 15
minutes of fame on duct tape?"
There is a serious side to this story. Millions of homes
have their duct
systems sealed with duct tape. Our results indicate that
there could be a
large number of premature failures, especially in the Sun
Belt. Such failures
would not usually be obvious. Rather, it would look as if
the air conditioning
(or heating) was simply not doing the job as well as it
used to. The
homeowner would call the repair guy, who would sell them
a larger unit and
all would be fine again.
Fine, except for the fact that the homeowner was paying
far too much
money for energy and equipment, and that a big chunk of
carbon was being
added to our atmosphere needlessly.
This enormous potential savings is why the utility rate
payer (through the
California Institute for Energy Efficiency) and the
American taxpayer
(through the Department of Energy and the Environmental
Protection
Agency) are paying us to do duct research.
As a professional, the one line I should probably be the
most proud of is the
one in the sound-to-be-adopted energy code of the state
of California that
discourages the use of duct tape on ducts by builders.
Using other sealants
(of which there are plenty) is a win-win situation,
saving the homeowner
money and helping the environment.
But as one-liners go, seeing yourself quoted in Time
magazine is hard to
beat.
Soon all of this duct tapery will be forgotten by the
press. I will get back to
my less exciting but still important research. Sabrina
has already grown tired
of hearing about duct tape and has ordered us to stop
talking about it at
dinner. She has declared, and rightly so, that her first
week in kindergarten
ought to be the subject of conversation.
I am, however, still a "duct tape hero" in the eyes of my
7-year-old, Alex. He
read that duct tape is like the Force because it binds us
and holds us
together. Naturally then, Daddy must be a Jedi knight.
Thank you, duct tape.
Max Sherman is a senior scientist at the Lawrence
Berkeley National
Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.
c Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
Gregory Thomas
121 Rachel Carson Way
Ithaca, NY 14850
g_thomas@compuserve.com