Which adhesive is better: tape or glue? This great debate has caused a great schism among the people within the adhesives community; however, I offer a simple solution to this controversial topic. Tape is just objectively better, and if you disagree with me you’re just flat wrong.
The evidence is simple.
First, tape has the ability to stick together a wider variety of objects when compared with glue; any two items that don’t have flat sides can’t be stuck together with glue due to the items falling off of each other before the glue has time to dry. Take for instance this example: gluing together two spheres is a near-impossible task only seasoned glue veterans can perform. Meanwhile, tape can stick any two strange, polygonal figures together easily due to its lack of need for drying time.
Second, glue takes minutes to hours to dry and even when the glue looks dry, sometimes it isn’t. So, if you’re a fool opting to use glue, you may prematurely pick up the glued object only to learn your prized glue and macaroni self-portrait was unsecured as it crashes on the floor along with all of your hopes and dreams. Tape won’t do this to you--it will preserve your dreams of becoming a world-class macaroni artist.
Third, tape offers customers a greater variety of options. Glue has only a few variations: glue, stronger glue, and slightly stronger glue. Meanwhile, tape is constantly reinventing itself with each iteration: duct tape allows for higher durability, double-sided tape offers a clean face to face adhesive, and flex tape fixes all leaks. Flex Tape even works underwater.
And, as if you needed yet another reason why tape is the superior adhesive, tape does not leave a mess behind, unlike its liquid competitor. Communal glue bottles found in Summer Camps are always weirdly sticky. Tape is just objectively better than glue--fact proven.
Despite the overwhelming superiority of tape compared to glue, their origins are fairly similar. Both date back to the caveman times when an adhesive-like substance was used to preserve cave paintings. This adhesive then evolved when the Egyptians started using an animal-based adhesive to fix random objects. The point where these two products diverged is when in 1845, Dr. Horace Day decided to apply adhesive to a strip of fabric. Suddenly with this revelation, humanity was accelerated into a new age of scientific discovery and progress, because, you guessed it, the tape was born.
In 1921, the tape was once again advanced further, to create the band-aid. Without tape, we wouldn’t have band-aids and millions could have potentially died due to infected cuts and scratches. Duct tape was invented in 1942 to aid the troops in World War 2 by being a waterproof adhesive that could keep moisture out of ammunition cases. It was also essential to repair broken equipment, meaning that without the invention of tape the Allies would have lost against the Axis Powers in World War 2 and everybody today would be at the mercy of a fascist dictator. Meanwhile, the only advancement glue has made is that we no longer have to sacrifice animals to manufacture it. Although glue was essential to the invention of tape, it has been outdated by the scientific advances tape has made in its comparatively shorter existence. And sure, according to a 2016 sales report from the website statista.com, the glue company Elmer’s sales largely outnumber that of the tape company 3M Scotch, but it’s also proven that 99% of humans are idiots, so this point is proven invalid by the wider scientific community.
As my flawless reasoning demonstrates, there is no reason one should even consider that glue could ever match the glory of tape.