Tipp Ex
Tipp-Ex is a brand name for correction foils and fluids for covering up typos when writing with a typewriter . The inventor of these correction media was Wolfgang Dabisch, who received a patent for it in 1959 and founded the Tipp-Ex company in Eltville am Rhein to manufacture the products of the same name.
Shortly afterwards, Otto Wilhelm Carls founded Tipp-Ex Vertrieb GmbH & Co. KG in Frankfurt am Main . The product quickly became popular and was so widespread at home and abroad that the brand name Tipp-Ex established itself in colloquial usage as a generic name for spelling correction aids.
history
Tipp-Ex for use with typewriters consists of small foil sheets in the format approx. 2 cm × 5 cm, which are coated on one side with fine powdery white paint. In order to correct a wrongly typed character, you bring the mistake to the point where the types are used, place the Tipp-Ex with the coated side on the paper and type the wrong character again. The stop removes white paint in such a way that it covers the character. The area covered in this way can then be rewritten.
From 1965 a liquid correction aid was also sold under the name Tipp-Ex , which was mainly used to cover spelling errors in handwritten texts. The sale of the same product under the name C-Fluid by the same manufacturer could not seriously prevent the public perception of a quasi- monopoly in this area.
The principle of the correction fluid was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham . She worked as a secretary at Texas Bank and Trust in Dallas in the early 1950s . Graham brushed over typed letters or words with painting paint, blew and rewrote them. She later marketed the product under the name Liquid Paper .
Since the organic chlorine solvent 1,1,1-trichloroethane used in the liquid Tipp-Ex raised concerns about health risks in some consumers, a water-soluble variant was later produced and sold.
From 1992 Tipp-Ex also manufactured correction tapes, from 1998 also correction pens.
Tipp-Ex has been owned by the BIC Group since 1997 . Otto Wilhelm Carls and his wife Ursula Carls used the proceeds from the sale to set up the Carls Foundation.
According to the manufacturer, the brand name should be the tenth best-known German brand name worldwide.
Oddities
A somewhat unusual use of Tipp-Ex is in the manufacture of Damascus steel . In the manufacture of so-called canister damask, blacksmiths like to use Tipp-Ex during fire welding as a separating layer between the high-quality steel inside and the inferior steel of the canister. This makes it easier to remove the inferior steel after the welding process.
Tipp-Ex paper found an almost bizarre use in bird migration experiments at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . To find out if birds migratory restlessness had, they were in the group of Professor Wolfgang Wiltschko in so-called Emlentrichter set, which were lined with white-out-paper and covered up with a sheet of glass. The birds tried to jump up the smooth walls of the funnel, leaving scratch marks on the paper. Since the funnels were set up according to cardinal points, a preferred flight direction could be determined from the scratch marks (which actually exists and which is opposite in autumn and spring).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Trademark register
- ^ Carls Foundation
- ↑ Forged in Fire: Weaponsmiths' Contest, Various Episodes.