Sure Horizon

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

The story of the very first measuring tape is lost somewhere in history. There’s no record of when people first realized that they could use a tape with marking on it to measure size, length, and width. By the eighteenth century tailors and dress makers in Europe were commonly using measuring tapes to design and fit garments to their customers. These cloth tapes with markings for inches, fractions of inches, and even feet, slowly became mainstream and women used these tape measures for home sewing projects.

By the nineteenth century the concept of tapes for measurements was adapted to carpentry. Unlike rulers and bulky folding rulers used by carpenters, tape measures could be wound up into a small coil. Credit for designing the first steel tape measure goess to Justus Roe & Sons of New York who began selling them in 1865 while the first spring tape measure was patented by Alvin Fellows of Connecticut in 1868. The steel construction allowed the tape to hold steady when measuring out longer distances for construction and the spring made it self-winding once the measurement was taken.

There was some resistance to these “newfagled” tools. Many carpenters stayed loyal to the traditional folding rulers for several decades. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the spring loaded steel tapes became popular. Today while most homes have both sewing and carpentry measures, more and more homes are using laser measuring tools or tools that use ultrasonic technology to determining the distance between the reader and an end point.