Writing this, I had a few 3M products nearby, forgot the post it notes & Velcro. 

The 3M company was started in 1902 in Minnesota, at the Lake Superior town of Two Harbors. Five men started out to mine mineral deposits for grinding-wheel abrasives. However, developing the grinding wheel abrasives with these deposits proved to be an unprofitable venture. The newly formed company, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co. (3M) picked up operations and relocated to Duluth, Minnesota to concentrate their efforts on sandpaper production.

Times were tough for 3M and the newly formed company had difficulty until it could perfect quality production and a distribution chain. A new investor, Lucius Ordway, was instrumental in moving the company to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1910. Due to 3M’s striving to improve their technical and marketing efforts, 3M began to profit in 1916. 3M Products paid its first dividend to it’s investors at a whopping 6 cents a share.

One of 3M’s innovations in the 1920’s was waterproof sandpaper. Waterproof sandpaper reduced airborne dusts during automobile surface preparation for painting.
Another step towards making the painting process easier in 1925, made by Richard G. Drew, was the development of masking tape. (My thought while researching this was “what did they use before there was masking tape?”) This was an important step toward growing the 3M company and the first of many Scotch Pressure-Sensitive Tapes.
In the years from that time, 3M’s technical prowess resulted in Scotch Cellophane Tape for box sealing and then many practical uses were discovered.
In the early forties 3M Products produced materials for defense, to support American efforts in World War II. Learning from the experience of producing products during the war, new products evolved, such as Scotchlite Reflective Sheeting for highway markings, magnetic sound recording tape, filament adhesive tape and the start of 3M’s involvement in the graphic art products field with offset printing plates.

In the nineteen fifties, 3M Products, unveiled the Thermo-Fax copying process, Scotchgard Fabric Protector, videotape, Scotch-Brite Cleaning Pads and several new electro-mechanical products. Dry-silver microfilm was a 3M product that came about in the nineteen sixties, as well asphotgraphic products, carbonless papers, overhead projection systems and a fast growing health care business of medical and dental products. 3M’s product line increased even more in the nineteen seventies and eighties to sur compass goods in pharmaceuticals, radiology and energy control. In nineteen eighty, 3M Products created Post-it Notes, which was a entirely new category in the marketplace and changed people’s communication and organization behavior forever.
In the nineties, 3M’s product sales reached the $15 billion mark. 3M Products continued to develop more and more innovative products, including immune response modifier pharmaceuticals; brightness enhancement films for electronic displays; and flexible circuits used in inkjet printers, cell phones and other electronic devices.
In 2004, 3M’s product sales topped $20 billion for the first time, with innovative new products contributing significantly to growth. Recent innovations include Post-it Super Sticky Notes, Scotch brand Transparent Duct Tape, optical films for LCD televisions and a new family of Scotch-Brite Cleaning Products that gave consumers the right scrubbing power for a host of cleaning jobs.

3M affected me, I was in in the automotive repair field for years and the 3M product that made my job so much easier as an auto technician was Scotch-Brite Roloc Surface Discs Reconditioning Discs (Cookies). I remember scraping old gaskets for water pumps, timing covers, transmission pans and many other surfaces prior to installing new gaskets and replacement parts. What a pain scraping gaskets was. With Roloc discs, removing gaskets was bearable. When replacing water pumps I used to always use 3M weather-strip glue. Since mechanics used weather strip glue for gluing gaskets, the 3M company has caught on and now the box says weather-strip and gasket adhesive. Some of the guys I used to work with called the 3M yellow weather strip glue, Gorilla Snot.  Since then many companies have adopted that name for various products. One of the more recent 3M products that help automotive technicians is the Roloc Brake Rotor Surfacing Discs. They are great for swirling rotors to create the non directional surface recommended on brake rotors after machining. 3M Product line is constantly growing, it will be interesting to see what they come up with next especially related to car tools.