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Mitch McConnell Is Older Than Duct Tape

Rolls of duct tape at a hardware store (left) and Mitch McConnell in 2021 (right).
Rolls of duct tape at a hardware store (left) and Mitch McConnell in 2021 (right). Photo: Mario Tama / Anna Moneymaker (Getty Images)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, was born on February 20, 1942.

Duct tape was invented in 1942 after a woman named Vesta Stoudt, who had two sons serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt with an idea for a new type of tape to seal gun boxes. Surprisingly, Roosevelt passed the idea along to Johnson & Johnson, which was tasked with creating the new cloth-based tape.

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