Originally made from flexible cloth or plastic, fiberglass is now the preferred material due to its resistance from stretching or tearing.

[2]Measuring tapes designed for carpentry or construction often use a curved metallic ribbon that can remain stiff and straight when extended, but can also retract into a coil for convenient storage.

The hook is connected to the tape with loose rivets through oval holes, and can move a distance equal to its thickness, to provide both inside and outside measurements that are accurate.

Due to this, measuring tapes used for surveying may be made out of invar because of its low rate of thermal expansion.

These tapes were manually inscribed with notches to denote specific measurements, enabling tailors to record the proportions of their clients.

[6] His design consisted of a spring-loaded cloth strip with marked measurements, housed within a compact case.

[8] On 6 December 1864, William H. Bangs received a patent for the first design of a spring return tape measure.

Fellows' design differed from Bang's by allowing the tape to be held in place via a spring-click mechanism.

[11] The first patented long tape measure in the United States was granted on 10 July 1860 to William H. Paine, and produced by George M. Eddy and Company.

Instead, it functioned as a singular unit of measurement, with the entire length of the tape representing a fixed distance.

To compete with other products, they transitioned to etching or stamping increments and numbers directly onto the tape, eliminating the need for rivets and washers.

[18] In 1947, the Swedish engineer Ture Anders Ljungberg began developing an improved version and in 1954 the TALmeter was introduced.

It was produced by his own company T A Ljungberg AB until 2005, when it was bought by Hultafors in 2005, who retained the name "Talmeter" for the product they now refer to as a märkmeter (marker-meter).

The basic design on which all modern spring tape measures are built can trace its origins back to an 1864 patent by a Meriden, Connecticut resident named William H. Bangs Jr.

The sale of dual Metric/US Customary scale measuring tapes is slowly becoming common in the United States.

As a curious fact, in 1956, Justus Roe, a surveyor and tape-maker by trade, made the 600 feet (183 m) gold-plated tape measure and, in a publicity gimmick, presented it to American professional baseball player Mickey Mantle.

[29][30][circular reference] This was formally stated as follows: "The metric units for linear measurement in building and construction will be the metre (m) and the millimetre (mm), with the kilometre (km) being used where required.

The accuracy for the end of a retractable tape measure is dependent on the hook's sliding mechanism and thickness.