Who is he and what did he invent?

without cheating and looking the guy's picture up, I'd guess it's earl scheib or maaco related. 

Or masking tape or something of that sort. 

Or a spray gun/reservoir cleaner that recovers the paint out of a spray gun. Picture looks old enough that it's before two part paints. 

After typing this, I'm going to cheat and see what he actually did.

Added later 1 d 4 h 38 min 07 s:

Since nobody else is visiting this post a day later. I had half of a good guess above, and the comment about him being Scottish should've led to guessing the other half. 

But coming from a pa dutch (protestant, not amish) background generations before, my relatives would not have called using masking tape and throwing it away cheap, but that was still my guess. 

Anything that's used once and thrown away would've been seen as a luxury to them, even if it made economic sense. 

A follow on to this about the guess of the spray gun cleaner - I don't know if those or other tools recover paint in a pot or lines (probably, especially in a production setting where you can count up real dollars by the end of the week), but it took little time to find automatic spray gun cleaners for a few grand. 

Nobody can have much of an original idea these days!

(follow on comment - it appears the innovation with the tape was the adhesive and not so much the tape. Reading an article on the scotch side reminds me of older relatives referring to it as cellophane tape, words I forgot. As my older relatives dropped off, we either referred to it as "real scotch tape" or "fake scotch tape". Fake just being off brand, and quite often, the off brand stuff back then was really abysmal. We should've called it dutchy tape - for pa germans two cheap to buy scotch tape).