Post-it Notes came from a glue that was too weak to work
A 3M chemist made an adhesive nobody wanted — until a colleague used it to keep a bookmark from falling out of his hymnal.
In 1968, 3M chemist Spencer Silver was trying to make a super-strong adhesive. He got the opposite: a glue full of tiny microspheres that stuck lightly, peeled off cleanly, and could be reused. It seemed like a “solution without a problem,” and for years Silver promoted it inside 3M with no takers.
The problem found him through a colleague. Art Fry sang in a church choir and was forever losing his place when paper bookmarks slipped out of his hymnal. In 1974 he remembered Silver’s adhesive — a bookmark that could stick and then lift away without damaging the page.
The pair soon realised the notes were better for jotting and passing messages than for marking pages. After a lukewarm test launch as “Press ‘n Peel,” 3M rebranded and rolled out Post-it Notes across the United States on April 6, 1980, where they became a runaway hit.
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