Read more: The coder club turning out tween tech prodigiesīut it never found a practical application, until in 1974 he was approached by a 3M colleague, Art Fry, who had heard him talk about his microspheres at a company seminar.įry had been in church for choir practice, grappling with a regularly occurring problem with his hymnbook, when he had his “eureka moment” – “the one where you get the adrenaline rush,” he says – regarding the way Silver’s microspheres could potentially help.ĭuring his Wednesday night choir practice, Fry would bookmark his hymnbook with pieces of paper – but by Sunday morning they would have fallen out. “I got to be known as ‘Mr Persistent,’ because I wouldn’t give up,” he said. What he came up with were microspheres, which retained their stickiness and had a “removability characteristic,” allowing attached surfaces to be peeled apart easily.įor years he struggled to find a use for his invention, preaching the merits of his creation to unreceptive colleagues. “It was part of my job as a researcher to develop new adhesives, and at that time we wanted to develop bigger, stronger, tougher adhesives,” he said. Spencer Silver, co-inventor of the Post-it We wanted to develop bigger, stringer, tougher adhesives. Spencer Silver, a chemist for the giant multinational Minnesotan company 3M, was attempting to develop a better adhesive. The story of the Post-it – the self-attaching note that adheres in such a way that it can be removed without causing damage – begins in 1968. In fact, it took 12 years from when the technology behind the product was first developed, to Post-its hitting the market. The sticky yellow squares did not always look destined to set the office supply world alight. It’s been described as the solution to a problem nobody realized existed.īut that hasn’t stopped the humble Post-it Note from becoming a ubiquitous fixture of stationery cupboards worldwide, with manufacturers 3M producing 50 billion each year.
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