There's probably one stuck to your fridge, your computer screen or the page of a cookbook right now. The little yellow sticky note is so ordinary that it's hard to imagine life without it. But it only exists because an experiment didn't go as planned.
In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at the American company 3M, was trying to develop a super-strong adhesive. Instead, he accidentally created a low-tack glue that could stick, peel off and stick again. It took years, and a slippery bookmark in a hymn book, before anyone figured out what it was good for.
A Solution Without a Problem
Silver's new glue was interesting, but nobody could think of a use for it. He called it a solution without a problem. For five years he promoted it around 3M, talking it up informally and presenting it at seminars, but he couldn't win any converts.
Still, he kept at it. That persistence paid off, because one of the people who sat through his seminars would turn out to be exactly the right listener.
The Bookmark That Wouldn't Fall Out
In 1974, a 3M colleague named Arthur Fry had a small but annoying problem. He wanted a bookmark that would stay put in his hymn book. Remembering Silver's seminar, he came up with the idea of using the weak, reusable glue to anchor his bookmark.
Fry used a 3M policy known as permitted bootlegging, which lets employees spend some of their work time on projects of their own choosing. He made prototypes and handed them out to coworkers, who started using them to leave messages for each other. That's when it became clear the product was more than a bookmark. It was a new way to communicate.
Why the Notes Are Yellow
Here's a fun detail. The famous canary yellow color wasn't the result of careful marketing research. It was chosen by chance, simply because yellow scrap paper was what the lab next door to the Post-it team happened to have on hand.
A Rocky Start, Then a Blitz
Success didn't come right away. In 1977, 3M tested the product in stores in four cities under the name Press 'n Peel. Sales were disappointing.
A year later, the company tried again with a big campaign nicknamed the Boise Blitz. It renamed the product the Post-it Note and handed out free samples to offices in Boise, Idaho. This time, more than 90 percent of the people who tried the samples said they would buy them.
Post-it Notes went on sale across the United States in 1980, and in Canada and Europe the next year. Silver and Fry both finished their careers at 3M with top honors for their research and many international engineering awards.
A Name Worth Protecting
3M's patent expired in 1997, so other companies now sell look-alike sticky notes, often calling them repositionable notes. The Post-it name and the original yellow color, though, are still 3M trademarks. That same year, 3M even sued Microsoft over an electronic Post-it in its Office 97 software.
Credit for the idea has been argued over, too. An inventor named Alan Amron claimed he came up with it in 1973. His 1997 lawsuit against 3M ended in a confidential settlement, and a later suit he filed in 2016 was dismissed.
So the next time you jot a reminder on a sticky note, remember that it began as a glue that didn't stick well enough. Sometimes a failed experiment just needs the right problem to come along.
