Summary Of Post-It Notes: An Idea That Stuck By Spencer Silver

Post-it Notes: An Idea that Stuck In 1966, 3M hired a young chemist named Spencer Silver. Silver was born in San Antonio, TX and had worked his way to a doctrine degree in chemistry. Little did they know that his invention, in just over 20 years, would account for one billion dollars in sales. His invention, seemingly so simple and used every day, started as a solution without a problem. Spencer Silver began his work looking to invent a super strong adhesive. Incidentally, he developed an adhesive that possessed the quality of low-tack. This allowed the adhesive to be applied to a surface and be removed cleanly while still maintaining a strong bond to the surface. This was achieved through the use of “indestructible acrylic spheres that would stick only when they were tangent to a given surface” (Wong 2).

Silver could not find an application for his newly discovered adhesive. That is until in 1974, one of Silver’s colleagues, Art Fry came up with an idea. Art Fry, who was a minister at a local church, had a problem. During the week, when practicing for his sermons, he would place pieces of paper in the hymnals to mark the hymns that would be sung. Come Sunday, the pieces of paper were gone. Fry used the new adhesive on yellow scrap paper to test his application. He discovered that the adhesive allowed the note to stick strongly, but be removed cleanly. Someone had finally found a problem for the solution that Silver had discovered. 3M took the product to market under the name “Press ‘n Peel” in four cities in 1977. This turned out to be a bust, but executives were not discouraged. 3M later gave out free samples in Boise, Idaho where 94% of the people who tried them were interested in buying the notes. In 1980, the name was changed to “Post-it Notes” and 3M tried again in the US. Success was much better and the following year they were launched in Canada and