The Post-it Note came from a failed attempt to make super-strong glue.
In 1968 a 3M chemist trying to make a very strong adhesive made a weak, reusable one instead. For years nobody wanted it. Then a colleague needed a bookmark that wouldn't fall out of his hymn book. The famous canary yellow was simply the colour of the scrap paper next door.
Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, was trying to develop a super-strong adhesive in 1968. What he got was the opposite: a low-tack, pressure-sensitive glue that stuck lightly and peeled off cleanly, again and again. For five years he promoted this 'solution without a problem' around the company, formally and informally, and found no takers.
In 1974 Arthur Fry, who had attended one of Silver's seminars, wanted a bookmark that would stay put in his church hymn book without damaging the pages. He developed the idea under 3M's 'permitted bootlegging' policy, which lets employees spend part of their working time on projects of their own choosing. The canary yellow was chosen by chance: it was the colour of scrap paper available in the lab next door. Once Fry handed prototypes around, colleagues started using them to leave each other messages, which revealed the product's real use.
The launch nearly failed. Test marketing as 'Press 'n Peel' in four cities in 1977 was disappointing. In 1978 3M tried again with the 'Boise Blitz', renaming it the Post-it Note and handing out free samples to offices in Boise, Idaho. More than 90 percent of people who tried them said they would buy. Post-its went on sale across the US in 1980 and in Canada and Europe the following year.
3M's patent expired in 1997, but the Post-it name and the original yellow remain trademarks. Another inventor, Alan Amron, claimed he came up with the idea first; a 1997 lawsuit ended in a confidential settlement, and a later suit was dismissed. The note is now in MoMA's architecture and design collection, and Silver and Fry were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010.
Source: Wikipedia — Post-it note · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
