In 1968 a chemist named Spencer Silver at the company 3M was trying to invent a glue stronger than any in the world. He failed spectacularly. He ended up making a glue so weak that two pieces of paper would stick together - and peel apart again without leaving any mess. He thought it was interesting but pretty useless. He talked about it to anyone who would listen.
Six years later one of his colleagues, Art Fry, was getting annoyed at the bookmarks falling out of his church hymnbook. He remembered Silver’s mystery glue and dabbed a tiny strip of it onto the back of a slip of paper. It stuck without tearing the page.
3M tested Post-it Notes in one U.S. city first, and sales were terrible. Almost nobody understood what they were for. Then they tried giving away free samples - and within months, offices everywhere were covered in little yellow squares. Today 3M sells around 50 billion Post-its a year.
