This Beloved Office Supply Was Invented by Accident
Sometimes, happy accidents lead to great things. Take cheese—a huge accident. Or the fact that alcohol makes superconductors run faster—drunken discovery. And the power of an accident is behind what could be the most iconic, successful office supply of our time: the humble-but-sticky Post-it Note.
It starts in a lab at 3M, where chemist Spencer Silver messed up bigtime. His goal was to create super-strong adhesives for the company, but during his experiments he actually created glue that was less sticky than the adhesives he’d been tasked to make. However, he’d stumbled across a new way of adhering things to other things: a pressure-sensitive adhesive that relied on linked polymers known as microspheres.
Struggling to justify his screw-up, Silver started to try to find a way to use microspheres in an industrial application—and failed again. Microsphere adhesives were cool, but totally useless. That is, until Silver’s coworker Art Fry learned of the innovation. Fry was a singer in his church choir, but was frustrated by his hymnal bookmarks’ penchant for constantly falling out. He wondered if he could use Silver’s not-so-sticky glue to get them to adhere.
3M had a “permitted bootlegging” policy that allowed employees to spend some of their time working on pet projects instead of focusing on company priorities. Fry began to create prototypes using Silver’s failed adhesive. Seven years after Silver’s discovery, Fry had invented the Post-it Note—and seven years later, the technology headed out to the field.
Fry called the result “a whole new way to communicate.” He tested the product extensively at 3M (employees loved it) before taking it to Boise Idaho to prove its viability. It became a ubiquitous product, moving out of offices and into homes and helping transform 3M into much more than an adhesives maker.
Now, 35 years after its introduction, the Post-it Note has wormed its way into popular culture. It’s even used in art, from over-the-top pixelated office murals to curated events featuring hundreds of works of art drawn on the small sticky notes. Chalk it up to the power of the perfect mistake.
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