An Idea That Stuck: How A Hymnal Bookmark Helped Inspire The Post-It Note
As part of a series called "My Big Break," All Things Considered is collecting stories of triumph, big and small. These are the moments when everything seems to click, and people leap forward into their careers.
For Spencer Silver, a retired chemist at 3M, his big break was the Post-it Note.
It all started when he stumbled on a new type of adhesive that used tiny microspheres.
The adhesive was weak enough that Silver could stick it and reapply it to surfaces without leaving behind any residue. But he had a problem: He didn't know what to do with it.
Then, Silver told his colleague Art Fry about the new adhesive.
"Spencer was talking about his adhesive and I learned a little bit about it," says Fry. "With so many new technologies you file them away in your memory bank and then pull them out when you see problems."
That problem came when Fry was singing in a church choir. He had bookmarked his hymnal with little pieces of paper but when it was time to sing, the pieces of paper fell out.
"Everybody else started singing and I'm still trying to find what page we're on," Fry says. "So I'm looking over the guy's shoulder next to me, trying to find the page."
That's when Fry started to wonder if he could create a bookmark that would stick and peel off the pages without tearing the paper.
He thought of Silver's new microsphere adhesive, and began creating some prototype products.