It’s no secret that R&D can sometimes take a while to come to fruition, but if any proof were needed that persistence pays off, look no further than the humble office Post-it note.
As the story goes, 3M’s Dr Spencer Silver had been tasked with developing a super-strong adhesive for use in the aerospace industry no less. What he came up with instead, in 1968, couldn’t really have been further from the brief: a surprisingly unsticky glue that would be lucky to hold together a paper plane.
What the new adhesive agent did possess however was a pressure-sensitive characteristic, as well as the ability to peel off surfaces without leaving any residue. Convinced of its dubious merits, Spencer touted his ‘solution without a problem’ around 3M’s offices and ‘sharing seminars’ for five long years, earning him the title ‘Mr Persistence’.
Spencer’s eventual salvation came in the form of chorister and colleague Art Fry, who realised that coating bookmarks in the not-so-sticky stuff would prevent them from falling out of his well-thumbed hymnbook and him from losing his place during choir practice.
It would be more than a decade after the initial discovery before Post-it notes were finally distributed to stores nationwide, but what Silver’s ‘epic fail’ originally lacked in purpose, it had more than made for in popularity. One of the five best-selling office supply products in the world today, around 50 billion of 3M’s ubiquitous Post-it notes are now sold every single year.
Stick at it folks!
