Unlikely Places For Eureka Moments: Post-It Notes
Arthur Fry
Researcher at 3M
Choir loft, North Presbyterian Church
St. Paul, Minnesota“I was singing in the church choir, and I would often put little pieces of paper into the music on Wednesday night to mark where we were singing. Sometimes, before Sunday morning, that little paper would fall out. It was during the sermon that Sunday morning that I thought, ‘What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but will not tear the paper when I remove it.’ I thought about a colleague in 3M’s central research department who had been looking at these acrylated adhesives that we used in things like Magic Tape. He had come up with a batch of little sticky spheres. I got samples of those and set about trying to make a bookmark. I thought it was going to be a little niche market. I discovered they weren’t just a bookmark but were wonderfully useful for notes and labels — because it’s a paper world out there and we need to stick things to paper.”
Photo by NatsPhotos.
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