Stick ’Em Up! Sticky Notes

In the mid-1970s, a chemist by the name of Art Frey was working for 3M in its adhesives division. Frey, who sang in a choir, used little scraps of paper to keep his place in his choir book, but they kept falling out. At one point, he remembered an adhesive that had been developed but rejected a couple years earlier because it didn’t hold things together well. The next Monday, he smeared some of this “lousy” adhesive on a piece of paper and found that it worked very well as a bookmark — and it peeled right off without leaving a residue. Thus was born those little yellow sticky notes you now find posted everywhere.