便利貼：黏東西的最佳幫手

Post- it Notes: Making the Best of a Sticky Situation

You’ve probably never heard of Art Fry or Spencer Silver. But you’ve definitely heard of, and used, their famous invention. What is it? Possibly the most important office supply product since the paperclip!

Art Fry loved to build things as a child, so it was natural that he study engineering in college. In 1953, while still an undergraduate in Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, he found a job as a new product development researcher at 3M—then known as Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing.

Spencer Silver followed a similar path, joining 3M’s Central Research Labs as a chemist in 1966 after studying organic chemistry at the University of Colorado. In 1968, while trying to invent a better adhesive for tape, Silver came up with something truly revolutionary—a reusable adhesive that was sticky enough to hold sheets of paper together, but not sticky enough to make them tear when you pulled them apart. The only thing was, he’d invented a solution without a problem.

Until, that is, Art Fry learned about Silver’s new adhesive at a company seminar five years later. Fry enjoyed singing at church, but he had a problem—the pieces of paper he used to mark his place often fell out when he opened his hymn book. One day, while sitting through a boring sermon, he had his eureka moment: he could use Silver’s adhesive to make a bookmark that would stay in place without damaging the pages.

When Fry passed out these bookmarks to his coworkers, they began using them to write notes on, and the Post-it was born. Introduced in the U.S. in 1980, and Canada and Europe a year later, Post-its can now be found stuck to computers, desks and doors in offices and homes all over the world.