Postmodernism, Writ Small
by g.beato

The spare utility of the Post-It note seems increasingly remarkable in a world gone hi-tech. No user manuals, no upgrades, no messages – you simply write your note and affix it to some surface. How simple. How efficient.

Its low-tech tactility can make you forget that it’s a relatively invention; in fact, its parallels that of the computer. At the same time that Steve Wozniak was creating the prototype for the first Apple, Art Fry and his colleagues at 3M were experimenting with primitive versions of a new product self-stick note pad with repositional adhesive.

Success came quicker to Wozniak, who debuted the successful Apple II in 1977. When 3M introduced Post-it Notes a few months later, initial sales were so disappointing the company took the product off the market. Despite the simplicity and intuitiveness which we attribute to Post-It Notes today, the typical office-worker simply didn’t know how to use them.

Which isn’t that surprising, really. Even their inventor Fry didn’t recognize their primary utility at first. Initially, longtime 3M engineer had hoped merely to create a better bookmark. He was motivated by a personal reason; he liked to sing in church choir on Sundays, but the tiny pieces of paper he’d been using to mark songs in his hymnal kept getting lost in its pages.

Pondering how to solve this problem in church one morning, Fry suddenly recalled an adhesive that his 3M colleague Dr. Spencer Silver had recently invented. Unlike more conventional adhesives, this one, as a consequence of Silver’s experimental operations on its molecular structure, formed itself into minuscule spheres instead of an even coating. The result was tape that stuck to things, but not very well; the tiny spaces between the spheres of adhesive made complete contact between the tape and another surface impossible.

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