The Post-it was born from a glue that went wrong

One of the most famous office objects in the world started out as a laboratory mistake: a glue that did not quite stick.

In 1968, a chemist called Spencer Silver was trying to create a very strong adhesive and got precisely the opposite: one so weak that it peeled off without leaving a trace. It looked useless, and for years nobody knew what to do with it. It was a colleague, Art Fry, who had the idea when he grew tired of his paper bookmarks falling out of the choir hymn book.

Those yellow notes that stick and unstick reached the market in 1980. The “faulty” glue turned out to be exactly what made it perfect.