Unbeknownst to me, an unlikely collision of my two worlds resulted in a product which has impacted my life almost every single day for the last 11 years. I knew nothing of this revolutionary product's origin story until today. It's too good not to share, even at the risk of violating George Costanza's warning to keep worlds from colliding... It's a bit of a meta-revelation, as well, as the story comes from a book that one must buy used, because it was pulled from circulation after the author was discovered to have misquoted, of all people, my favorite recording artist, of all things! Should I even bother with such a book? This story alone vindicated the risk...

"It begins on a frigid Sunday morning in 1974 in the front pews of a Presbyterian church in north St. Paul, Minnesota. A few weeks earlier, (3M engineer, Arthur) Fry had attended a Tech Forum presentation by Spencer Silver, an engineer working on -- you guessed it -- adhesives. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Fry had patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. 'It seemed like a dead-end idea,' Fry says. 'I quickly put it out of my thoughts.' What good, after all is a glue that doesn't stick?

"That Sunday, however, the paste reentered Fry's thoughts, albeit in a rather unlikely context. 'I sang in the church choir,' Fry remembers, '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, those little papers would fall out.' This annoyed Fry, because it meant that he would often spend the service frantically thumbing through his hymnal, looking for the right page. But then, during a particularly boring sermon, Fry engaged in a little daydreaming. He began thinking about bookmarks, and how what he needed was a bookmark that would stick to the paper but wouldn't tear it when it was removed. And that's why Fry remembered Spencer Silver and his ineffective glue. He immediately realized that Silver's patented formula -- this barely sticky adhesive -- could help create the perfect bookmark..."

(From Jonah Lehrer's "Imagine," which I'd recommend buying used, despite the aforementioned controversy. Might be worth another post on that at some point, actually...)

The "perfect bookmark," as I'm sure you've figured out, became the Post-It note.

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.