Inventor who made the Post-it Note stick
Spencer Silver, a chemist who accidentally invented the delicate adhesive used in Post-it Notes, an innovation that blanketed the office landscape like a blizzard with messages and reminders and became a favored modern medium for jotting notes to oneself and others, died May 8 at his home in St. Paul, Minn. He was 80.
Dr. Silver’s death was announced by 3M — maker of products including Scotch tape — where he had worked for nearly three decades. He had cardiac ailments unrelated to a heart transplant that he underwent 27 years ago, said his wife, Linda Silver.
The Postit Note was credited to two principal inventors — Silver, tasked by 3M in 1968 with creating a new super-strong adhesive, and Art Fry, a colleague who discovered an application for the intriguing substance that Silver produced.
His adhesive at first seemed a failure. It was weaker even than a schoolchild’s art glue. But it had an unusual characteristic: It could be attached to a surface, peeled off and reattached without damaging the surface or losing stickiness.
Silver struggled to find a marketable application for it. It was, he observed, “a solution waiting for a problem to solve.” That problem was identified in 1974 by Fry, a 3M scientist who sang in a Presbyterian church choir. He marked each week’s musical selec- tions with scraps of paper, which, to his annoyance, fluttered to the floor when he opened his hymnal.
Silver received 37 patents during his employment with 3M, according to the company, where he retired in 1996.
He and Fry were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010.
Survivors include his wife of 55 years, Linda; a daughter, Jennifer Silver; and two grandchildren. His daughter Allison Anderson died in 2017.