Sticky notes came from a glue that didn't stick well.
In 1968 3M chemist Spencer Silver made a weak adhesive nobody had a use for, until colleague Art Fry wanted bookmarks that wouldn't fall out of his church choir hymnal.
More amazing facts
- 1967 · 1974 Humanity's most famous ancestor is named after a Beatles song.
- 1967 The first pulsar was jokingly named LGM-1, for 'little green men'. In 1967 Cambridge student Jocelyn Bell spotted radio pulses so regular that the team seriously checked whether they could be signals from aliens.
- 1968 Almost every high jumper today goes over the bar backwards, thanks to one American.
- 1969 The computer that guided Apollo to the Moon had about 4 kilobytes of working memory: 2,048 sixteen-bit words of magnetic core.
- 1969 The first session on ARPANET, the internet's ancestor, crashed after two letters.
- 1969 · 1971 The first microprocessor was ordered for a Japanese calculator.