In 1968, Spencer Silver was a senior chemist at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (now called 3M). The adhesives were among 3M's best-selling products, and Silver was engaged in adhesive research in the laboratory, trying to create a super-strong adhesive for use in the aerospace industry for building aircraft. “We wanted to develop bigger, stronger, more durable stickers,” Silver said. Unfortunately his prototype was a failure: the glue was too weak to be of any use. It was more of a sticky substance than a binding glue. However, the substance had three important properties: one, it had a high level of stickiness, two, it had a low degree of adhesion, and three, it was strong. In other words, the adhesive was strong enough to stick to surfaces, but left no residue after removal and could be removed easily. Additionally, the substance resisted breaking, dissolving or dissolving, which meant the adhesive was reusable. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essaySilver struggled to find a use for this new glue. He said, “My discovery was a solution waiting for a problem to be solved.” The sticker did not interest 3M management; it was deemed too weak to be useful. Although Silver promoted the product for five years directly to various 3M employees, the sticker was more or less shelved. He became known as “Mr. Persistent” because he didn't want to give up. In 1973, when Dr. Geoff Nicholson was named product lab manager at 3M, Silver immediately approached him with the sticker and gave him some samples to play with. Silver suggested spraying the sticker on a bulletin board. Users can then attach pieces of paper to the board without tacks or tape. The paper can also be easily removed without leaving any residue. However, the idea was not potentially profitable enough as the annual sales of the message boards were quite low. His boss told Dr. Nicholson to stop the project. He agreed at first, but then kept the project afloat as part of 3M's 15% program, which allowed employees to use 15% of their work time to work on experimental projects (If this sounds familiar, Dr. Nicholson claims that Google's legendary 20% policy was based on 3M). Nicholson and Silver continued to fiddle with the sticker. Meanwhile, Arthur Fry, another 3M product development researcher, was frustrated. Every Wednesday night, while practicing with his church choir in St. Paul, Minnesota, he used scraps of paper to mark the hymns they would sing during the upcoming service. By Sunday these pieces of paper would have fallen from the hymnbook, leaving Fry floundering. “My mind started wondering during the sermon,” Fry confessed. “I thought about Spence's sticker. If you could cover it in paper, it would be just the ticket to a better bookmark. He had a eureka moment, “the one where you get the adrenaline rush”. Fry came up with the idea for an "adhesive bookmark" in 1974. He suggested that Nicholson and Silver use the adhesive in reverse. Instead of sticking the sticker on the bulletin board, they should “put it on a piece of paper and then we can stick it to anything.” Spencer and Fry began developing a product, but this turned out to be easier said than done. In early prototypes, the adhesive peeled away from the paper and remained on the object to which the paper was attached. There had been no such problems with the bulletin boards because Silver had specially made them so that the adhesive stuck to the bulletin board better than the paper. Enter Roger.