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he was in charge of the development of ejection seats

ired as a safety engineer for AB Volvo in Gothenburg, Sweden.

. Safety belts were in use at the time, but the most prevalent design used a single strap with a buckle over the stomach. This design risked injury to body organs in high-speed crashes.

Bohlin aimed to find an alternative design that would not only protect both the upper and lower body, but would also be comfortable and simple to use.

The design held both the upper and lower body in place, and was simple enough that the driver could buckle up with one hand.

In 1958, Bohlin was h

by 1963 all Volvos came equipped with front seat belts, and the company decided to make the design free for use by all car makers.

In 1959, Volvo became the first auto maker to introduce Bohlin’s three-point safety belt design.

The report claimed that the belt had already saved thousands of lives, reducing the risk of injury or death in car accidents by as much as 75 percent.

It persuaded a number of other national governments to do the same

Since its introduction, the three-point shoulder/lap safety belt has changed very little in its overall design.

As of today, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates the belts reduce the risk of deaths in car crashes by at least 45 percent.

Bohlin retired from Volvo in 1985.

In 1974 Bohlin was awarded The Ralph H. Isbrandt Automotive Safety Engineering Award.

honored in 1979 and in 1985 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington, D.C. In 1995, he received a medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. In 2002, he was inducted into the (U.S.) National Inventors Hall of Fame. On the day he was to be honored for this achievement, Bohlin died at age 82.

Fry then suggested to Nicholson and Silver that they were using the adhesive backwards.  Instead of sticking the adhesive to the bulletin board, they should “put it on a piece of paper and then we can stick it to anything.”

This initially proved easier said than done, in terms of practical application.  It was easy enough to get the adhesive on the paper, but the early prototypes had the problem that the adhesive would often detach from the paper and stay on the object the paper was stuck to, or, at least, leave some of the adhesive behind in this way.  There was no such problem with the bulletin boards Silver had made because he had specifically made them so that the adhesive would bond better with the board than the paper. Two other 3M employees now entered the scene, Roger Merrill and Henry Courtney.  The two were tasked with coming up with a coating that could be put on the paper to make the adhesive stay bonded to it and not be left behind on whatever the paper was stuck to when it was removed, a task at which they were ultimately successful at achieving. Interestingly, because management at 3M still didn’t think the product would be commercially successful, they more or less shelved it for three years, even though the Post-It notes were extremely popular internally at 3M labs during that span.    Finally, in 1977, 3M began running test sale runs of the Post-It note, then called “Press ‘n Peel”, in a certain areas in four different cities to see if people would buy and use the product.  It turned out, no one much did, which confirmed in the minds of the executives that it wasn’t a good commercial product.

This time, the re-order rate went from almost nothing, in the previous attempt, to 90% of the people and businesses that had received the free samples.  For reference, this was double the best initial rate 3M had ever seen for any other product they’d introduced.  Two years later, the Post-It note was released throughout the United States.

So after 5 years of constant rejection for the adhesive and another seven years in development and initial rejection, Post-It notes were finally a hit and have since become a mainstay in offices the world over, today being one of the top five best selling office supply products in the world.

Another obstacle in the initial launch of Post-It notes was that, because it was a completely new type of product, it required the construction of new machinery to mass produce the Post-It note pads, which was initially prohibitively expensive for a product seen by many within 3M as destined for commercial failure.

Post-It notes received an upgrade in 2003 when 3M launched a new version of the Post-It note with super sticky glue that has better adhesion to vertical surfaces.

 Post-It notes are occasionally used in art-work.  One such famous example was in 2008 when Shay Hovell used 12,000 Post-It notes to create a replica of the Mona Lisa.  The most expensive Post-It note art piece was done by R.B. Kitaj and sold for £640 (about $1000) in 2000.

. History