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Dr. Harry Coover, inventor of Super Glue, passed away on March 26, 2011 at his home in Kingsport, Tennessee.  According to Elizabeth A.  Harris with The New York Times, Dr. Coover’s daughter, Dr. Melinda Paul, confirmed that Harry Wesley Coover was born on March 6, 1917 (not 1919 as some reports state) making him 94 years old when he passed away this weekend.

Super Glue, also known as cyanoacrylate, was

originally discovered in 1942 by Dr. Harry Coover, who by the way died last month on March 26th, 2011

Nine years later, in 1951

Sticky notes are much more than simple notepads! If used correctly, they can be ultimate portable marketing tools. Sticky notes were originally marketed to workplaces, but they can now be found everywhere. At home, they come in handy for grocery lists, phone numbers, to-do lists, and reminders. They’re used in magazine advertising to highlight a new product’s advantages; if the reader desires, he or she can peel away the sticky note and take the ad. They also make great bookmarks for students! Sticky notes' functionality leads users to wonder how these little unassuming notes came about and how they are made.

Up to that point, 3M had only ever produced rolled products like adhesive tape, so the company’s engineers had to create and build new machinery to accommodate the flat pads and eventually cubes of paper. Then they had to find a way to apply the adhesive without gumming up the machinery. While this was a very expensive venture, it also gave 3M market dominance because few companies had the budget to back such an undertaking.

Fry was a member of his church’s choir and often marked pages in his hymnal with bits of paper that almost always fell out. What if he could stick the bits of paper to the pages of the hymnal without damaging the book? Dr. Silver’s glue seemed to be the answer!

Post-it adhesive was invented in 1968 by Dr Spencer Silver, a research scientist for 3M Company.  He had hoped to use as a spray or to produce a new bulletin board with a sticky surface, but got little interest from management. In 1974 3M Product Development Engineer Arthur Fry was singing in his church choir and his bookmark kept falling out of his hymnal causing him to lose his place.  He had attended a product demonstration by Dr Silver, and got the idea to put the new adhesive on his bookmark and the concept was born. Post-it notes are yellow because the lab next door had some yellow scrap paper that they used in the initial development, and continued using yellow paper. 3M management was not confident the product would be a commercial success.  They initially tested it under the name Press and Peel in 1977, and it did not do well.  A year later they introduced Post-it notes by giving free samples in Boise, Idaho.  The “Boise Blitz” produced a 90% reorder rate which was double the best intial rate 3M had ever seen.  Post-its were officially released throughout the US two years later.

There's a bit in Wonderful World that has to do with Post-it Notes so we did some research into this seemingly ubiquitous office product and learned some fun stuff. Here goes, courtesy of the inventor, 3-M.  - The Post-it Note was invented as a solution without a problem: In 1968 Dr. Spencer Silver developed a unique, repositionable adhesive, but the 3M scientist didn't know what to do with his discovery. Early ideas included a sticky bulletin board for temporary messages, or as a low-powered spray adhesive. Silver kept plugging away at the possibilities of this new glue, presenting it individually and during seminars.

Then, six years later, a colleague of Dr. Silver, Art Fry, remembered the light adhesive when he was daydreaming about a bookmark that would stay put in his church hymnal. The rest is history. - Post-it Notes were introduced to the American market in 1980 by the 3M Company. 

- A Post-it Note weathered a flight from Las Vegas to Minneapolis on the nose of the plane. It endured speeds of 500 mph and temperatures as low as -56 degree Fahrenheit. - In 1989 a family left a Post-it® Note on their front door during Hurricane Hugo and it was there 3 days later. Their trees weren’t. 

In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M in the United States, was attempting to develop a super-strong adhesive, but instead he accidentally created a "low-tack", reusable, pressure-sensitive adhesive[1][2] that has been characterized as "a solution without a problem"

Fry then developed the idea by taking advantage of 3M's officially sanctioned "permitted bootlegging" policy.[5] 3M launched the product in stores in 1977 in four cities under the name "Press 'n Peel", but its results were disappointing.[6][7] A year later, in 1978, 3M issued free samples to residents of Boise, Idaho, and 94 percent of the people who tried them said that they would buy the product.[6] On April 6, 1980, the product debuted in US stores as "Post-It Notes".[8] In 1981, Post-its were launched in Canada and Europe.[9]

In 2003, the company came out with Post-it Brand Super Sticky notes, with a stronger glue that adheres better to vertical and non-smooth surfaces.[10] Standard Post-it Brand notes have only partial adhesive coating on the back, along one edge.

11:00 AM-12:00 Noon , Thirty years ago today a man stood on a New York City sidewalk and changed history. Martin Cooper, who worked for Motorola, invented the handheld cell phone. On April 3rd, 1973, he placed the first call to the competition.

I called my counterpart at Bell Laboratories, a guy named Dr. Joel Engell, who was running the cellular telephone program at Bell Laboratories, and I told him, `Joel, I'm calling you from a real cellular telephone, a handheld unit.' Now I thought I could hear gnashing of teeth at the other end, but Joel was polite. And then I went on to other phone calls.