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justin creed

Final Word: Post-it Notes have stuck around for a reason - USATODAY.com - 0 views

  • April marks the 30th anniversary of the Post-it Note.
  • It all began in 1968 when scientist Spencer Silver discovered a unique adhesive that would not only stick to surfaces, but could also be repositioned. Then along came Silver's colleague, Art Fry, who was having trouble keeping his bookmark in his hymnal while singing in the church choir. So Fry applied the adhesive to create a bookmark, soon realizing he had found a new way to mark the spot, so to speak.
  • My love affair with the Post-it stems from the fact I'm a habitual listmaker. There are lists on the kitchen counter. Lists at my desk. Lists everywhere. This doesn't mean that my life is any more organized, but I think it is, and that's all that matters. I even cross things off my lists on occasion. Nothing gives me more pleasure. I sometimes even put something on a list and cross it off immediately, just to feel that satisfaction. I know that's a form of cheating, but I don't care. It works for me. For the past 30 years, my lists have been on Post-its. What I love about them is that they know their place. Post-its don't wander. The stay put, which is the whole point. (I also stick with Canary Yellow Post-its. Always the traditionalist.)
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  • I think it's a better system than using your brain. Your brain can fail you. A Post-it never will. The only time a Post-it will fail is late at night. I can only assume that since the trusty pad hails from Minnesota, it's a sensible product with an early-to-bed mentality. There's a Post-it pad next to my bed so I can record every brilliant thought that might come to me at 3 in the morning. Roll over, write it down, fall back to sleep. SURF! was scribbled on the pad the other morning. I don't have a clue what it means, but obviously it's important. A Post-it never lies.
justin creed

Post-It Notes Were Invented By Accident - 1 views

  • There were actually two accidents that lead to the invention of the Post-It note.  The first was by Spencer Silver.  According to the former Vice President of Technical Operations for 3M Geoff Nicholson (now retired), in 1968, Silver was working at 3M trying to create super strong adhesives for use in the aerospace industry in building planes.  Instead of a super strong adhesive, though, he accidentally managed to create an incredibly weak, pressure sensitive adhesive agent called Acrylate Copolymer Microspheres.
  • It did have two interesting features, though.  The first is that, when stuck to a surface, it can be peeled away without leaving any residue. 
  • Specifically, the acrylic spheres only stick well to surfaces where they are tangent to the surface, thus allowing weak enough adhesion to be able to be peeled easily.  The second big feature is that the adhesive is re-usable, thanks to the fact that the spheres are incredibly strong and resist breaking, dissolving, or melting.   Despite these two notable features, no one, not even Silver himself, could think up a good marketable use for it.  Thus, even with Silver promoting it for five years straight to various 3M employees, the adhesive was more or less shelved. Finally, in 1973, when Geoff Nicholson was made products laboratory manager at 3M, Silver approached him immediately with the adhesive and gave him samples to play with. 
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  • Silver also suggested what he saw as his best idea for what to use the adhesive for, making a bulletin board with the adhesive sprayed on it.  One could then stick pieces of paper to the bulletin board without tacks, tape, or the like.  The paper could subsequently be easily removed without any residue being left on the sheets.  While this was a decent idea, it wasn’t seen as potentially profitable enough as annual bulletin board sales are fairly low.
  • Now enter the second accident by chemical engineer Art Fry.  Besides working at 3M as a Product Development Engineer and being familiar with Silver’s adhesive thanks to attending one of Silver’s seminars on the low-tack adhesive, he also sung in a church choir in St. Paul, Minnesota.
  • One little problem he continually had to deal with was accidentally losing his song page markers in his hymn book while singing, with them falling out of the hymnal.  From this, he eventually had the stroke of genius to use some of Silver’s adhesive to help keep the slips of paper in the hymnal.
  • 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.
  • Luckily for offices the world over, Nicholson and Joe Ramey, Nicholson’s boss, didn’t feel like giving up yet.  They felt the marketing department had dropped the ball in that they hadn’t given businesses and people samples of the product to use to let them see for themselves how useful the notes could be.  So a year after the initial flop, 3M tried again to introduce the Post-It note to the world, this time giving huge amounts of free sample Post-It note pads away in Boise, Idaho, with the campaign deemed “The Boise Blitz”. 
  • 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.
  • Ever wonder why the standard color for Post-It notes is yellow?  It turns out this was kind of an accident as well.  The official story from some at 3M is that it was because it created a “good emotional connection with users” and that it would “contrast well stuck to white paper”.  However, according to Geoff Nicholson there was no such thought given to the color.  The real reason Post-It notes were yellow was simply because the lab next door to where they were working on the Post-It note “had some scrap yellow paper – that’s why they were yellow; and when we went back and said ‘hey guys, you got any more scrap yellow paper?’ they said ‘you want any more go buy it yourself’, and that’s what we did, and that’s why they were yellow. To me it was another one of those incredible accidents. It was not thought out; nobody said they’d better be yellow rather than white because they would blend in – it was a pure accident.”
  • 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.
  • While most Post-It notes only have a thin strip of adhesive, you can buy Post-It notes that are completely covered in the back with the adhesive.  One example of a place this type of note is used is at the U.S. postal service.  These full adhesive backed notes are used there on forwarded mail.
  • 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.
  • Spencer Silver holds a total of 22 patents, including the patent for the “low-tack, reusable, pressure sensitive adhesive” used in Post-It notes (Patent#: 3,691,140).  Silver is still working at 3M today in their special adhesives department.  He also has a doctorate in organic chemistry, which he received two years before inventing the adhesive used in Post-It notes.  On the side, his favorite past time is painting using pastels and oils, which he apparently is extremely accomplished at.
  •  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.
  • Art Fry received his early education in a one room schoolhouse.  He studied chemistry at the University of Minnesota and was hired while still in school at the “Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company”, which later was re-named 3M.  He retired from 3M in the early 1990s.
Chad Amico

Everyday Chemistry - The history and science of Post-it notes - 0 views

  • In 1974, a scientist at 3M research laboratories called Stephen Silver was trying to find a new strong adhesive; instead he discovered an adhesive that was not too strong. This new adhesive would stick on all surfaces but could be removed easily without leaving any residue or damage to the surface. Silver had no idea what use he could make of this adhesive.
  • Four years later Art Fry, a colleague of Stephen Silverÿfds came up with the idea to use his ÿfdlow tackÿfd adhesive to stick his bookmark in his hymnal. He then further developed his idea and in 1977, 3M launched Post-it notes nationwide. For some reason the product did not do well as consumers had never tried the product.
  • Everybody uses a Post-it note today to write down something you might forget. You can use Post-its to remind somebody about something or even to remind yourself, as peopleÿfdÿfd generally tend to forget important tasks. In order to remember these tasks, they write what needs to be done on a Post-it and stick it onto a wall or something which they use or see very often. You can stick one in your notebooks for reference later.
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  • u get Post-it notes in eight standard sizes, 25 shapes and 62 colours to be precise, which make even artists use them to create colourful fancy designs. There is a Post-it software available for your computer as well, in which you can write your reminders on a Post-it note which will remain on your desktop. Although people may complain that Post-its are too expensive and cause wastage of paper, they will always be popular because of their high utility.
Heather Purpera

The First CD Invented - 0 views

  • James Russell invented the compact disc in 1965. James Russell was granted a total of 22 patents for various elements of his compact disc system. However, the compact disk did not become popular until it was mass manufactured by Philips in 1980.             The first working prototype was produced in 1979. At the time of the technology's introduction it had more capacity than computer hard drives common at the time. The reverse is now true, with hard drives far exceeding the capacity of CDs.
  • n 1979, Philips and Sony got together to manufacture the compact disc.
  • The team leaders of this project were Kees Immink and Toshitada Doi. Philps handled the manufacturing process along with the Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation (EFM), while Sony too care of the error connection method, better known as CIRC. However, Philips claims that this invention was not a one man's job but a collective contribution by members of both the companies who worked together as a team.
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  • Audio CDs and audio CD players have been commercially available since October 1982.            Mass adoption didn't happen immediately -- CDs wouldn't overtake cassette tapes until the late 1980s. The first album to sell 1 million copies in the CD format and outsell its vinyl version was Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms," released in 1985.
  • This disc was taken over by nearly all markets across the globe, especially the Europe and the United States consumer market. The first successful CD to be launched was Brothers in Arms in 1985.A compact disc (CD) is a popular form of digital storage media used for computer files, pictures, and music. The plastic platter is read and written to by a laser in a CD drive. It comes in several varieties including CD-ROM, CD-R, and CD-RW.  As with most new technologies, one reason for the slow spread of CDs was their steep price tags. The Sony CDP-101 player sold for the equivalent of $730 when it first hit Japanese shelves in 1982. Accounting for inflation, that's about $1,750 today. The audio CDs themselves were $15, which is $35 in 2012 dollars.
  • Standard CDs have a diameter of 120 millimeters (4.7 in) and can hold up to 80 minutes of uncompressed audio or 700 MB (actually about 703 MB or 737 MB) of data. The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 millimeters (2.4 to 3.1 in); they are sometimes used for CD singles, storing up to 24 minutes of audio or delivering device drivers.
Max N.

Milton Bradley - 0 views

  • Candy Land, Chutes and L
  • adders, Mouse Trap, and Cootie
  • didn’t set out to be a game maker
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  • trained as a draftsman, drawing plans for railroad cars
  • lithography business in 1860.
  • Bradley became a game maker fortuitously
  • Playing a board game with a friend, he had an idea for one of his own.
  • He was an early advocate of the emerging kindergarten movement started by Friedrich Fröbel in Germany. Fröbel used toys, called Fröbel’s gifts, to spark the imagination of young children
  • pastime and Puritanical preparation rolled into one.
  • forty-thousand copies
  • beginning of the Civil War
  • Soldiers got bored. And a reasonably priced game kit was just what they needed.
  • Charitable organizations bought and distributed kits made by Bradley.
  • players moved pieces on a converted checkerboard, with labels added to the squares. Landing on the square labeled “industry” transported a player to the square labeled “wealth”. “Gambling” led to “ruin”; “intemperance” to “poverty.” The game was called the “Checkered Game of Life.”
  • embraced the idea, and supplied blossoming kindergartens with educational toys.
  • he continued to produce educational toys even when it put his business at risk
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    :)
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    Very good info on Milton Bradley
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