Post-it Chemist Still Has That Stick-to-Itiveness

There was a time the 20th anniversary of the Post-it wouldn’t have meant much to me.

Maybe I would have celebrated in much the same way I’d celebrate the golden jubilee of the staple gun.

But now my Post-it appreciation quotient is higher than it’s ever been.

A conversation with Spencer Silver does that to you.

At 59, Silver is leading the retiree’s good life in Ojai. He gardens, he plays tennis and he pours himself into intense, Expressionist landscapes. He also volunteers for the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy, mapping the group’s holdings.

But Silver’s legacy is elsewhere.

Like on that yellow slip of paper your boss has affixed to your so-called expense, so-called report, the slip that bears his angry red comment: “See me about this!”

Or on the slips that adorn every desk and computer terminal in America, the slips that say “Remember M.’s birthday!” and “Send check to podiatrist!”

For it was Silver who concocted the glue that barely holds the Post-it in place, eternally in a state of there-but-about-to-not-be-there, like an Oscar-night gown.

So you thought weak glue came from weak horses?

Hardly.

It came from hard work, precise calculation and good old-fashioned scientific accident. The glory came later.

A couple of weeks ago, Silver met with reporters in New York, where 3M sponsored a media blitz to mark the Post-it’s 20th year. While he was in a hotel reminiscing, his wife, Linda, gazed up at a huge--the scientific term is “humongous”--screen in Times Square and saw for a few seconds the face of her husband.

“It was the high point of my career,” he joked.

Moments later, the face disappeared, peeled off as effortlessly as a virtual Post-it.

Of course, it wasn’t Silver’s only high point.

A PhD chemist, he has 29 patents to his credit. His work has ranged from packing tape to cell biology, from lettuce cultivation to immunology.

Another high point is Silver’s very survival. After years of illness, he received a heart transplant in 1994.

“It’s quite a miracle,” he said. “Six years ago, I had to get around in a wheelchair. Now I hike and everything else.”

A contractor on Silver’s house asked him why he was bothering to smash concrete himself.

“Because I can,” Silver said.

Silver’s Post-it discovery, like so many great discoveries, was accidental.

He was noodling around with some alkyl acrylate copolymer microspheres--you know the stuff--when he came up with an adhesive just strong enough to stick but too weak to stick with any real vigor.

That was in 1968.

No one in the company knew of any need for such an unmuscular stickum. But Silver, who can rhapsodize about the “elegance” of complex reactions, was intrigued.

“I was convinced it would be useful,” he said.

Attempts to make a spray-on bulletin board with it were unconvincing, though, and it languished.

Years later, colleague Art Fry recalled the strangely feeble stick-um as he sat in church, trying vainly to keep his bookmarks from flying out of his hymnal.

The rest is adhesive history.

“It took the genius of Art Fry to make the whole world a bulletin board,” Silver said.

But it took the serendipitous discovery of Spencer Silver to make it stick.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.