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The humble Post-it note.

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Now, most of us have probably never ever thought about it, but somebody had to invent it.

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In fact, there were two of them, Art and Spence.

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And as we discovered when we went to meet them, they make for quite a double act.

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There's simply no accounting for inspiration, divine or otherwise.

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This story begins in this church, this Presbyterian church in the American city of St. Paul's [St. Paul], Minnesota,

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and it led to an invention that we never really realized how badly we needed.

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The Post-it note is a self-attaching note that will adhere to all sorts of surfaces, including paper,

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so that when it is removed, it won't damage the surface that you've applied it to.

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The invention of two employees of a giant multinational Minnesotan company, 3M, Post-it notes have become ubiquitous in stationery cupboards worldwide.

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Post-it note is a unique invention that we uses an adhesive I invented called microspheres to adhere and to paper,

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but also give it this removability characteristic.

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Under the microscope, they look like bubbles of stickiness.

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They have just the right amount of tack, not too little, not too much.

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Things got going when adhesive expert Spencer Silver was approached by his colleague, Art Fry, to help him out with a problem at his choir practice.

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The basic problem was that Wednesday night would be choir practice.

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We would sing from different sheaves of music, and I would put little pieces of paper in there that would sometimes fall out before Sunday morning.

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And I thought, what I need is a bookmark that will stick to the paper without falling off, but not damage the sheets.

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We thought, yeah, what we have here isn't just a bookmark. It's a whole new way to communicate.

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3M says it manufactures a staggering 50 billion Post-it notes every year.

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Post-it notes took off so rapidly that I think it left a lot of people in marketing and sales gasping a little bit.

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Post-it notes was like a virus.

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It was always a self-advertising product,

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because a customer would get a pad, had 100 sheets on it, but 20 might go on to things that he sent to other people.

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They would look at it, peel it off, play with it, and then go out and buy a pad for themselves.

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And what did the co-inventors make out of it?

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I got to work for 30 years and no one said, "What are you doing now, Spence?" I think I got a lot of freedom as a result.

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People think because, you know, I invented Post-it notes, I must be rich.

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I don't get any royalty. But we're... we were well taken care of in that we have a comfortable retirement.

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To this day, 3M won't reveal how exactly the notepads are coated with adhesive.

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We never patented Post-it notes, because his patent on the microsphere gave us protection.

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And because we didn't patent it, we didn't have to tell people how we made it,

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because this is a product that looks so simple but is very high-tech.

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And so, it's [a] trade secret.