How To Invent A Billion Dollar Product and Personally Gain Very Little

In 1930, a young engineer was sent by his supervisor to spend time working on the floor of a Minneapolis auto body shop. The reason for the working visit was to review the performance of his employer’s principal product, industrial grade sandpaper, in actual use as a car door was being sanded. The young mans name was Richard Drew.

While in the repair shop, young Mr. Drew was exposed to a rougher work environment than he was used to. The floor of the shop was loud, dirty, and, well, quite profane. A good deal of the profanity was related to the difficulty the repairmen experienced while attempting to perfectly match paint panels and striping to auto bodies. They quite simply had no rudimentary tool, other than a steady hand and line of sight to make perfectly smooth straight lines that did not overlap.

Richard Drew was curious and began to consider options to simplify the process of crisply painting multiple color paint to auto bodies. His invention was ingenious, elegantly simple, and is a standard in every "do-it-yourselfer’s" toolbox to this day. He created "masking tape". There is almost no paint job done in a home or business that does not employ masking tape to protect and finish edges.

Arthur Fry was also seeking a simple answer to a personally vexing problem. Mr. Fry was continually losing his place in his church hymnal when he attended Sunday services at his church. He hated bending, or "dog earing" pages. He did not want to mark or damage the hymnal in any way. Book-mark’s would simply fall out of the hymnal.

He was also, a Minneapolis area resident, and decided to seek a solution in his place of employment. Mr. Fry went to a colleague, Spencer Silver, who was working on a type of new glue with minimal adhesion properties. He borrowed a bit of Spencer’s prototype glue and applied a bit to the edge of a small square of paper. When applied to paper, the glued square attached snuggly, but was easily removed without damaging the host paper.
by Geoff Ficke