Sticky Stuff

NEVER BEFORE IN THE history of humankind has it been so easy to attach one thing to another. Big deal? Well, consider entropy. That's the scientific name for the tendency of things--atoms, molecules, paperwork, dirty socks--to become less orderly if left alone. Judging by your average desktop, plenty of people see nothing wrong with entropy. The trouble comes when you learn that scientists believe that as the universe becomes increasingly disordered, it runs down like an old battery. Not good, Fortunately, over the past century, inventive minds have brought us a bounty of products designed to keep our daily lives--and, who knows, maybe even the universe--together. The paper clip, for instance, is not only an ingenious amalgam of form and function, it's a powerful force for order. A few more of the finest:

Anybody who's ever struggled with a stuck zipper or stubborn button owes a debt of gratitude to Georges de Mestral, the Swiss engineer who gave us all an alternative. After a walk in the woods with his dog one day in 1948, de Mestral marveled at the ability of burrs to fasten themselves to his dog's coat and to his own wool clothing. De Mestral shoved a bit of burr under a microscope and saw that its barbed, hooklike seed pods meshed beautifully with the looped fibers in his clothes. Realizing that his discovery could spawn a fastening system to compete with, if not replace, the zipper, he devised a way to reproduce the hooks and loops in woven nylon, and dubbed the result Velcro, from the French words velours and crochet. Today Velcro-brand hook-and-loop fasteners (which is how trademark attorneys insist we refer to the stuff) not only save the arthritic, fumbled-fingered or just plain lazy among us untold aggravation with our clothing, they secure gear--and astronauts--aboard the space shuttle, speed diaper changes and help turn the machine-gun turrets in the M-1A1 tank. Velcro U.S.A., Inc., engineers have even used the product to assemble an automobile. Try doing that with zippers.

Some theorize that the world is held together by Scotch tape. If that's not true, it could be; 3M, the company behind the brand, makes enough tape each day to circle the earth almost three times. This was certainly not foreseen by a young 3M engineer named Richard Drew when he invented the tape in 1930, Drew, who'd come up with the first masking tape after overhearing a burst of frustrated invective in an autobody painting shop, sought to create a product to seal the cellophane that food producers were starting to use to wrap everything from bread to candy. Why not coat strips of cellophane itself with adhesive, Drew wondered, and Scotch tape was born. It was also soon rendered obsolete for its original purpose, as a process to heat-seal cellophane packaging debuted. Ironically, the Great Depression came to the rescue: consumers took to the tape as a dollar-stretcher, to keep worn items in service. Ever since, it's just kind of stuck.

The Post-it note not only keeps information right where we want it, it may also be the best thing ever to come out of a dull sermon. Art Fry, a chemical engineer for 3M who was active in his church choir, was suffering through just such a sermon one day back in 1974 when he got to thing about a problem he'd been having with improvised bookmarks falling out of his hymnal. "I realized what I really needed was a bookmark that would attach and detach lightly, wouldn't fall off and wouldn't hurt the hymnal," recalls Fry, now 66 and retired from 3M. Fry called to mind a weak adhesive developed by his colleague, Spencer Silver. Fry slathered a little of the adhesive on the edge of a piece paper, and voila! He wrote a report about his invention and forwarded it to his boss, also jotting a question on one of his new bookmarks and pressing it down in the middle of one page. His boss scribbled an answer on the note and sent it back to Fry, attached to some other paperwork. Later, over coffee, the two men realized Fry had invented a new communications tool. Today Post-its are ubiquitous--available in 18 colors, 27 sizes and 56 shapes, Some even contain fragrances that smell like pizza, pickles or chocolate. Soon, perhaps, we'll have our notes and eat them too.