Who invented the sticky note?Read the papers.

November 29, 1973

Dr. David W. Young, a chemical consultant working out of the John Hancock Center in Chicago, answers a memo I had sent him two weeks earlier. He quotes $750 to develop a composition suitable for my invention, plus the cost of filing with the patent office, and asks me to send the samples shown in Figures 1 and 2 of my report.

Figures 1 and 2. By the middle of November 1973 there was already a written report with numbered drawings, and a chemist in another state had quoted a fee to formulate an adhesive for it. This is the earliest paper in the story and the only one written by a stranger while the work was happening. Young was not remembering 1973 from 1997. He was in it, on the day, with a fee quote.

The letter is from a working chemist to a named client, on the record, about developing an adhesive for the memo project. The envelope carries a Chicago postmark of the same day.

July 22, 1974 — Letter to patent counsel

In my own handwriting, to Charles Marks at 286 Fifth Avenue: "I have invented a revolutionary new stationery item that I am about to introduce to the stationery wholesale and retail industry, as well as the glue printing industries." I ask him to "file the necessary patent for protection on this item," and write, "Samples are enclosed."

In the same letter I record that I had set up a corporation called Press On Memo Ltd. and opened a post office box for my mass mailing to industry and stores.

One page, one date: the invention, the trade, the patent instruction, the samples, the company name, and the mailing.

July 22, 1974 — Post Office receipt

The same day I wrote to my patent attorney, I opened the post office box. This is the original receipt for Box 302, Press On Memo Ltd., Rockville Centre, New York, marked ORIGINAL and carrying a round United States Post Office cancellation of that date.

Two documents, one day. One is mine. This one was stamped by the Post Office.

July 24, 1974 — Incorporation

Certificate of Incorporation of Press On Memo Ltd., filed under Section 402 of the New York Business Corporation Law. Department of State filing stamp dated July 24, 1974. Filing number A171137. Filed by Fritz & Solomon, Esqs., Freeport, New York.

The company was named for the product. This is the first page; the remainder follows it in the filed record.

1974 — Franchise tax record

New York State Corporation Franchise Tax Report, Form CT-4, calendar year 1974, addressed to Press On Memo Ltd. at my attorneys' address in Freeport.

It is the dullest document on this page and that is exactly why it is here. A certificate of incorporation proves a filing fee was paid once. A franchise tax report is the state treating the company as a going concern with an obligation to it. Nobody invents a tax form.

A New York State corporation tax record for 1974 listing Press On Memo Ltd. The company was registered, filed and paying tax in its first year.

The affidavit of Michael Solomon

Michael Solomon was my attorney in 1974. He swore this affidavit on June 5, 1997. He states that he was a partner in Fritz & Solomon, that I was a client, that they filed the Certificate of Incorporation for Press On Memo Ltd. on or about July 24, 1974, and that I was the sole shareholder.

Then, in his words: that I had invented a memo pad with a strip of stickem glue on the back of each sheet of paper, enabling one to post notes in and around the office or home without the use of pins or tape and without leaving a glue residue — and that the purpose of the corporation was to manufacture and sell press-on memo pads.

A 1997 recollection of 1974, sworn by the lawyer who filed the incorporation papers in Document 4.

The concept artwork

The original concept rendering, made for me by graphic artist Steve Grossman, who also did the artwork for the Benihana restaurants.

Look at what the drawing is of. Not a product on a shelf. A hand writing a note, tearing it off, and pressing it onto a refrigerator door. The whole invention is in that gesture — the paper goes where the message belongs. Before there was a company, a mailing or an invoice, someone was paid to draw that.

The concept rendering by Steve Grossman, the graphic artist who did the Benihana restaurant artwork. It shows a memo sheet being placed on a refrigerator door and was filed in 1997, dated on or about February 1974, and filed again in 2016.

The 1974 mass mailing

With Press On Memo Ltd. incorporated and Box 302 open, I mailed roughly 2,000 pieces to buyers in the stationery trade — a sales sheet and a working sample in every envelope. The mailer's principal told me his stationery list held between 1,900 and 2,000 top-level executives: manufacturers, retail store chains, wholesale distributors.

The envelope carries the Press-On Memo Ltd. name and the Rockville Centre post office box recorded on the July 22, 1974 receipt.

The sales sheet

The promotional material that went out in the mailing, addressed to stationery buyers. It called the product The Magic Touch: jot down your memo, tear it off, place it anywhere, and it stays — without the use of tapes, pins or magnets.

That sentence is the sticky note, described to the trade, in 1974, six years before 3M's national launch of Post-it Notes. Not a lab note or a private diary. A sales sheet, printed in quantity, mailed to people whose job was buying stationery.

A printed sales sheet with a © Amron 1973 notice, the return address at P.O. Box 302, Rockville Centre, and a retail price of $1.19 for three fifty-sheet pads.

The memo sheet

Everything else on this page describes the invention. This is the invention. The Press-on Memo sheet itself, from the same 1974 mailing — not a drawing of it, not a description of it, not a lawyer's account of it. The paper.

Write on one. Tear it off. Press it where you need it and it stays. Lift it and it comes away clean. If you have ever used a sticky note you already know exactly what you are looking at, and you know what year it is from.

The product itself: a memo sheet with a repositionable, reusable adhesive on the back, so the note goes where the message belongs.

The affidavit of Daniel Dassow

Daniel Dassow worked at 3M as a computer consultant, in Corporate Marketing, while finishing his computer science degree at the University of Minnesota. He swore this affidavit on July 8, 2016 before a notary in Missouri, and it sets out an unsolicited message he wrote to me on April 11, 2016 after finding me through LinkedIn.

In it he says that Press-on memos were brought into 3M's Corporate Marketing, that an office assistant, Joan George, distributed them to people around the area — including librarians Colleen Lang and Fran Upton and marketing analyst Bill Gearhart — that he believes they were called slips of paper sticky notes at the time, and that Joan recommended sizes and promoted the little notes.

He came to me. A man I had never met found me online and wrote to say he remembered these notes inside 3M's Corporate Marketing department, then swore to it before a notary and let it be filed in a lawsuit against a company he once worked for. Nobody does that for a stranger's benefit.

Daniel Dassow worked in 3M Corporate Marketing in the mid-1970s and swore this affidavit in 2016. He describes Press-on Memos inside that department and names four colleagues he recalls there.

The repositionable adhesive

To make the Press-on Memo sheets and pads I needed an adhesive that would hold and then let go. I had one developed and I sprayed the sheets myself. The product was called Stick-Em-Up.

Its label describes an instant pressure sensitive effect and states that an item can be lifted and repositioned with ease. Barry Alan Products Inc., 31 South Grove Street, Freeport, New York.

Stick-Em-Up, the repositionable spray adhesive, sold in aerosol cans filled for me by Rite-Off Corp. of Plainview, New York. It is what made the memo sheets work.

April 2, 1975 — Purchase order

The adhesive became a product of its own. This is a purchase order from Alco Photo Supply Corporation, dated April 2, 1975, ordering 125 cases of Stick-Em-Up.

Their form, their date, their signature. Not my document. Theirs.

May 1975 — Invoice and payment

The order was filled. Invoice 5162 from Barry Alan Products to Alco Photo Supply, dated May 14, 1975, for 125 cases of Stick-Em-Up, private labeled. $1,509.00. Marked paid May 30, 1975.

A purchase order shows an intention. An invoice marked paid shows a transaction.

March–May 1975 — The rest of the invoices

Document 14 is one of them. Here is the rest of the run: No. 5151 through No. 5179, dated between March 14 and May 19, 1975, all on Barry Alan Products letterhead, all for Stick-Em-Up.

Read the names. Price Chopper Supermarkets in Schenectady. Stew Leonard's Dairy in Norwalk. Zehrs Markets in Kitchener, Ontario. Applebaum's Food Market in St. Paul. Durso Supermarkets on Broadway. Handy Andy Shop n Save in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Service Food Stores in Milwaukee. Chevy Chase Supermarket in Maryland. Mount Hope Super Duper in Rochester. Interphoto in Long Island City. Camera Fair in Baldwin. Gemini International. Albert Berg Ltd. in Toronto. Blok & Diaz Trading in Curaçao.

Six states, Canada and the Caribbean, inside ten weeks, on one continuous run of numbered forms. Not a prototype. An order book.

And look where Document 14 sits. The Alco invoice on the page above this one is No. 5162 — inside this same run, between the Stew Leonard's invoice and the Mount Hope invoice. It was never a single sale standing on its own. It was one page torn out of a book that was being written all spring.

Now look at two names in the run. No. 5155, March 17, 1975, is typed across the middle: delivered by Arkay Sales. Arkay Sales, Inc. is the stationery rep group my investor named in his sworn affidavit in Document 17, whose president he names as Ronald Katz; the salesman box on that invoice reads RK. And No. 5153 is made out to Kroma, 30 West 21st Street — Kroma Lithographers, the New York printer who printed my Press-on Memo sheets, flyers and envelopes in 1974.

Two names from the 1974 story, appearing on 1975 business forms that were never written to prove anything. The affidavit and the invoices were made twenty-two years apart, by different hands, for different purposes, and they match.

Nineteen more invoices from the same numbering run, No. 5151 through No. 5179, March 14 to May 19, 1975, to supermarkets, camera dealers and importers in New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maryland, Ontario and Curaçao. One of them, No. 5155, is annotated Delivered By ARKAY SALES — the rep group Jeffrey Brown names in his affidavit twenty-two years later.

February 11, 1975 — The National Mail Order Merchandise Show

A letter from Bernard Lane, President of Exhibition Management, Inc., the company that produced the National Mail Order Merchandise Show, to Press-on Memo, Ltd. He has marked up a floor plan, changed booth #85 to an eight-by-eight, notes that it will get maximum traffic, and offers booths #30 and #35 in the Red Room as alternatives.

Every corporate record above proves the company was filed. This proves it was being courted. A show promoter took the trouble to hold floor space for Press-on Memo, Ltd. and to write about it on his own letterhead.

The letter confirms booth #85 for Press-on Memo, Ltd. at the 1975 National Mail Order Merchandise Show, and is addressed to the company at 26 Middle Neck Road, Great Neck.

The affidavit of Jeffrey Brown

Jeffrey E. Brown was a twenty percent investment partner in Press-On Memo. He swore this affidavit on June 6, 1997, under oath, and it was filed in federal court.

He states what his money paid for: developing the invention into a saleable product, the printing of the samples, and the mass mailing to the stationery industry. That is Document 8 and Document 9, described by the man who financed them, from the other side of the transaction.

He describes the product in his own words — the first ever memo pads with a sticking glue on the back of each sheet, to post notes around the office or home without pins or tape and without leaving any residue. And he says we joined forces with Arkay Sales, Inc., president Ronald Katz, to reach the established stationery trade. Arkay's name appears again, in typescript, on a 1975 invoice in Document 15.

Jeffrey Brown was a twenty percent investment partner in the venture. His money funded developing the product, printing the samples and the 1974 mass mailing, and he swore to it in 1997. His paragraph 6 names Arkay Sales, Inc. and its president Ronald Katz — the same rep group annotated on invoice No. 5155.

October 28, 1997 — I write to 3M

Twenty-three years after the exhibition I wrote to Gary L. Griswold, Chief Counsel of 3M's Office of Intellectual Property, by certified mail, return receipt requested. Not to a press office. To the lawyer whose job was the company's patents.

In it I set out my conception and offered-for-sale date as July 22, 1974 — the same date as the Post Office receipt in Document 3 and the letter to my patent attorney in Document 2 — and I asked 3M for permission to manufacture and sell my product worldwide, and asked it to voluntarily withdraw and invalidate its patents in light of that date. I gave them ten business days.

The proof of delivery is here too. Certified article Z 152 277 862, mailed at the Syosset post office on October 29, 1997, and the return receipt card signed on delivery, marked received by 3M. There is no version of this story where 3M did not receive it. I sued that December.

The letter went out certified, article Z 152 277 862, from the Syosset post office on October 29, 1997. The return receipt came back signed and marked received by 3M.

January 1998 — Clause 6

Everything above this line is mine. My letter, my artwork, my company, my product, my invoices, my witnesses. That is what an inventor's archive is, and I have never pretended otherwise.

This one is not mine. It is a federal court's own recitation of what the 1998 settlement says, and it records that 3M acknowledged it has no right to prevent me from manufacturing and selling my Press-on memo pads as originally conceived in 1974.

As originally conceived in 1974. My product, my year, in an agreement 3M's lawyers negotiated and signed. They did not have to write it that way. They could have written 1997. They could have written nothing.

In Clause 6 of the January 1998 settlement, 3M agreed it had no right to prevent me from manufacturing and selling my Press-on memo pads as originally conceived in 1974.

March 21 – April 6, 1998 — The right, and the door

Clause 6 was the whole reason I settled. 3M had put it in writing on January 5, 1998, before we signed: it had no patent rights that would prevent me from making my Press-on Memo pads as I put them into public use in 1974, in the same form and with the same adhesive. That was worth more to me than money. It meant I could finally build the thing.

Eight weeks later I nearly did.

On March 21, 1998 I wrote 3M's intellectual property counsel by fax and by certified mail. I was in serious negotiations with a major stationery industry manufacturer — Avery Dennison, 3M’s largest competitor in stationery — to license the Press-on Memo for manufacturing and sale. After investigating my pads and 3M's, they had offered me a $50,000 advance against a royalty of one and a half percent on all net sales. One thing stood in the way. Before Avery Dennison would license a product from me, its lawyers had to satisfy themselves that I actually held the right to license it — that 3M could not come after them for making my pads. The only proof of that right was Clause 6, and Clause 6 was inside the settlement agreement. Paragraph 9 said I needed 3M's written consent to show that agreement to anyone. So I asked for consent, and I told them time was crucial.

3M answered on April 6. It said it was puzzled as to why a manufacturer would need to see any settlement agreement with 3M. It said it had entered into the agreement on the basis that the agreement, its contents, and correspondence about it would be kept confidential, and that it saw no reason to change that commitment from either side. It was not willing to give permission. It added that it did not wish to be involved in my negotiations with the other party.

I answered the same day. I told them what 3M's New York litigation counsel, Leonard Jacoby, had told me at the signing: that if I ever needed to disclose any portion of the agreement, for whatever reason, consent would not be unreasonably withheld. I copied Jacoby on the letter. No one wrote back to say I had it wrong.

The license did not happen. I was never trying to publicize the settlement — I was trying to prove I had the right to license my own product without 3M interfering, and 3M held the only document that proved it. No manufacturer signs a license on a stranger’s word.

Clause 6 gave me the right. Paragraph 9 made it impossible to prove. Read separately they are ordinary. Read together they are a door with a lock on the inside, and 3M held the key. That is what fifty thousand dollars and a royalty on every pad walked away from.

I am not saying 3M was obliged to consent. I am saying that a right you are forbidden to demonstrate is not worth what it appears to be worth, and that the two clauses were written by the same lawyers on the same day.

A separate matter — the confidentiality itself

Look again at what 3M wrote on April 6, 1998. It did not say the clause bound me. It said it saw no reason to change that commitment from either side.

From either side. I understood that in 1998 to mean the confidentiality commitment was mutual, and for twenty-six years I treated the settlement accordingly. I never showed the agreement to anyone, and I never asked again after 1998.

In January 2024, in a federal court, 3M asserted that Clause 9 imposed no obligation on 3M.

It is below, in their own filing. On January 2, 2024, 3M's counsel wrote to Judge Pamela K. Chen in the Eastern District of New York that my breach of contract claim was based on 3M allegedly breaching the confidentiality and release clauses of the settlement — and that neither provision imposes any obligations on 3M or Fry, so it is impossible for 3M to have breached them. The citation immediately after that sentence is to paragraphs 3 and 9 of the agreement. Paragraph 9 is the confidentiality clause.

Set the two side by side. April 6, 1998: no reason to change that commitment from either side. January 2, 2024: that provision imposes no obligations on 3M at all.

That is a different grievance from the one above, about a different clause, arising twenty-six years later. It is not about sticky notes at all. It is about whether a company can hold a man to a promise for twenty-six years and then tell a judge the promise was never mutual. It is the issue presented in my pending petition to the Supreme Court.

My letter of March 21, 1998, sent by fax and by certified mail no. Z 104 508 853, and 3M's reply of April 6, 1998 — both from my own file, both filed in my 2016 case. The court's recitation of the same letter follows them.

September 25, 1974 — the date on 3M's own trademark

Every document above this one is from my side of the story. These two are from 3M's, and they are certificates issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Anyone can pull them.

Registration No. 1,198,694 covers the Post-it mark for stationery notes containing adhesive on one side for attachment to surfaces. That is the sticky note, described by 3M in its own application. That application was filed March 12, 1981 and the mark registered June 22, 1982. The first use claimed on its face is September 25, 1974, and in commerce September 25, 1974.

My mailing went out on and around July 22, 1974. The date 3M's own registration claims is two months and three days later.

The second certificate is Registration No. 1,046,353, filed December 29, 1975, for paper and cardboard sheet material having adhesive coating on both sides thereof, for attaching displays to walls. A different product entirely — double-sided mounting material. It claims the same first use date: September 25, 1974.

And there is a third thing on the face of the '694 certificate worth noticing. By 3M's own public account, the note pads were not test-marketed until 1977 as Press 'n Peel and not launched nationally until 1980. The date on the registration is three years earlier than the test market.

Both certificates were issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and both are public. Anyone can pull them and read the first-use date on the face.

February 10, 2016 — TransWeb, LLC v. 3M

This one is not about me at all, which is exactly why it belongs here.

In TransWeb, LLC v. 3M Innovative Properties Company, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that 3M had obtained a patent through inequitable conduct and was liable under the antitrust laws for enforcing it. The award against 3M came to roughly $26 million, including about $23 million in trebled attorneys' fees.

The conduct the court described: TransWeb's president had handed out samples of his new filter material at a trade show more than a year before 3M filed its applications. 3M told the Patent Office those samples had been received under a confidentiality agreement and were therefore not prior art. The court found that characterization false.

Samples handed out at a trade show, and a confidentiality agreement asserted over them that the court found was not there. That is a published federal appellate decision, decided sixteen days after I filed my own case in 2016 and added to it by amended complaint, and it is a matter of public record.

A published decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, decided February 10, 2016, and filed in my own case as Exhibit R.