Many people know that “Wite-Out” (aka “Verblot,” “Shit-Scrub,” “Reversible Jizz,” etc.) was invented by the father of ex-Monkee Micky Dolenz. Fewer, however, understand the circuitous, often dark, frequently amusing and eventually rather predictable history of Post-It brand stickie notes.
The story, like most stories, began in 1517. Divinity student Martin Luthor (cited by the Simon and Shuster, Catholic creators of the comic-book Superman as the inspiration for their hero’s arch-nemesis Lex) was a young overachiever in the city of Wittgenstein, Germany. Having somehow been accepted into 95 separate graduate programs at the local University, he found himself needing to produce a separate thesis for each one. Citing the futility of exerting all that strenuous academic labor merely to have it perused and discarded by the handful of tenured individuals on his thesis panel, Luthor decided to post his work on the door of the local church so as to have it read by all – hence the famous “95 Thesises.”
Luthor experimented with a number of different mediums for attaching his document to the door, including honeypap, boiled hogshead, and tongue-of-marrow-bark-resin-of-swamp-bog- of-syrup-bog-swamp. These various methods proving unsatisfactory, Luthor eventually decided simply to affix the heretical paper using Satanic magic, along with a nail for good measure. Nonetheless, for these early efforts Luthor is generally considered the Father of Self-Adhesive Stationery.
When Luthor was burned at the stake in 1578, his notebooks and correspondence inevitably fell into the hands of the Illaminati, a secret society that made a practice of going to as many estate sales as possible during the Reformation. Its leader, one Gracchus Bluto, discovered an alternate use for one of Luthor’s compounds, and soon wrote the Illaminati Manifesto, detailing how monarchies could be toppled by stealing all of their important documents and covering them entirely in a thin layer of shellac, thereby rendering them incapable of revision. Though Bluto was executed soon after ruining the original Magna Carta by covering it with improperly brewed paste, his process and organization gave its name to the modern process of “illamination” (literally, “being made sick by contact with a llama”).
It wasn’t until the late 19th Century that Luthor and Bluto’s research once again reared its gummy head. After having his legs chopped off in the Franco-Prussian war, retarded French aristocrat Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec decided that he might as well design posters for local cabarets and dance halls, because seriously, what else was he cut out for? He needed some kind of method with which to hang the posters on walls, since otherwise they would fall to the ground and get covered in mud and feces (pavement not having yet been invented). Being legless, Toulouse-Lautrec had commissioned local scientist Marie Curie to develop a legless horse so he could ride in relative comfort. The horses kept dying, however, and Marie Curie, in possession of a rare copy of the Illaminati Manifesto, used the recipes contained within to create a new adhesive out of dead horse, which she christened “glue” after the past participle of the French “gluer” – “to kill horses for a crippled aristocrat.”
From here, it was only a short leap to the modern Post-It. Leave it to that bastion of modern ingenuity, Adolf Hitler, to bring this journey to its “final solution.” After inventing the reclining armchair, the electric guitar, and genocidal anti-Semitism, Hitler was looking for a new challenge. Hoisting Marie Curie out of her deathbed during the lead-up to World War II, Hitler demanded from her information on how to create a radium-controlled toaster oven (which could eventually be dropped from airplanes onto the British). Curie, a French patriot to the last, misled Hitler with a false equation that was actually an altered version of her formula for glue. In that it was only a recipe for a very small amount of glue, Hitler didn’t know what to do with the results, and so tried to wipe it from his finger onto a small sheet of blotting paper nearby. When he subsequently went out onto his balcony to salute the teeming masses before his famous Nuremberg Rally, the crowd was delighted to see a flapping piece of paper affixed to his extended right hand, believing it to be a butterfly. A local craftsman by the name of Herbert 3mhoff, however, was able to see this “miracle paper” for the cash cow that it was. Fleeing to America, he founded an eponymous office supply empire, which to this day operates out of the same Yorktown tenement in which it began – and thus, the Post-It note was born.
Bonus Fact: a malfunctioning Post-It was the cause of the tragic Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986.
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