Spencer Silver, a research chemist at 3M who created the kind of adhesive that allows Post-It Notes to be removed from surfaces as easily as they adhere to them, died May 8 at his home in St. Paul, MN. He was 80.

Since their introduction in 1980, Post-It Notes have become a ubiquitous office product, first in the form of little canary-yellow pads — billions of which are sold annually — and later in different hues and sizes. There are currently more than 3,000 Post-It brand products globally.

At first, the adhesive appeared to be the solution to a problem that didn’t exist, The New York Times said. But Dr. Silver promoted his adhesive throughout 3M in the hope that product development people would recognize it as the Breakthrough Dr. Silver thought it was.

Art Fry, a chemical engineer in the tape division lab, had heard about Dr. Silver’s adhesive. “It was a eureka, head-flapping moment,” Mr. Fry told Financial Times. Mr. Fry received a patent for the Post-It,

technically a “repositionable pressure-sensitive adhesive sheet material.”

Dr. Silver and Mr. Fry were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010. Dr. Silver received the American Chemical Society’s Award for Creative Invention in 1998.