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begin on that section again, their labor undone.
    After watching this happen several times, Drew realized that the adhesive was too sticky. The workers were only hanging paper; they didn’t need a strong glue. And that’s when Drew had his first insight: sandpaper might help him solve the auto-body problem. Sandpaper, after all, was simply a mixture of adhesive and abrasive. (A tough paper backing coated in glue and then rolled in crushed minerals.) If you left out the abrasive, then you were left with a moderately sticky paper, which is precisely what the mechanics needed.
    When Drew got back to the office after this realization, he began exploring his new idea. The first thing he discovered was that the glue used in sandpaper was also too strong — it ripped the wet paint right off. And so he began experimenting with the adhesive recipe, trying to make the rubber resin a little less sticky. This took him several months. He then had to find the right backing. Most adhesives were applied to woven fabrics, but Drew’s experience as a sandpaper salesman led him to focus on a backing of paper. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of a way to store the sticky sheets; they kept sticking together, forming a crumpled stack. After two months of struggle, Drew was ordered by his boss, William McKnight, to stop working on the project. The company was in the sandpaper business; Drew should go back to selling industrial abrasive.
    But Drew refused to give up. Although he was stumped, he still stayed past closing time at work, testing out different varieties of backing and recipes for glue. And then, late one night in his office, everything changed. In the time it took to have an insight — that burst of gamma waves erupting in the right hemisphere — Drew grasped the solution to his sticky problem. The idea was simple: Instead of applying the adhesive to square sheets of paper that needed to be stacked, it could be applied to a thin strip of paper that was then rolled up, like a spool of ribbon. The mechanics could unwind the necessary amount of sticky paper and attach it directly to the car, allowing them to paint without tack or glue. Drew called it masking tape.
    Nobody knows where this revelation came from. Some say that Drew was inspired by the car wheels in the auto-body shop; others think he borrowed the idea from the large spools of paper that were shipped to the sandpaper factory. Drew himself had no answer. And yet, the insight happened. Drew was able to imagine a long roll of stickiness, a pressure-sensitive adhesive that could be applied to metal and then ripped off without damaging the paint.
    In retrospect, the idea for a roll of tape seems incredibly obvious; it’s hard to imagine a world where stickiness is limited to glue and tack and sticky sheets. Sure enough, the product was an instant hit in the marketplace, and not only among car mechanics. By 1928, Drew’s company was selling more masking tape than sandpaper.
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    The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company is now called 3M. The corporate headquarters, just outside St. Paul, looks like a college campus, a sprawling five-hundred-acre landscape of lab buildings, grassy fields, and parking lots. Although the company still sells sandpaper and tape, it has since expanded into an astonishing array of product categories. (The company currently sells more than fifty-five thousand different products, giving it a nearly 1:1 product-to-employee ratio.) A random list of 3M products includes computer touch screens, kitchen sponges, water-purification filters, streetlights, stain-resistant fabrics, lithium ion batteries, home insulation, dental fillings, medical masks, and drug patches.
    What do these products have in common? Nothing at all, except that they were pioneered by 3M. “We’re an unusual company,” says Larry Wendling, a vice president in charge of corporate research. “We have no niche or particular focus. Basically, all we do is come up with new