(One technique he used involved a cigar box with holes cut out of it to allow for the application of adhesive to the back of a sheet of paper.) Avery was brought in to improve the machinery used to create those labels. Avery was known as a tinkerer while a student at Ponoma College, and had a great interest in a printing press that his father, a minister, used to print sermons and church bulletins.Īccording to his entry in Oxford University’s American National Biography Avery had experimented with ideas such as a phonograph with a built-in alarm clock, which led to a role with an on-campus firm that produced its own primitive self-adhesive labels.

In many ways, the roots of how we got all these stickers on our laptops comes down to a guy named Ray Stanton Avery. (I thought the design of my HP Spectre x360 was simply too lovely to add any stickers to, but on my MacBook Pro, I have the warning label commonly seen on the back of NES games-you know the one, the one that warns not to immerse the game in water.) Some of them are quite creative and clever many of them never get removed, of course. These days, as people are stuck at home trying to get some dang work done, many of those folks have stickers on the back of their laptops. (Melissa Keizer/Unsplash) The guy who turned a $100 loan from his fiancé into an adhesive giant … after a name change Our laptops wouldn’t look quite the same without this invention.

Neato labels