BEFORE CLIPS
Ribbon, string and pins
Until the 20th century, papers were usually bound with ribbon or string, and small stacks were held with a straight pin. Pins left holes; a spring of wire did not.
Walk the timelineStart
A SMALL HISTORY
One and a half
loops of wire.
The paper clip looks too simple to have a history.
It does. Before it, papers were tied with ribbon or string or held with a pin. Then came decades of patents, a famous misattribution, and one looped design that outlasted the rest.
GEMthe shape that stuck
Walk the timelineKeep in mind
- Grips without tearing
- Slides on easily
- Cheap to bend by machine
- A small, good compromise
THE SHORT ANSWER
Nobody invented it
in one go.
The clip grew out of many patents.
The Gem shape won on everyday use.
THE GEM
The looped shape we know
The Gem was on sale in the US by 1892 or 1893. It has one and a half loops and grips by the twist in the bent wire plus friction against the paper.
Why it works
MACHINES
Made to be bent fast
In 1899 William Middlebrook patented a machine for making wire paper clips. Clips are still bent from steel wire by machine today.
See the numbersA QUICK TIMELINE
Which clip
came when?
Pick a moment in the paper clip's story. The bar shows how far along it sits between the first bent-wire patent in 1867 and the Gem trademark in 1904.
Dates from the original US patents on Google Patents and the Early Office Museum's history of paper clips.
TWO NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING
Old idea,
tiny object.
One date for the first bent-wire patent,
one weight for an everyday clip.
1867
First bent-wire clip patent
Samuel B. Fay of Franklin, Pennsylvania, patented a wire ticket fastener in April 1867, mainly for attaching tickets to fine fabrics. Fay-design clips were not widely sold until the late 1890s.
FIRST PATENT · US 64,088
≈ 1 g
An ordinary metal paper clip
Most paper clips are steel wire, and a regular metal clip weighs about one gram.
WEIGHT · REFERENCE
Engineer and historian Henry Petroski found much late-19th-century experimenting with clip designs, which is why no single inventor can fairly claim the paper clip.
WHAT A GOOD CLIP MUST DO
Simple shape,
many jobs.
Writing about the Gem, engineer John Lienhard lists what a good paper clip has to manage at once. Improving one of these often made another worse.
Step 1
Grip firmly
Hold the sheets together without slipping off when the stack is handled.
Step 2
Go on and off easily
Slide over the paper without fuss and come away again just as easily.
Step 3
Leave the paper alone
Avoid tearing the sheets or leaving rust marks behind.
Step 4
Stay cheap and obvious
Be quick to make, not tangle in the box, and need no instructions.
WHY THE GEM WORKS
A twist of wire
does the gripping.
Push paper into a Gem and the two tongues of wire are forced apart. The bent wire resists that twist and springs back against the sheets, and friction between wire and paper holds them in place.
Lienhard calls the Gem a compromise rather than a perfect design: every change to grip, ease or cost tends to cost something else. One Gem maker reportedly received about ten improvement suggestions a month.
Questions
Questions on the way
Who invented the paper clip?
No single person. Samuel Fay patented a bent-wire ticket fastener in 1867, the Gem was on sale in the US by 1892 or 1893, and other designs were patented around the same time.
Did a Norwegian invent the paper clip?
Johan Vaaler is often credited, but his US patent came in 1901, years after the Gem, and the Early Office Museum calls the credit mistaken. His clip shape was different from the Gem.
Why is it called a Gem clip?
Gem was the name it was sold under. Cushman & Denison registered Gem as a US trademark for paper clips in 1904.
What are paper clips made of?
Most are steel wire, though other metals and moulded plastic are also used. A regular metal clip weighs about one gram.
Why does Norway have a giant paper clip?
A statue almost 7 metres high was put up in Sandvika in 1989 to honour Vaaler. It shows a Gem-type clip, not the design he patented.
Destination
Where the facts come from
- The Engines of Our Ingenuity No. 769: The Paper Clip (John H. Lienhard, University of Houston)
- Early Office Museum: History of paper clips
- Google Patents: US64088, Ticket fastener (Samuel B. Fay, 1867)
- Google Patents: US636272, Machine for making wire paper-clips (W. D. Middlebrook, 1899)
- Google Patents: US675761, Paper clip or holder (Johan Vaaler, 1901)
- Wikipedia: Paper clip
Updated