PAPER CLIP: 8 Things You Didn't Know About It
This week's video goes through the history of the Gem style Paper Clip.
Going from the invention of the straight pin, in 1835 in New York City, passing through Samuel's B. Fay clip patented in 1867, reaching today's most used style of paper clip in office spaces: the Gem Paper Clip.
It's quite amazing that the Gem style Paper clip has never been patented; William Middlebrook was the man behind the machine that allowed the creation of this artifact and that’s what his patent covered: the machine that created the “Gem” paperclip (1899) and not the paperclip itself. Middlebrook’s patent drawing shows the paper clip not as the invention but as the outcome of the patented invention.
It was the fact that in 1855 steel was able to deliver the right balance between strength and flexibility (while being mass-produced at a low cost) that allowed us to move from the straight pin to the Gem Paper Clip we know today. By being coiled in a loop within a look of springy steel wire, the paper clip is pliant enough to open and hold the papers in, while being springy enough to press them back together. One of the detrimental factors for the Gem Clip’s success lied in its patented production method. By just requiring three gentle bends and a snip, its production method was cheap and could easily be automated.
This simple object even got to a point where it got people arrested. During the second world war, forbidden from wearing any buttons allusive to their king, the Norwegians took advantage of the paper clip’s features to bound their shirts and jackets while using it at the same time as a rebellion symbol against the nazi occupation. The Norwegians used the Gem paper clip, not because they thought it was a Norwegian invention, but rather because it could be easily clipped to one’s clothing, and was a useful item that wasn’t initially a banned symbol by the Germans.
A paper clip can have multiple different purposes, some more legal than others. It can be twisted, pulled apart, and used as a tool to allow its user to do far from the commercially productive, sanitary, and morally meaningless act of clipping papers together. Paper clips have the ability to be used to pick locks, clean under fingernails, hack into phones and when straightened they can serve as a distraction to their users from the monotony of their original intended use.
The Gem style Paper Clip is considered by many as a fetish object within the design circles, the paper clip’s simple and functionally driven aesthetic as well as its omnipresence, granted him a spot in the 2004 MoMA’s Humble Masterpieces show. Unlike many of our day-to-day objects, that have evolved over time in incremental ways, you would still be able to find a perfectly recognizable, shiny silver paper clip on a nineteenth century office desk. Familiar to the contemporary eye, even on an 1984 advertisement, the minimal, functionally driven and plain aesthetics of the paper clip categorized it as the epitome of the disposable, anonymous, manufactured object.
The Gem Paper Clip's competitors have always been trying to improve upon different aspects, at the cost of raising new problems, therefore most of them haven’t ever sustained a chance against the best-selling form of paper clip.
The Gem style paper clip has even been used by Kyle McDonald in 2005 to begin a series of trades that eventually got him a house.
Apart from being used as a symbol or visual cue on several different instances, the paper clip has also been perpetuated as the graphical digital symbol for the “attachment” on most of our laptops and desktop email programs.