You may have seen our Social Media post a couple of weeks ago about the next letter in our Museum & Archive A-Z. P is for Paperclips and as we said at the time, there’s more to a simple paper clip than you might first think.
Until this century we bundled papers with ribbon or string. If the sheaf was small enough, we used a straight pin — even a clothes pin. The first paperclip patented in 1867, the Fay paperclip, was originally designed to clip paper tickets to textiles, although the patent acknowledged it could be used to clip papers together.
The design of the paperclip as we are familiar with today has never been patented; It is not known for sure who invented but the fully evolved paper clip we use today is in use in the 1870s in England and showed up in an 1899 patent. But not as a patent for a paperclip! Instead, William Middlebrook patented a machine that would make wire paper clips.
In one corner of his patent drawing is the clip his machine would make. It has the round top and bottom so familiar today. We call this the Gem paper clip because Middlebrook invented his machine for the Gem Company, in England and it went on to become the most common paperclip in use all over the world, largely because improving on it is a tricky concept!
A paper clip is a tool used to hold sheets of paper together, usually made of steel wire or plastic covered wire, bent to a looped shape, often characterized by the one and a half loops made by the wire. Common to paper clips proper is their utilization of torsion and elasticity in the wire, and friction between wire and paper. When a moderate number of sheets are inserted between the two “tongues” of the clip, the tongues will be forced apart and cause torsion in the bend of the wire to grip the sheets together.
The list of requirements for such a simple object is surprisingly long…. and countless variations on the same theme have been patented always seemingly improving on one characteristic at the expense of the others!
Consider the pitfalls waiting for a new paper clip. It should exert a clinging grip. It shouldn’t tangle with other clips in a box. It should be easy to apply and remove. It shouldn’t tear the paper or leave rust marks. It should be cheap and easy to make. Its use should be obvious.
Over time, some variations have had pointed instead of rounded ends, some had the end of one loop bent slightly to make it easier to insert sheets of paper, and some have wires with undulations or barbs to get a better grip. Some have been marketed as more grippy, lighter and various other attributes. In addition, purely aesthetic variants have been patented, clips with triangular, star, round shapes and numerous other shapes. But the original Gem type has for more than a hundred years proved to be the most practical, and consequently by far the most popular. Its qualities—ease of use, gripping without tearing, and storing without tangling—have been difficult to improve upon. Its popularity is such that the Swedish word for a paperclip is ‘gem’.
This selection from the Museum & Archive were all collected by volunteers swapping the older iron (and therefore rusting) paperclips on our dye recipe cards, for newer brass ones which will not corrode, as part of conservation work. The selection includes Fay (or Philadelphia) clips, and versions of later Niagara clips, as well as more modern sizes and shapes of the Gem. These images also show just a small selection of the variety of paperclips shapes (Japan, Brazil, Columbia for starters)
Over nearly two centuries of paper clip history, they have been worn as substitutes for buttons and zippers, twisted into makeshift lock-picking devices, strung together to make jewellery, used to push the tiny recessed buttons on our electronic devices, and used in their hundreds in sculptures.
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