Norway Built a Monument to the Man Who Invented the Paper Clip. He Didn't Invent It.

US675761 is one of several American patents covering bent-wire paper fasteners around the turn of the twentieth century. The paper clip is a useful case study in how invention credit actually gets assigned, because the man most famously credited with it did not invent the object in question, and the reasons the myth stuck are more interesting than the truth.

The Gem

The clip you are picturing — the flat double-oval loop of springy wire — is called the Gem. It was in production in Britain by the 1890s, manufactured by the Gem Manufacturing Company, and it was never patented in the form that won. It simply appeared, was obviously good, and spread.

Its virtue is that it is a single piece of wire that exploits its own springiness: the loops separate under load and clamp back, gripping paper by tension without piercing it. There are dozens of patented alternatives — clips with teeth, clips with clamps, clips shaped like owls and triangles — and the plain Gem beat all of them because it is cheap, snag-resistant, and works.

Johan Vaaler

Johan Vaaler was a Norwegian inventor who, in 1899, patented in Germany and later in the United States a wire paper fastener of his own design. His clip was not the Gem. It lacked the crucial second full loop, which meant it lacked the springy grip that makes the Gem work; his design had to be manipulated more awkwardly and held less well.

By the time Vaaler filed, the superior Gem was already being sold. His clip was never manufactured commercially in any significant quantity.

The myth began in the 1920s, when a Norwegian engineering dictionary and subsequent national accounts credited Vaaler with inventing the paper clip. Norway, a small country that had only become fully independent in 1905, embraced the claim. It was repeated for decades, taught in schools, and eventually memorialized: a giant paper-clip sculpture was erected outside a school in Oslo, and Norway issued a commemorative stamp.

The sculpture, in a detail that historians of the object find delicious, is shaped like a Gem — the clip Vaaler did not design.

The occupation

There is a part of the story that redeems the whole affair.

During the German occupation of Norway in the Second World War, Norwegians began wearing paper clips on their lapels as a silent sign of resistance and national unity — partly on the strength of the belief that the clip was a Norwegian invention, and partly for the plain symbolism of the thing: a small object whose entire function is holding things together.

Wearing one could get you arrested. People wore them anyway.

So the historical record is that Johan Vaaler patented a clip that was not the paper clip, was credited with an invention that was not his, and became the namesake of a symbol that genuinely mattered to people under occupation. The credit is wrong. The monument is, in a roundabout way, deserved.

See the original

The full text and figures of US675761 are on patents.us.