The Civil War and paper clips

The current occupant of the White House places the end of the Civil War in “1869, or whatever.” No.

And he places the invention of the paper clip in 1817. Also no.

From Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things (1992):

As with many new devices, especially ones of modest proportions and few pretensions, the origins of the first bent-wire paper clip are not without their uncertainties, including those induced by chauvinism. According to an oft-repeated account, a Norwegian named Johan Vaaler should be credited with the invention of the paper clip in 1899. However, as the story goes, Norway had no patent law at the time, and though Vaaler’s drawing was accepted by a special government commission, he had to seek an actual patent in Germany. Norwegians are said to have remembered proudly the humble item’s origins in their country when, during World War II, they “fastened paper clips to their jacket lapels to show patriotism and irritate the Germans.” Wearing a paper clip could result in arrest, but the function of the device, “to bind together,” took on the fiercely symbolic meaning of “people joining against the forces of occupation.

Vaaler’s fin-de-siècle notion was granted an American patent in 1901, and the document describes the “paper clip or holder”:

It consists of forming same of a spring material, such as a piece of wire, that is bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop, the end parts of which wire piece form members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions.

But there’s more:

There were indeed other paper clips by the time Vaaler’s American patent was issued, and it appears to have been granted more for his variations on some common themes than for any seminal contribution. Matthew Schooley, a Pennsylvanian, filed a patent application in 1896 for a “paper clip or holder which, while simple in its construction, is easy of application and certain in the performance of its functions.”

And:

When all is said and done, any attempt to sort out the origins and the patent history of the paper clip may be an exercise in futility. For there appear to have been countless variations on the device, a great multiplicity of forms, and some of the earliest and most interesting versions seem not to have been patented at all, which is perhaps not so surprising for such a modest artifact.

But at least we can say that the paper clip was not invented in 1817.

I believe that the current occupant pulled both dates out of his — no, out of his head. What a scustumad.

There’s also an 1867 patent, issued to Samuel B. Fay, for a “ticket fastener,” “a loop made of wire for the purpose of holding tags or tickets to fine fabrics to supply the place of pins.” It’s often cited as the first paper clip, but notice: it’s for holding tags or tickets to fabrics, not for holding papers together. Petroski doesn’t mention it.

Related reading
On paper clips : Paper clips (A prose poem) : My dad’s paper clips