Paper Clip

Vaaler claims wire "bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop" with end parts acting as gripping tongues. Count the closed loops in his drawing — there are none.

Take an ordinary paper clip and trace the wire with a fingertip from end to end. It makes two full oval turns, one inside the other. This is the Gem geometry.

Cut 2 × 100 mm of galvanised steel wire. Equal lengths matter — the comparison later is only fair if both clips use the same amount of material.

Form a rectangular hoop about 30 × 12 mm, leaving both ends as straight inward-facing tongues that overlap the opening. Do not close the ends into loops.

Form an outer oval about 32 × 10 mm, then bend the wire back inside it to form a second, shorter oval. Both ends finish inside the outer loop.

Slide 5 sheets between the tongues, then rotate the body about 180°. The patent requires this twist — the clip does not simply slide on.

Push the same 5 sheets straight into the Gem. No rotation, no manipulation. Note how much less handling this takes.

Hook a spring scale to the clip and pull steadily along the sheets until it slips. Record the force in newtons.

Repeat identically on the hoop clip. Record the force. Same wire, same length, same paper.

The Gem holds harder. The two full loops give a longer sprung span and a wider contact line, so more of the wire's elastic energy ends up pressing on paper.

Increase the stack and refit both. Vaaler's tongues splay outward and lose grip; the Gem's outer loop opens elastically and keeps clamping.

Remove each clip and inspect the top sheet. The rotation Vaaler's design needs scores and creases the paper; the Gem leaves a light indent.

Fit and remove each clip ten times, then re-measure pull-off force. Note which one loses grip faster as its bends take a permanent set.

Record your own verdict from the four measurements before reading on. The historical answer and your bench answer should agree.

The patent. US 675,761, "Paper clip or holder", filed 2 January 1901 and granted 4 June 1901 to Johan Vaaler (15 March 1866 - 14 March 1910), a Norwegian who worked at an invention office in Kristiania. He had already secured a German patent, applied for on 12 November 1900 and granted 6 June 1901. Both grants are genuine. Norway had no patent law covering this at the time, which is why he filed abroad.

His clip is not the Gem, and the difference is the thing your measurements found. The Gem-type clip — the double-oval everyone uses — was already being manufactured by the Gem Manufacturing Company in Britain before Vaaler filed, though it had not yet reached Norway, so he very likely did not know it existed. His design lacks the two full loops. That is not a cosmetic difference: the loops are what let the clip be pushed straight onto a stack, what give it a long enough sprung length to accommodate varying thickness, and what stop it from scoring the paper. Vaaler's has to be twisted into place. He probably obtained his patents at all because patent authorities of the period were liberal and rewarded any marginal modification of an existing idea.

How the myth started, precisely. This is unusually well documented. In the 1920s an engineer from the Norwegian patent agency travelled to Germany to register Norwegian patents there, came across Vaaler's German patent, and failed to notice that it was not the common Gem clip. He wrote up Vaaler as the inventor of the paper clip in the agency's report on its first fifty years. From there the claim moved into Norwegian encyclopedias after the Second World War, and writers on Norwegian technological history took it up because it made a thin national story substantial. One misreading, in one report, by one person who was not looking carefully.

Why it stuck so hard. During the German occupation Norwegians wore paper clips in their lapels as a silent sign of resistance, after flag pins and pins bearing the cipher of the exiled King Haakon VII were forbidden. The clip became a national symbol of holding together, and a symbol that useful does not get fact-checked. In 1989 a giant paper clip was erected at Sandvika in Vaaler's memory — and the monument depicts a Gem-type clip, not the one Vaaler patented. The memorial to the wrong attribution is itself in the wrong shape.

Why this belongs in a blueprint at all. Vaaler did invent something, did patent it legitimately, and did not claim to have invented the Gem; the error was made about him, decades later, by people not reading the drawing. The honest version is more interesting than the myth: a working design that lost on the merits, and a national story built on a clerical misreading. If you did step 14 before reading this, you re-ran the 1901 commercial decision yourself, with a spring scale, and reached the same conclusion the market did.