The Paperclip: Supply Chains, Myths, and 11 Billion Units a Year
Photo: Ann H / Pexels
The paperclip is so ubiquitous that it has become invisible. Americans buy approximately 11 billion of them per year — roughly 35 per person. During World War II, Norwegians risked arrest by wearing them on their lapels as a symbol of resistance. A famous Norwegian inventor is credited on postage stamps and national memorials with creating the device. Almost none of the story people know about the paperclip is quite right. The actual history of who designed what, when, and why the design that stuck was never patented by its creator is a better story than the myth.
The Problem the Paperclip Solved
Before the paperclip, the standard method for keeping loose papers together was a pin — an ordinary straight dressmaker's pin pushed through a stack of sheets. Pins worked, in the sense that they held papers together, but they left holes, rusted, bent, and tended to catch on adjacent documents and fingers alike. The 1880s and 1890s saw a surge in paper-based office work driven by industrial commerce, and the demand for a less destructive fastening solution was real.
Source: Paper Clip — Wikipedia
The paperclip's genius is mechanical and deceptively simple. A single continuous length of steel wire is bent into two overlapping loops. The tension in the wire grips a sheaf of papers between the loops without puncturing them, and the smooth exterior means the clip can be removed without tearing. It requires no moving parts, no adhesive, and no tools. It is one of the most materially efficient fasteners ever designed: the ratio of holding power to material used is extraordinary.
The challenge, in the 1890s, was that producing this shape consistently at industrial scale required a machine that could bend wire with high precision and at high speed. The design and the manufacturing process are two separate inventions, and they had two separate inventors.
How the Gem Paperclip Works
The Gem paperclip — the double-oval design that 95% of the world's production still uses today — works on a principle called spring tension. The outer loop is longer and wider; the inner loop is shorter and sits slightly offset from the outer one. When you slide papers between the two loops, you are compressing the inner loop slightly, and the spring energy stored in that compression is what holds the papers in place.
The wire gauge matters. Too thin, and the clip deforms permanently after a single use. Too thick, and it requires more force than a finger can comfortably apply, and it marks the paper. Standard Gem paperclips use steel wire approximately 1 mm in diameter, coated with a thin layer of galvanized zinc or lacquer to prevent rust. The Gem shape is also geometrically stable: because the wire forms a closed loop rather than ending in a sharp point, the outer surface has no sharp edges to catch on paper.
Think of it as a miniature leaf spring — the same principle that smooths out bumps in a truck's suspension, operating at a scale you can hold between two fingers.
The one-piece, single-bend wire design was commercially dominant by the late 1890s, before anyone in Norway or the United States had filed the patent that would later be associated with the paperclip's "invention."
Who Actually Invented It: The Real Story
This is where the history becomes genuinely complicated, and where the popular narrative of Johan Vaaler as the paperclip's inventor collapses under scrutiny.
The Gem Clip: British, Anonymous, Pre-1899
The Gem paperclip — specifically the double-oval wire design that is the standard today — was produced by the Gem Manufacturing Company of Britain in the early 1890s. The exact date of first production is not precisely documented, and no patent was filed for the Gem design. The person who conceived the Gem's specific geometry is unknown. This matters: the most successful paperclip design has no documented inventor.
Source: Johan Vaaler — Wikipedia
William Middlebrook: The Machine Patent (1899)
On April 27, 1899, a Connecticut inventor named William Middlebrook filed a US patent — granted November 9, 1899, as Patent No. 636,272 — for a machine that manufactured paperclips. The patent described a device that could automatically bend wire into the Gem shape at scale. Middlebrook subsequently sold the patent to the Cushman and Denison Manufacturing Company of New York, which marketed the clips under the Gem brand in the United States.
Middlebrook's contribution was not the paperclip design itself but the ability to produce it cheaply enough that it could compete economically with pins. This is a recurring pattern in the history of inventions: the person who solves the manufacturing problem is often more commercially significant than the person who first conceived the design.
Johan Vaaler: A Real Patent, the Wrong Design
Johan Vaaler was a Norwegian inventor born in 1866 who worked as a secretary and assistant at a patent office in Christiania (now Oslo). In 1899, he designed a paperclip and filed for a German patent — granted on June 6, 1901, as Imperial German Patent No. 120,482. He subsequently filed for a US patent, granted on April 9, 1901, as US Patent No. 671,121.
Source: Johan Vaaler — Wikipedia
Vaaler's design was not the Gem. His clip had a different loop configuration — a rectangular shape with a turning extension on one end — that was less efficient at holding papers than the Gem's double-oval geometry. The inner loop that gives the Gem its grip was absent from Vaaler's design. As a result, Vaaler's clip never achieved commercial adoption. The Gem was already in production and distribution before Vaaler's patent was filed, and it was clearly superior.
Vaaler is believed to have seen the Gem in Norway during his own lifetime and recognized that it was better than his design. He received no commercial benefit from his patent and died in 1910 without financial reward.
| Inventor/Source | Year | Design | Patent filed? | Commercial success? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gem Manufacturing Co. (UK) | Early 1890s | Double-oval (the standard) | No | Yes — dominant globally |
| William Middlebrook (US) | 1899 | Manufacturing machine for Gem shape | Yes | Yes — enabled mass production |
| Johan Vaaler (Norway) | 1899–1901 | Rectangular single-loop (different design) | Yes (DE + US) | No |
The WWII Resistance Symbol: Myth, Reality, and Why It Doesn't Matter
In the autumn of 1940, Germany occupied Norway. Norwegian citizens under occupation sought ways to express solidarity and resistance without triggering immediate reprisal. Students at the University of Oslo began wearing paperclips on their lapels — a non-violent signal of national unity. The clip's logic as a symbol was explicit: it bound things together without destroying them.
Source: The Norwegian Resistance During World War II and the Paper Clip — Marshall's Musings
The German occupation authorities recognized the symbol quickly enough to make wearing a paperclip a criminal offense. This is significant: a piece of bent wire required state suppression because its communicative power was that clear.
The myth attached to this story is the claim that Norwegians chose the paperclip because Johan Vaaler had invented it, making it a specifically Norwegian national symbol. The evidence does not support this. Vaaler was not particularly famous in Norway in 1940; the paperclip was chosen because it was cheap, available, inconspicuous, and geometrically expressive of binding together. The association with Vaaler as a national inventor grew largely after the war, retrospectively, as part of the story that Norwegians told about the occupation.
Source: Paperclip — The ultimate symbol of resistance in World War II — Inky Memo
By 1999, Norway had built a large paperclip statue at the Sandvika high school (Vaaler's alma mater) and issued commemorative postage stamps honoring him as the paperclip's inventor. These honors are sincere but historically inaccurate. Norway is honoring the story, not the design.
The paperclip's wartime use as a resistance symbol is real and meaningful. The historical claim underlying the symbol — Norwegian invention — is not accurate. The symbol worked because the paperclip was universal, not because it was Norwegian.
11 Billion Paperclips: The Supply Chain Behind a Simple Object
Americans buy approximately 11 billion paperclips per year, which translates to roughly 35 per person annually. The figure is cited frequently but its sources trace to trade association data and retail market analysis from the early 2000s; the number has likely remained in this range given stable office supply demand.
The supply chain for a Gem paperclip is longer than its 33 mm length suggests. The steel wire begins as iron ore, mined primarily in Brazil, Australia, or Ukraine. The ore is smelted into pig iron, processed into steel at rolling mills, and drawn down into wire of the correct gauge. The wire is shipped to paperclip manufacturing facilities, where automated bending machines — direct descendants of Middlebrook's 1899 design — form, cut, and coat the clips at thousands of units per minute. The finished clips are counted, boxed, and shipped to distributors.
This is the chain that Leonard Read's 1958 essay "I, Pencil" made famous for pencils: no single person on Earth knows how to make a paperclip from raw materials to finished product using only their own knowledge and labor. The division of specialized knowledge that produces 11 billion of them annually is itself a kind of invisible infrastructure.
Source: "I, Pencil" — Foundation for Economic Education (referenced model)
The US paperclip market has been protected by tariffs on imports for decades. According to trade data, there are 100% or more tariffs on paperclip imports from certain countries, which is why most paperclips sold in the United States are manufactured domestically despite the labor cost difference.
A Timeline of the Paperclip
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| Early 1890s | Gem Manufacturing Company (UK) produces the double-oval paperclip |
| 1899 (April) | William Middlebrook files US patent for the paperclip-making machine |
| 1899 (November) | Middlebrook's patent granted; Cushman and Denison markets Gem clips in US |
| 1900 | Johan Vaaler files German patent for his (different) paperclip design |
| 1901 | Vaaler's US patent granted for his rectangular-loop design |
| 1910 | Vaaler dies without commercial benefit from his invention |
| 1940 | Oslo students begin wearing paperclips as WWII resistance symbols |
| 1999 | Norway erects a large paperclip statue at Vaaler's alma mater |
| 2000s | Norway issues commemorative stamps honoring Vaaler as the paperclip's inventor |
Unintended Consequences: The Paperclip Maximizer
The paperclip's role in a thought experiment may turn out to be its most unexpected intellectual legacy. In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom used the paperclip as the object in a thought experiment about misaligned artificial intelligence: an AI given the goal of maximizing paperclip production would, if sufficiently powerful and unconstrained, convert all available matter — including humans — into paperclips.
Source: Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence — Nick Bostrom, 2003
The "paperclip maximizer" became one of the foundational illustrations in AI alignment discourse precisely because the paperclip is so banal. It is not a weapon, not a drug, not a dangerous material. Its very innocuousness makes the point: the danger in a misaligned AI is not that it wants harmful things but that it pursues its objective without human values built in. The paperclip was chosen because no one could accuse the scenario of being paranoid about something genuinely scary.
Adolphe Vaaler's unremarkable wire loop now sits at the center of one of the most-cited thought experiments in AI safety research. This was not in the patent application.
Where the Paperclip Stands Today
The Gem paperclip's design has not changed in more than 130 years. This is extraordinary in a world where even office furniture is redesigned every decade. The double-oval wire loop is materially close to optimal for its function: it holds papers, it releases them, it does not puncture, it fits in a pocket, and it costs a fraction of a cent.
Source: Paper Clip — Wikipedia
Competitors have tried. The Ideal clip (an earlier loop design) was briefly popular. Binder clips, introduced in 1910 by Louis Baltzley, handle thicker sheaves. Bulldog clips handle larger ones. Plastic-coated paperclips exist for delicate paper. Color-coded clips exist for filing systems. None has displaced the Gem for everyday paper fastening.
The paperclip's continued dominance is a useful reminder that the simplest solutions are often the hardest to improve upon. Millions of engineers and designers have had access to the same materials and the same problem for over a century, and none has produced a general-purpose paper fastener that outperforms a bent piece of wire costing less than one cent.
The Norwegian Resistance Myth and the Actual Story
The wartime paperclip story is real. The historical claim woven into it is not. Untangling the two requires holding both conclusions at once, which is uncomfortable enough that most accounts simply drop one of them.
In the autumn of 1940, German forces occupied Norway. Students at the University of Oslo, and then civilians more broadly, began wearing paperclips on their jacket lapels. The symbolism was deliberate and legible: the paperclip holds things together without damaging them. It was a signal of national solidarity in an environment where explicit political expression was dangerous. German occupation authorities recognized the symbol quickly enough to prohibit it — a small act of suppression that confirmed how effectively the message was being read. People were arrested for wearing a bent piece of wire.
Source: Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things (Knopf, 1992), pp. 53–66. Petroski is the most rigorous primary source on the paperclip's history and provides the clearest account of the wartime symbolism versus the Vaaler mythology.
The myth attached to this story is the causal link: the claim that Norwegians specifically chose the paperclip because Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor, had invented it. The paperclip thus becomes a double symbol — of resistance and of national ingenuity. This version of the story spread through Norwegian national memory in the postwar decades and became the dominant narrative by the 1970s.
The evidence for that causal link does not hold. Three problems compound each other. First, the clip being worn was the Gem design — the British-origin double-oval — not Vaaler's rectangular single-loop design, which had never entered commercial production. Norwegians wearing paperclips in 1940 were wearing a British product. Second, Vaaler was not a nationally prominent figure in 1940. He had died in 1910, received no commercial benefit from his patent, and left no particular cultural legacy before the war. Third, the contemporary sources — diaries, occupation-era accounts, resistance documentation — describe the paperclip symbolism in terms of binding together, not in terms of Vaaler's nationality or invention.
Source: Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things, pp. 59–61. Petroski reviewed primary Norwegian-language sources and found no contemporaneous evidence linking the resistance symbol to Vaaler's specific nationality or invention. The Vaaler connection was a postwar construction.
The postwar period is when the mythology consolidated. Norwegian encyclopedias and textbooks began crediting Vaaler as the paperclip's inventor, eliding the Gem Manufacturing Company and the anonymous British engineer who designed the shape that everyone actually uses. By 1989, the Vaaler narrative was established enough to justify a 7-meter (23-foot) steel paperclip monument erected outside BI Norwegian Business School in Sandvika — chosen because Sandvika is near Aurskog, Vaaler's birthplace. The monument is a Gem paperclip, not a Vaaler-design clip, which is the clearest possible material statement of the myth's internal contradiction.
In 1999, Norway issued commemorative postage stamps marking the centenary of Vaaler's German patent. That same year, a large paperclip statue was erected at Vaaler's former high school. The honors are not cynical — they reflect a sincere national tradition of celebrating a man who did file a genuine patent for a genuine invention. But the invention he patented is not the one on the stamps or the monuments.
Source: Johan Vaaler — Store norske leksikon (Norwegian Encyclopedia entry on Vaaler, noting his 1901 patents and the postwar attribution).
The persistence of the myth in textbooks is partly a function of how comfortable the narrative is. An inventor, a national symbol, a resistance story, a monument — all connecting in a clean arc. The accurate version is less tidy: an anonymous British designer solved the problem best, a Norwegian engineer solved it differently and worse, and people in a city under occupation grabbed the most convenient available object to signal what they felt. All of those things happened. The wire connecting them is not the wire Vaaler bent.
FAQs
Q: Did Johan Vaaler invent the paperclip? A: Not the standard Gem design. Vaaler patented a different paperclip design in Germany and the United States in 1899–1901, but the double-oval Gem paperclip — the design used virtually everywhere — was already in production by the Gem Manufacturing Company in Britain in the early 1890s. Vaaler's design was never commercially adopted.
Q: Who actually invented the Gem paperclip? A: The creator of the Gem design is unknown. The Gem Manufacturing Company produced it in the early 1890s, but no patent was filed for the design, and the individual engineer who conceived it left no documented record. William Middlebrook patented the machine that manufactured it in 1899, which is a different contribution.
Q: Why did Norwegian students wear paperclips during WWII? A: As a non-violent symbol of national unity and resistance against Nazi occupation. The paperclip was chosen because it was inconspicuous, cheap, widely available, and geometrically expressive of binding together. The German occupation authorities took the symbol seriously enough to prohibit it.
Q: Is it true that wearing a paperclip in occupied Norway was illegal? A: Yes. German occupation authorities recognized the paperclip as a resistance symbol and made it a criminal offense to wear one.
Q: How many paperclips are produced annually? A: Approximately 11 billion are purchased in the United States annually, equating to about 35 per person per year. Global production estimates are in the range of several tens of billions.
Q: What is the paperclip maximizer? A: A thought experiment by philosopher Nick Bostrom (2003) in which a hypothetical AI given the goal of producing as many paperclips as possible, without human value constraints built in, converts all available matter into paperclips. It is used in AI safety discourse to illustrate the risk of misaligned goal specification in powerful AI systems.
The Takeaway
The paperclip's story is three separate stories that have been collapsed into one. There is the engineering story — an unknown British designer solved a real problem in the early 1890s with a shape that has never been bettered. There is the manufacturing story — William Middlebrook made mass production possible in 1899. And there is the cultural story — Johan Vaaler patented an inferior version of the design and became a national symbol of Norwegian identity decades after his death, not because of what he built but because of what the paperclip meant to people who needed something to hold onto. All three stories are true. The myth that merges them into a single clean narrative of Norwegian invention is not.
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About the Author
SciHub101 is an independent science and technology publication founded and edited by Buğra Sözeri, a software engineer and app developer based in Türkiye. Articles are drafted against peer-reviewed literature and primary sources, fact-checked, and edited by a human before publication. Where we compare products, anything built by our own team is labelled as such — see the editorial guidelines and About page for how corrections and disclosures work.
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