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Short Stuff: Paperclips · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: and Jerry's here for Dave. So this is an official
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: short stuff boom. I just stamped it with the official seal.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: That's right, big thanks to thought Co, Gizmoto, slate signs,
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: American University of Michigan, Go Wolverines, University of Houston, Houston,
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: University of Houston, Go Cowgers.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Is it? Are they the cougars?
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Huh. Are there a lot of cougars roaming around Houston?
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: You kidding me? They love they love those young guys.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, good to those kind of cougars. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Those are places where I found some pretty good resources
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: on the history of the paper clip, which when I
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: started on this I expected to be pretty straightforward. It
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: is not at all. I was thrilled and delighted to
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: find that the history of the paper clip is pretty convoluted.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of bad information out there. We're going
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: to shuffle it all into place into a coherent, fact based,
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: conceptually amazing short stuff.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought this is a really good one. This
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: is classic short stuff stuff. So before the paper clip,
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: and hey, I love a paper clip, but there ain't
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: nothing classier than making a slit in the top right
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: corner of a page and running some ribbon through there
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: to keep some paper together.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. The choices between ribbon are limitless.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it just it looks so good.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: For sure, And that's why people did that for centuries
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: and centuries and centuries. I don't remember exactly when that started,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: but it was probably early medieval if I remember correctly.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: And it wasn't until the late nineteenth century that paper
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: clips started to come along, and they weren't something that
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: was invented quite out of the gate, but not too
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: long after people started tinkering with this, did we arrive
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: at the paper clip as we understand it today.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And it was one of those weird things that
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: a few different people just you know, not working together,
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: created a very similar thing at the same time or
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: around the same time. And the reason this happened seems
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: to be because making like needles and metal wire became
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: you know, they had the machinery to do this kind
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: of thing at this time, and people are like, hey,
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: what all can we do with little needles and little
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: pieces of wire besides using them for sewing?
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we're poking your eye up, Yeah, exactly. So. Yeah.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: So apparently several men around the world in the last
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: couple decades of the nineteenth century saw a really good
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: use for mass produced wire was paper clips, or a
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: way to bind paper, I think is a better way
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: to put it. Some people really didn't. They just kind
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: of phoned it in. They're like, here, just chop it
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: off and jam this through the paper. And most people said,
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: we prefer the ribbon technique over that.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: But the guy who who really came the closest out
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: of the gate to inventing what we understand as the
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: paper clip, it's called the Jim paper clip. It was
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: a Norwegian man named Johann Vohler. I've also seen it
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: spelled v l e R so voler yeh.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: Sure, and that's Jim capital g E M. And we'll
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: get to the naming of that in a second. But yeah,
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: he made a paper clip that didn't have the second
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: smaller oval inside the larger oval. It was just the
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: one larger outer oval. But he's credited. I mean, I
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: think there was a German newspaper in the nineteen twenties
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: that kind of misreported like him being the sole inventor
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: of the paper clip, and everyone now looks at him
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: as the inventor.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Of the paper clip, like around the world.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, he couldn't get a patent in Norway,
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: so we got them in Germany and the United States,
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: And this was in eighteen ninety nine and nineteen oh one.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: But everybody around the world calls him the inventor, even
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: though there were at least a couple of people a
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: couple of few decades before that invented a paper clip.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, both Americans. One guy was Samuel B. Fay. He
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: seems to be the first one to've invented a bent
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: wire paper clip, or at least he was the first
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: to patent it back in eighteen sixty seven. Okay, there's
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: a guy named Earlman J. Wright. In eighteen seventy seven,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: he got a patent for an improvement on Fay's bent
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: wire paper clip and Samuel Fay's paper clip. You know
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: those awareness lapel pins that people wear for all sorts
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: of different stuff. Yeah, that's what his paper clip looked like.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: And I think they're still kind of around today. So
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: you would call that a Fay paper clip, I would
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: or Sam B.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: Hey, tust me a Sam bn, I need to get
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: these papers clips exactly.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: I want to poke my eye out.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: So have you what does the deal with that? Have
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: you ever poked your eye out with a paper clip?
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: Anytime I think of So, there's a couple of things.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Anytime I think of like a just a sharp, pointy something, okay,
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: cry out okay. And then anytime I see like a
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: hearth made of stone or brick, I always imagine some
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: poor kid just stumbling and cracking their head open on
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: that car. Also anything with a really sharp corner too,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: I don't like that at all.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but you don't have like a compulsion like if
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: you have a pointy thing, you're not like, don't do it.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Josh, No, no, I don't. I don't feel the call
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: of the void forshing my head into the edge of
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: a coffee table.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: It's opposite. You're cautious.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Have you ever seen those those bumper pads that
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: people put on the corner of coffee tables when they
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: have kids.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: I had a kid, so yeah, we had plenty of those.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's the reason why, because it's possible. It's not
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: just me being crazy, like that's possible.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think that's an unusual fear.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: All right, Well that's where my paper clip thing comes from.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: Okay, gotcha. So back to the gym paper clip Capital
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: J I'm sorry, I just did it. Capital Gem. It's
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: named that because they were made on the behalf of
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: the gym manufacturing company that was in the UK, and
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: this was an eighteen ninety nine and a Connecticut man
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: named William Middlebrook came up with this was it? With
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: the design or the machine?
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: The machine to make them?
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because the long and short of it is, no
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: one like Middlebrook didn't and the gym company didn't pat
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: in the actual paper clip. They patented the machine that
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: made him. So anybody that's making a GEM style paper
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: clip from that point on could just do it if
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: they had the resources.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: Right, which is one reason why when we think of
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: paper clips today, we think of Gem paper clips because
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: they are worldwide, they're made everywhere. You don't have to
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: pay any royalties. You never had to pay any royalties
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: with them. So the paper clip, we think of the
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: two ovals, one inside of the other. That's the GEM
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: paper clip. And I'm glad you keep spelling it out
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: because I'm sure people would be confused and think that
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: you were talking about the truly, truly, truly outrageous rocker
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: girl Jim her paper clip. I think people would be
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: very misled had you not set them straight.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: Oh gooy, Since you mentioned that, I think we need
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: to shout out Britta Phillips.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, how so what?
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure that Britta Phillips, who is the bass
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: player of one of my favorite all time bands, Luna,
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: and married to Dean Wareham and Dean's brother Anthony, is
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: a listener to the show. Wow, this came full circle. Yeah,
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: so shout out to Anthony and Dean and Britta. Because
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: Britta played Oh no, it wasn't g It was.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: J E M. Yeah.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: The cartoon Jim and the Holograms.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: Who did she play? She played Jim.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: She played Jim.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: She voiced Jim oh oh on the actual cartoon. Yes,
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: that was a good cartoon. I actually watched that when
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: I was a kid.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: I really struggle with that. But anyway, shout out to Dean,
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: Britta and Anthony.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Nice. I think we should take a break, man, we
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: haven't yet.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: No, let's do it.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, here we go.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: All right, So back to the gym paper clip you know,
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: the sort of regular size one, not the tiny one
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: and not the giant ones, is about an inch can
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: hold supposedly about twenty sheets of regular paper, pretty well,
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: about twenty billion or made every year, and Americans apparently
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: use eleven billion of those. And you pointed out very
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: astutely that paper clips are used obviously to bind paper,
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: but those things can be undone and used most often
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: to poke the little reset buttons in a lot of
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: technology hardware. Back in the day, if you wanted to
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: open your CD ROM tray if it was stuck, you
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: would use that. In elementary sco cool. I don't know
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: if you did this, but you could unfold it and
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: make it into something that when you drop it pops
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: up in the air.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Oh I was never able to do that, but yeah.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you would bend it in such a way that
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: it's like a bear trap or something. You know, it's like,
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: I mean, I know there's a word for this, but
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: and we would have contests to see who could make
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: their pop the highest.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Nice. You could also shoot them pretty far with a
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: rubber band and particularly take someone's eye out.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: That's, oh man, your biggest fear.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: Right, So one of the things about the gem paper
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: clip is it's been around for one hundred and twenty
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: five years. At least, it's been virtually the same for
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty five years. So there's probably a
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: lot of people walking around thinking like, well, it's a
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: perfect thing. It is a perfect design, can't be improved on,
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: and that is just so wrong. Shouldn't even say that
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: out loud?
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, if you've ever had a tangle boot
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: box of paper clips, you know the frustration that comes
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: with that. If you've ever you know, had one out
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: in moisture, you know that they can rust and rust
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: that paper usually not a big deal, but if it's
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: an important paper, you don't want rust on that thing.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: No what else? We also chuck the cut end of
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: the wire can poke through the paper. It can poke
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: your eye. It can poke. Is the big problem with
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: that one. Yeah, very poky. And then also like eventually,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: if you stuck too many sheets of paper in there
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: and they stretch out too wide, or you make a
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: bear trap out of one, it's not going to hold
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: any papers from that point on.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and all of this has culminated, and this is
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: very funny to me that companies that make these, they
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: say they get like, you know, up to ten letters
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: a week still where people are like, you know how
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: you could fix these things?
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Right? I'm sure. I mean imagine being a person who's like,
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: I got it. I just figured out how to keep
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: people from poking themselves in the eye with a gem
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: paper clip. Of course, you're going to write a letter,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: and then you'd probably be pretty sad to get the
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: letter back saying like that's a great idea, but what
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: about this problem and that problem that you've just created
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: with your stupid design. That was the standard letter that
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: you would get back from Jim paper Clip company.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: I love it. Shout out a couple of other kinds
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: of paper clips that for me, I don't want to
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: yuck someone' jump, but if you hand me these, I'm
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: just going to throw this paper back in your face.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: Oh wow, if you have the nerve to walk up
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: with one of those spiral paper clips in the corner,
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: the round ones, uh huh no, thank you, okay, or
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: I don't know if this is the official name, but
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: I saw them called regal paper clips. They're the ones
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: that are they're rectangles and then dangling down in the center,
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: which is the binder is it looks like a couple
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: of pool cube balls on a string. Okay, that's the
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: non crude way to describe it. Oh, I see, you
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: know what I'm talking about. But I'll text you a
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: picture of the regal paper clip and you'd be like, oh, yeah, those.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: Things oh weird. Yeah, well, there are some that are
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: improved versions, right, they just haven't caught on, Like the
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: gem clip. There's one called the gothic clip, and it
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: inverts its angles inward so that when you slide it
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: onto the paper, there's no way to poke through the paper.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: And it's so good that typically it's used by archivists.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: If you're going to bind paper together and you're an archivist,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: you're probably going to use a gothic clip, although I
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: would think also in that industry you do not want
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: to use a paper clip at all.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you want to tie classy ribbon through that thing.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: They'd be like, you just carved a hole in the
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Declaration of Independence.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: I looked up gothic clip, and I mean, you type
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: those two words together, you're gonna end up with a
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: lot of weird results on the images because of goths
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: and stuff like. There were a lot of gothic hair
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: clips and things like that. But was it the one
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: that kind of is shaped like a coffin or with
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: those just.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, no, it has like inverted angles, yes, yeah, okay,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: the gothic clip. I don't know. Maybe that's why they
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: call it that, I mean, I assume. So well, let's
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about Johann Vuhler in Norway,
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: because we should say, if you're a Norwegian listener, you're
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: probably kind of mad at us right now for saying
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: that he didn't invent the paper clip. It seems to
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: be true. We're very sorry for saying that. But the
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: reason that our Norwegian listeners are mad everybody is that
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: he is a national hero in Norway for inventing the
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: paper clip.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, didn't know paper clips were such a big deal there,
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: but apparently, and this is super kind of fun fact,
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: during the Nazi occupation there in World War Two, Norwegian
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: citizens wore paper clips as sort of a sign of
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: unity and resistance.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, one of the few fun facts that involved Nazis.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, agreed.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: There's also a twenty three foot statue seven meters for
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: our friends outside of the US and Liberia of a
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: paper clip in honor of Alor. It's at the BI
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Business School in Oslo. The thing is, it's not a
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: Volor paper clip. It's a gem clip with a squared
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: off bottom.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, which is very strange. And that was the same
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: one they used on the postage stamp that they commemorated
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: for him in Norway in nineteen ninety nine.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I guess everybody just kind of dusted the
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: original version under their rug and they're like, it's a
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: Voler clip.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, thanks a lot everybody for joining us. We
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: don't have anything more to say about paper clips, which
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: means that short stuff is.
• 14:26
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• 14:33
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