Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Paperclips

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

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This is an iHeart Podcast. is going to force us to confront the boundaries of our ethics. And what does this have to do with brain plasticity, social belonging, messed up boundaries between mental categories? What does this uncover about brain science and our calculations of morality? Listen to Inner Cosmos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and Jerry. It's here for Dave. So this is an official short stuff. Boom. I just stamped it with the official seal. That's right. Big thanks to ThoughtCo, Gizmodo, Slate, Science American, University of Michigan, go Wolverines, University of Houston, Houston? University of Houston, go Calgars.

Is it, are they the cougars? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Are there a lot of cougars roaming around Houston? You kidding me? They love those young guys out there. Yeah, I get you. Those kind of cougars. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, those are places where I found

some pretty good resources on the history of the paperclip, which when I started on this, I expected it to be pretty straightforward. Turns out it is not at all. I was thrilled and delighted to find that the history of the paperclip is pretty convoluted. There's a lot of bad information out there, and we're going to shuffle it all into place

into a coherent, fact-based, conceptually amazing short stuff. Yeah, I thought this is a really good one. This is classic short stuff stuff. So, before the paperclip, and hey, I love a paperclip, but there ain't nothing classier than making a slit in the top right corner of a page and running some ribbon through there to keep

some paper together. Yeah, the choices between ribbon are limitless. Yeah, and it just, it looks so good. For sure. And that's why people did that for centuries and centuries and centuries. I don't remember exactly when that started, but it was probably early medieval, if I remember correctly. And it wasn't until the late 19th century that paperclips started to come along. And they weren't something that was invented quite out of the gate,

but not too long after people started tinkering with this did we arrive at the paperclip as we understand it today? Yeah, and it was one of those weird things that a few different people just not working together created this very similar thing at the same time or around the same time. And the reason this happened seems to be because making like needles and metal wire became, they had the machinery to do this kind of thing

at this time, and people were like, hey, what all can we do with little needles and little pieces of wire, besides using them for sewing? Yeah, or poking your eye out. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, so apparently several men around the world in the last couple decades of the 19th century saw a really good use for mass produced wire was paper clips.

Or a way to bind paper, I think, is a better way to put it. Some people really didn't, they just kind of phoned it in. They're like, here, just chop it off and jam this through the paper. And most people said, we prefer the ribbon technique over that. But the guy who really came the closest out of the gate to inventing what we understand as the paperclip,

it's called the Jim paperclip, was a Norwegian man named Johan Voller. I've also seen it spelled V-O-L-A-R, so, Voller? Johan Voller? Okay. Sure. And that's Jim, capital G-E-R, so Wöhler, Johann Wöhler. Sure. And that's Jim, capital G-E-M, and we'll get to the naming of that in a second.

But yeah, he made a paperclip that didn't have the second smaller oval inside the larger oval. It was just the one larger outer oval. But he's credited, I mean, I think there was a German newspaper in the 1920s that kind of misreported like him being the sole inventor of the paper clip and everyone now looks at him as the inventor of the paper clip. Like around the world. Yeah, for sure. He couldn't get a patent in Norway, so he got them in Germany and the

United States and this was in 1899 and 1901. But everybody around the world calls him the inventor, even though there were at least a couple of people, a couple of few decades before that invented a paperclip. Yeah, both Americans. One guy was Samuel B. Fay. He seems to be the first one to have invented a bent wire paperclip, or at least he was the first to patent it back in 1867. There's a guy named Erlman J. Wright in 1877.

He got a patent for an improvement on Fay's bent wire paperclip. And Samuel Fay's paperclip, you know those awareness lapel pins that people wear for all sorts of different stuff? That's what his paperclip looked like. And I think they're still kind of around today. So you would call that a Faye paperclip.

I would. Or a Sam Bee. Right. Hey, toss me a Sam Bee, honey, to get these papers clipped. Exactly. I want to poke my eye out. So have you, what is the deal with that? Have you ever poked your eye out with a paperclip?

No. Is that common? Anytime I think of, so there's a couple of things. Anytime I think of just a sharp pointy something, poke your eye out. Okay. And then anytime I see a hearth made of stone or brick, I always imagine some poor kid just stumbling and cracking their head open on that hearth.

Also, anything with a really sharp corner too. I don't like that at all. Yeah, but you don't have like a compulsion. Like if you have a pointy thing, you're not like, don't do it, Josh. No, no, I don't feel the call of the void for bashing my head into the edge of a coffee table. It's the opposite, you're cautious.

Yeah, have you ever seen those bumper pads that people put on the corner of coffee tables when they have kids? I had a kid, so yeah, we had plenty of those. Okay, that's the reason why, because it's possible. It's not just me being crazy, like that's possible. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think that's an unusual fear. All right, well that's where my paperclip thing comes from.

Okay, gotcha. So back to the gem paperclip, capital J, I'm sorry, I just did it, capital G-E-M. It's named that because they were made on the behalf of the gem manufacturing company that was in the UK, and this was in 1899, and a Connecticut man named William Middlebrook came up with this, what was it, the design or the machine?

The machine to make them. Yeah, because the long and short of it is no one, like Middlebrook didn't and the Gem company didn't patent the actual paperclip, they patented the machine that made them. So anybody that's making a Gem-style paperclip from that point on could just do it if they had the resources.

Right, which is one reason why, when we think of paperclips today, we think of Gem paperclips because they are worldwide. They're made everywhere. You don't have to pay any royalties, you never had to pay any royalties with them. So the paper clip we think of, the two ovals, one inside of the other, that's the gem paper clip.

And I'm glad you keep spelling it out because I'm sure people would be confused and think that you were talking about the truly, truly, truly outrageous rocker girl gem Her paperclip. I think people would be very misled had you not set them straight Go ahead since you mentioned that I think we need to shout out Britta Phillips. Oh, yeah, how so who what? I'm pretty sure that Britta Phillips who is the the bass player of one of my favorite all-time bands, Luna, and married to Dean Wareham, and Dean's brother Anthony is a listener to

the show. Wow, this came full circle. Yeah. So shout out to Anthony and Dean and Britta because Britta played, oh no, it wasn't G, it was J-E-M. Yeah. The cartoon, Jim and the Holograms. Who did she play? She played Jim? She played Jim. She voiced Jim.

Oh, on the actual cartoon? Yes. That was a good cartoon. I actually watched that when I was a kid. I really struggled with that. But anyway, shout out to Dean, Britta, and Anthony. Nice. I think we should take a break, man. We haven't yet. No, let's do it. Okay, here we go. No one is harmed.

No death, no trauma. Just a few cells grown in a dish. This is David Eagleman from the Inner Cosmos Podcast. And this week, we're tackling a tough question where brain science meets the future. Lab-grown meat is going to force us to confront the boundaries of our ethics and our imagination. It invites us to question why we draw lines exactly where we do

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those things can be undone and used most often to poke the little reset buttons in a lot of technology hardware. Back in the day, if you wanted to open your CD-ROM tray, if it was stuck, you would use that. In elementary school, I don't know if you did this, but you wanted to open your CD-ROM tray, if it was stuck, you would use that. In elementary school, I don't know if you did this, but you could unfold it and make it into something that when you drop, it pops up in the air. Oh, I was never able to do that, but yeah. Yeah, you would bend it in such a way that it's like,

like a bear trap or something, you know, it's like, I mean, I know there's a word for this, but, and we would have contests to see who could make theirs pop the highest. Nice. You could also shoot them pretty far with a rubber band and potentially take someone's eye out. Oh, yeah. That's, oh man, your biggest fear. Right? So one of the things about the gem paperclip is it's, it's been around for 125 years at least. It's been virtually the same for 125 years at least.

It's been virtually the same for 125 years. So there's probably a lot of people walking around thinking like, well, it's a perfect thing. It is a perfect design. It can't be improved on. And that is just so wrong. You shouldn't even say that out loud. Yeah.

I mean, if you've ever had a tangled box of paper clips, you know the frustration that comes with that. If you've ever, you know, had one out in moisture, you know that they can rust and rust that paper. Usually not a big deal, but if it's an important paper, you don't want rust on that thing. No. What else? Also, Chuck, the cut end of the wire can poke through the paper.

It can poke your eye. It can poke is the big problem with that one. Yeah, very pokey. And then also like eventually if you stuff too many sheets of paper in there and they stretch out too wide, or you make a bear trap out of one, it's not going to hold any papers from that point on.

Yeah, and all of this has culminated, and this is very funny to me, that companies that make these, they say they get like up to 10 letters a week still where people are like, you know how you could fix these things. Right. That's awesome.

I'm sure. I mean, imagine being a person who's like, I've got it. I just figured out how to keep people from poking themselves in the eye with a gem paperclip. Of course you're gonna write a letter. And then you'd probably be pretty sad to get the letter back saying like, that's a great idea. But what about this problem and that problem

that you just created with your stupid design? That was the standard letter that you would get back from Jim, paper clip company. I love it. Shout out a couple of other kinds of paper clips that, for me, I don't want to yuck someone's yum, but if you hand me these, I'm just going to throw this paper back in your face. Oh, wow.

If you have the nerve to walk up with one of those spiral paper clips in the corner, the round ones. Uh-huh. No, thank you. Okay. Or, I don't know if this is the official name, but I saw them called Regal paper clips.

They're the ones that are, they're rectangles, and then dangling down in the center, which is the binder, is, it looks like a couple of pool cue balls on a string. Okay. What? That's the non-crued way to describe it. Oh, I see.

You know what I'm talking about. But I'll text you a picture of the Regal paper clip and you'll be like, oh yeah, those things. Oh, weird. Yeah, well there are some that are improved versions, right? They just haven't caught on like the gem clip there's one called the gothic clip and It inverts its angles inward so that when you slide it onto the paper There's no way to poke through the paper and it's so good that typically it's used by

Archivists if you're going to bind paper together and you're an archivist You're probably going to use a gothic clip. Although I would think also in that industry, you do not want to use a paper clip at all. Yeah, you wanna tie a classy ribbon through that thing. They'd be like, you just carved a hole in the Declaration of Independence? I looked up gothic clip and I mean,

you type those two words together, you're gonna end up with a lot of weird results on the images because of Goths and stuff like there were a lot of Goth hair clips and things like that yeah but was it the one that kind of is shaped like a coffin or with those just yeah okay no it has like inverted angles yes yeah okay I don know, maybe that's why they call it that. I mean, I assume so. Well, let's talk a little bit more about Johan Wuehler in Norway,

because we should say, if you're a Norwegian listener, you're probably kind of mad at us right now for saying that he didn't invent the paper clip. It seems to be true, we're very sorry for saying that, but the reason that our Norwegian listeners are mad, everybody, is that he is a national hero in Norway for inventing the paperclip. Yeah. Didn't know paperclips were such a big deal there. But apparently, and this is super kind of fun fact,

during the Nazi occupation there in World War II, Norwegian citizens wore paperclips as sort a sign of like unity and resistance. Yeah, one of the few fun facts that involved Nazis. Yeah, agreed. There's also a 23-foot statue, 7 meters for our friends outside of the US and Liberia, of a paper clip in honor of Voller. It's at the BI Business School in Oslo. The thing is, it's not a Voller paper clip in honor of Válar. It's at the BI Business School in Oslo. The thing is, it's not a Válar paper clip. It's a gem clip with a squared off bottom. Yeah, which is very strange.

And that was the same one they used on the postage stamp that they commemorated for him in Norway in 1999. Yeah. So I guess everybody just kind of dusted the original version under their rug, and they're like, here's a Válar clip. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, well, thanks a lot everybody for joining us. We don't have anything more to say about paper clips, which means that short stuff is out.

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