Norway celebrates inventing the paper clip. It didn't.
Norway has a giant paper-clip monument, a commemorative stamp and a national hero, Johan Vaaler, credited with the invention. But Vaaler's 1899 design was clumsier than the 'Gem' clip already sold in Britain and America, and it was never made. The monument and the stamp both show the Gem.
The familiar paper clip, with its one and a half loops of steel wire, is the Gem type. It works by torsion: slide sheets between the tongues and the bent wire twists, gripping them by spring tension and friction. It was never patented. It was probably being made in Britain by the early 1870s, the earliest illustration of its modern shape is an 1893 advert, and by 1899 an American had patented a machine for making it, without even needing to name it.
Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian working in a patent office, obtained patents in Germany and the US around 1899 to 1901 for a clip of similar idea but worse design. Without the Gem's second full loop, it was hard to slip onto paper and stuck out like a keel. It was never manufactured. Patent authorities then were generous to marginal variations.
The myth began in the 1920s, when a Norwegian patent engineer came across Vaaler's German patent, failed to notice it differed from the Gem, and declared him the inventor. The Second World War gave it emotional force: under German occupation, Norwegians wore paper clips on their lapels as a quiet symbol of solidarity, 'we are bound together', and the practice was banned. After the war, the story that a Norwegian had invented the clip took hold in encyclopedias and then in international reference books.
In 1989 a paper clip almost 7 metres high was erected near Oslo in Vaaler's honour, and in 1999 Norway issued a stamp celebrating him. Both show the Gem, not the clip he patented. The humble Gem has barely changed in over a century, because its combination of easy use, grip without tearing and no tangling has proved very hard to beat.
Source: Wikipedia — Paper clip · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
