There’s a 23-foot-tall paperclip standing outside a university in Sandvika, Norway. It was erected in 1989 to honor Johan Vaaler, the Norwegian inventor who supposedly gave the world the paperclip. It’s a touching monument to a national hero. It’s also a monument to a design Vaaler never made.
The giant sculpture is a Gem clip — the double-looped, oval-shaped paperclip you’ve held ten thousand times. Vaaler’s actual patent was for something different entirely: a single-looped, roughly rectangular wire form that looked more like a cotter pin than the thing sitting on your desk (Wikipedia, Johan Vaaler). Vaaler’s version was never manufactured. Never marketed. Never sold. And the Gem clip, the real one — the one Norway built a 23-foot statue of to celebrate — was never patented by anyone, anywhere, ever.
Here’s how a wrong design became a national symbol, how the right design stayed anonymous, and how the whole mess accidentally made the paperclip one of the most politically charged office supplies in history.
The man who patented a clip that already existed
Johan Vaaler was a patent examiner at Alfred J. Bryns Patentkontor in Kristiania (now Oslo). He worked there from 1892 until his death in 1910. In 1899, he designed a wire binding device and, because Norway had no patent laws at the time, filed for protection in Germany first — granted June 6, 1901 — and then in the United States, granted June 4, 1901 (Wikipedia, Johan Vaaler).
His design was a single piece of spring wire bent into a rectangular or triangular hoop, with the ends forming “members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions.” It held paper. It technically worked. But it was missing the thing that made the Gem clip brilliant: the second loop. Without that extra curl, Vaaler’s clip couldn’t grip a stack of paper flatly. The sheets buckled. The wire relied on bending stiffness alone, not the torsion that gives a Gem its hold (ThoughtCo, The History and Invention of the Paperclip).
What Vaaler almost certainly didn’t know was that the Gem clip — the double-looped design that would become the universal standard — was already in production. The Gem Manufacturing Company Ltd. of England had been making them since at least the early 1870s, and by 1893, Cushman & Denison were advertising the “Gem Paper Clip” in American trade publications (Wikipedia, Paper clip). In 1899, William Middlebrook of Waterbury, Connecticut received a patent for a machine that made wire paper clips — and his patent drawing shows the Gem design, which he didn’t bother naming, apparently because it was already so obvious (Wikipedia, Paper clip).
Vaaler was a patent professional. He likely saw the Gem clip eventually — possibly during his own lifetime — and recognized the problem. He never improved his design. Never tried to manufacture it. Never contacted potential producers. His patent quietly expired. “Quite soon he must have had the disappointment of his life,” Wikipedia notes with gentle Norwegian understatement, “when he was confronted by the ‘Gem.’” (Wikipedia, Johan Vaaler)
The Gem clip, meanwhile, conquered the world. Norwegian fish-hook manufacturer O. Mustad & Son has been producing Gem-type clips since 1928 (Wikipedia, Johan Vaaler). The Swedish word for paperclip is gem. The clip was never patented because there was nothing to patent — the design was just a shape, a particularly good shape, that anyone could make from a piece of wire.
How Norway adopted the wrong inventor
Vaaler’s invention didn’t become famous until after World War II. During the German occupation of Norway (1940–1945), the occupiers banned Norwegian national symbols — pins bearing the likeness or initials of the exiled King Haakon VII, red garments, certain hats. Norwegians needed something small, something ordinary, something a soldier wouldn’t bother confiscating. They chose the paperclip (Wikipedia, Norwegian resistance movement).
The symbolism was elegant: a paperclip holds things together. We hold together. Students at the University of Oslo wore Gem clips on their lapels as a quiet act of defiance — a one-gram protest (Joe Moran, “Paper Clip”). The Germans eventually banned paperclips too, which only proved the point.
After the war, Norwegians looking for a hero to celebrate the paperclip’s role in resistance found Vaaler’s patent — the only Norwegian connection to the paperclip in the historical record. They didn’t check whether his design was the one people had actually worn. It wasn’t. But by then Vaaler had been dead for 35 years, the Gem clip had become inseparable from Norwegian identity, and a patent clerk’s expired wire form was about to become a national myth.
A 23-foot Gem clip went up in Sandvika in 1989, honoring a man who designed a different clip. A commemorative stamp was issued depicting the Gem, not Vaaler’s design. Vaaler was retroactively credited as “the inventor of the paperclip” in encyclopedias worldwide — all because the real inventor was a nameless British company that never filed paperwork (Wikipedia, Johan Vaaler).
A small-town Tennessee version of the same idea
Sixty years after Norwegian students wore paperclips as symbols of solidarity, a group of middle schoolers in Whitwell, Tennessee stumbled onto the same piece of history and turned it into something else entirely.
In 1998, Linda Hooper, principal of Whitwell Middle School, asked her staff to find a project that would teach tolerance to the mostly white, mostly Christian student body in this small town in southeastern Tennessee. Assistant principal David Smith and teacher Sandra Roberts started a Holocaust education class. The students were overwhelmed by the scale of it — six million — and asked if they could collect something physical to represent the number. They chose paper clips, after learning that Norwegian students had worn them during the war (Paper Clips Project, Wikipedia).
The students got the details slightly wrong — they believed Norwegians wore paperclips specifically as a protest against anti-Semitism and the deportation of Jews, which isn’t quite accurate. The clips were a broader symbol of Norwegian solidarity and resistance to occupation. But the mistake didn’t matter, because what happened next was extraordinary. Letters and packages arrived from everywhere. Actors, politicians, Holocaust survivors, entire schools. They collected over 30 million paper clips — five times the six million they’d set out to represent (One Clip at a Time, Paper Clips Project).
In 2001, the school dedicated a Children’s Holocaust Memorial: an authentic German railcar — the kind used to transport people to concentration camps — filled with a portion of the collected paper clips. A 2004 documentary, Paper Clips, brought the story to a wider audience. The town of Whitwell, population about 1,600, became the unlikely home of one of the most visited Holocaust memorials in the American South.
A paperclip is about as close to nothing as a manufactured object can get. It’s a piece of wire bent into a shape. And somehow it has been a symbol of Norwegian resistance against fascism, a teaching tool for Tennessee schoolchildren learning about genocide, and the subject of one of history’s more entertaining attribution errors — all without ever being owned by anyone.
The clip that beat every patent
The irony at the center of the paperclip story is that the design which won — the Gem — is the one that belongs to no one. Vaaler patented a clip and it failed. Dozens of other inventors patented clips between 1867 and 1899, and every one of them is now forgotten. Samuel B. Fay patented the first bent-wire clip in 1867; it was meant for attaching tickets to fabric. Erlman J. Wright patented one in 1877 for fastening newspapers. None of them looked like the Gem, and none of them lasted (Wikipedia, Paper clip).
The Gem’s genius is its use of torsion. When you slide paper between the two tongues of a Gem clip, they’re forced apart, and the bends in the wire twist — that’s torsion — gripping the sheets with friction. The more paper you add, the more the wire twists, the tighter it holds. It’s a spring system that tightens under load, made from a single piece of wire bent three times, and it works so well that in 130 years nobody has improved it enough to matter (Wikipedia, Paper clip).
You can buy them anywhere — boxes of 100 for a few dollars, in every office supply store on earth. No brand matters. No patent matters. The best-designed fastener in history is the one that no one owns.
Maybe that’s the best part. The paperclip won by being too simple to own, too useful to replace, and too ordinary to notice — until a 23-foot monument, a Norwegian resistance movement, and a Tennessee school project reminded us that the most boring object in your desk has had a stranger life than almost anything in it.