Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck
and Jerry's here for Dave. So this is an official
short stuff boom. I just stamped it with the official seal.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
That's right, big thanks to thought Co, Gizmoto, slate signs,
American University of Michigan, Go Wolverines, University of Houston, Houston,
University of Houston, Go Cowgers.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Is it? Are they the cougars?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Huh. Are there a lot of cougars roaming around Houston?
Speaker 2 (00:33):
You kidding me? They love they love those young guys.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, good to those kind of cougars. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Those are places where I found some pretty good resources
on the history of the paper clip, which when I
started on this I expected to be pretty straightforward. It
is not at all. I was thrilled and delighted to
find that the history of the paper clip is pretty convoluted.
(00:57):
There's a lot of bad information out there. We're going
to shuffle it all into place into a coherent, fact based,
conceptually amazing short stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, I thought this is a really good one. This
is classic short stuff stuff. So before the paper clip,
and hey, I love a paper clip, 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.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah. The choices between ribbon are limitless.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah, and it just it looks so good.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
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 nineteenth century that paper
clips started to come along, and they weren't something that
was invented quite out of the gate, but not too
(01:56):
long after people started tinkering with this, did we arrive
at the paper clip as we understand it today.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah, And it was one of those weird things that
a few different people just you know, not working together,
created a 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
you know, they had the machinery to do this kind
of thing at this time, and people are like, hey,
(02:24):
what all can we do with little needles and little
pieces of wire besides using them for sewing?
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, we're poking your eye up, Yeah, exactly. So. Yeah.
So apparently several men around the world in the last
couple decades of the nineteenth 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
(02:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
But the guy who who really came the closest out
of the gate to inventing what we understand as the
paper clip, it's called the Jim paper clip. It was
a Norwegian man named Johann Vohler. I've also seen it
spelled v l e R so voler yeh.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
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 paper clip 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
(03:41):
think there was a German newspaper in the nineteen twenties
that kind of misreported like him being the sole inventor
of the paper clip, and everyone now looks at him
as the inventor.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Of the paper clip, like around the world.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, for sure, he couldn't get a patent in Norway,
so we got them in Germany and the United States,
And this was in eighteen ninety nine and nineteen oh one.
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 paper clip.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, both Americans. One guy was Samuel B. Fay. He
seems to be the first one to've invented a bent
wire paper clip, or at least he was the first
to patent it back in eighteen sixty seven. Okay, there's
a guy named Earlman J. Wright. In eighteen seventy seven,
he got a patent for an improvement on Fay's bent
(04:29):
wire paper clip and Samuel Fay's paper clip. You know
those awareness lapel pins that people wear for all sorts
of different stuff. Yeah, that's what his paper clip looked like.
And I think they're still kind of around today. So
you would call that a Fay paper clip, I would
or Sam B.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Hey, tust me a Sam bn, I need to get
these papers clips exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
I want to poke my eye out.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So have you what does the deal with that? Have
you ever poked your eye out with a paper clip?
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Anytime I think of So, there's a couple of things.
Anytime I think of like a just a sharp, pointy something, okay,
cry out okay. And then anytime I see like a
hearth made of stone or brick, I always imagine some
poor kid just stumbling and cracking their head open on
that car. Also anything with a really sharp corner too,
(05:23):
I don't like that at all.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, but you don't have like a compulsion like if
you have a pointy thing, you're not like, don't do it.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Josh, No, no, I don't. I don't feel the call
of the void forshing my head into the edge of
a coffee table.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
It's opposite. You're cautious.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah. Have you ever seen those those bumper pads that
people put on the corner of coffee tables when they
have kids.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I had a kid, so yeah, we had plenty of those.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Okay, that's the reason why, because it's possible. It's not
just me being crazy, like that's possible.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think that's an unusual fear.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
All right, Well that's where my paper clip thing comes from.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Okay, gotcha. So back to the gym paper clip Capital
J I'm sorry, I just did it. Capital Gem. It's
named that because they were made on the behalf of
the gym manufacturing company that was in the UK, and
this was an eighteen ninety nine and a Connecticut man
named William Middlebrook came up with this was it? With
(06:18):
the design or the machine?
Speaker 1 (06:19):
The machine to make them?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, because the long and short of it is, no
one like Middlebrook didn't and the gym company didn't pat
in the actual paper clip. They patented the machine that
made him. So anybody that's making a GEM style paper
clip from that point on could just do it if
they had the resources.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Right, which is one reason why when we think of
paper clips today, we think of Gem paper clips 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
(06:54):
because I'm sure people would be confused and think that
you were talking about the truly, truly, truly outrageous rocker
girl Jim her paper clip. I think people would be
very misled had you not set them straight.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Oh gooy, Since you mentioned that, I think we need
to shout out Britta Phillips.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Oh yeah, how so what?
Speaker 2 (07:16):
I'm pretty sure that Britta Phillips, who is 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.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
J E M. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
The cartoon Jim and the Holograms.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Who did she play? She played Jim.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
She played Jim.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
She voiced Jim oh oh on the actual cartoon. Yes,
that was a good cartoon. I actually watched that when
I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I really struggle with that. But anyway, shout out to Dean,
Britta and Anthony.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Nice. I think we should take a break, man, we
haven't yet.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
No, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Okay, here we go.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
All right, So back to the gym paper clip you know,
the sort of regular size one, not the tiny one
and not the giant ones, is about an inch can
hold supposedly about twenty sheets of regular paper, pretty well,
about twenty billion or made every year, and Americans apparently
use eleven billion of those. And you pointed out very
(08:40):
astutely that paper clips are used obviously to bind paper,
but 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 sco cool. I don't know
if you did this, but you could unfold it and
(09:03):
make it into something that when you drop it pops
up in the air.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Oh I was never able to do that, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, you would bend it in such a way that
it's 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
their pop the highest.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Nice. You could also shoot them pretty far with a
rubber band and particularly take someone's eye out.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
That's, oh man, your biggest fear.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Right, So one of the things about the gem paper
clip is it's been around for one hundred and twenty
five years. At least, it's been virtually the same for
one hundred and twenty five years. So there's probably a
lot of people walking around thinking like, well, it's a
perfect thing. It is a perfect design, can't be improved on,
and that is just so wrong. Shouldn't even say that
(09:52):
out loud?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, I mean, if you've ever had a tangle boot
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.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
No what else? We 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 poky. And then also like eventually,
if you stuck 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.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yeah, and all of this has culminated, and this is
very funny to me that companies that make these, they
say they get like, you know, up to ten letters
a week still where people are like, you know how
you could fix these things?
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Right? I'm sure. I mean imagine being a person who's like,
I got it. I just figured out how to keep
people from poking themselves in the eye with a gem
paper clip. Of course, you're going to 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've just created
with your stupid design. That was the standard letter that
(11:04):
you would get back from Jim paper Clip company.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I love it. Shout out a couple of other kinds
of paper clips that for me, I don't want to
yuck someone' jump, 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
(11:28):
that are they're rectangles and then dangling down in the center,
which is the binder is it looks like a couple
of pool cube balls on a string. Okay, that's the
non crude way to describe it. Oh, I see, you
know what I'm talking about. But I'll text you a
(11:50):
picture of the regal paper clip and you'd be like, oh, yeah, those.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
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.
(12:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, you want to tie classy ribbon through that thing.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
They'd be like, you just carved a hole in the
Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
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 gothic hair
clips and things like that. But was it the one
that kind of is shaped like a coffin or with
those just.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, okay, no, it has like inverted angles, yes, yeah, okay,
the gothic clip. I don't know. Maybe that's why they
call it that, I mean, I assume. So well, let's
talk a little bit more about Johann Vuhler in Norway,
because we should say, if you're a Norwegian listener, you're
probably kind of mad at us right now for saying
(13:10):
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
paper clip.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah, didn't know paper clips were such a big deal there,
but apparently, and this is super kind of fun fact,
during the Nazi occupation there in World War Two, Norwegian
citizens wore paper clips as sort of a sign of
unity and resistance.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, one of the few fun facts that involved Nazis.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
There's also a twenty three foot statue seven meters for
our friends outside of the US and Liberia of a
paper clip in honor of Alor. It's at the BI
Business School in Oslo. The thing is, it's not a
Volor paper clip. It's a gem clip with a squared
off bottom.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
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 nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, so I guess everybody just kind of dusted the
original version under their rug and they're like, it's a
Voler clip.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Yeah. 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.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
At Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck
and Jerry's here for Dave. So this is an official
short stuff boom. I just stamped it with the official seal.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
That's right, big thanks to thought Co, Gizmoto, slate signs,
American University of Michigan, Go Wolverines, University of Houston, Houston,
University of Houston, Go Cowgers.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Is it? Are they the cougars?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Huh. Are there a lot of cougars roaming around Houston?
Speaker 2 (00:33):
You kidding me? They love they love those young guys.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, good to those kind of cougars. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Those are places where I found some pretty good resources
on the history of the paper clip, which when I
started on this I expected to be pretty straightforward. It
is not at all. I was thrilled and delighted to
find that the history of the paper clip is pretty convoluted.
(00:57):
There's a lot of bad information out there. We're going
to shuffle it all into place into a coherent, fact based,
conceptually amazing short stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, I thought this is a really good one. This
is classic short stuff stuff. So before the paper clip,
and hey, I love a paper clip, 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.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah. The choices between ribbon are limitless.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah, and it just it looks so good.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
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 nineteenth century that paper
clips started to come along, and they weren't something that
was invented quite out of the gate, but not too
(01:56):
long after people started tinkering with this, did we arrive
at the paper clip as we understand it today.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah, And it was one of those weird things that
a few different people just you know, not working together,
created a 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
you know, they had the machinery to do this kind
of thing at this time, and people are like, hey,
(02:24):
what all can we do with little needles and little
pieces of wire besides using them for sewing?
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, we're poking your eye up, Yeah, exactly. So. Yeah.
So apparently several men around the world in the last
couple decades of the nineteenth 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
(02:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
But the guy who who really came the closest out
of the gate to inventing what we understand as the
paper clip, it's called the Jim paper clip. It was
a Norwegian man named Johann Vohler. I've also seen it
spelled v l e R so voler yeh.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
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 paper clip 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
(03:41):
think there was a German newspaper in the nineteen twenties
that kind of misreported like him being the sole inventor
of the paper clip, and everyone now looks at him
as the inventor.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Of the paper clip, like around the world.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, for sure, he couldn't get a patent in Norway,
so we got them in Germany and the United States,
And this was in eighteen ninety nine and nineteen oh one.
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 paper clip.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, both Americans. One guy was Samuel B. Fay. He
seems to be the first one to've invented a bent
wire paper clip, or at least he was the first
to patent it back in eighteen sixty seven. Okay, there's
a guy named Earlman J. Wright. In eighteen seventy seven,
he got a patent for an improvement on Fay's bent
(04:29):
wire paper clip and Samuel Fay's paper clip. You know
those awareness lapel pins that people wear for all sorts
of different stuff. Yeah, that's what his paper clip looked like.
And I think they're still kind of around today. So
you would call that a Fay paper clip, I would
or Sam B.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Hey, tust me a Sam bn, I need to get
these papers clips exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
I want to poke my eye out.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So have you what does the deal with that? Have
you ever poked your eye out with a paper clip?
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Anytime I think of So, there's a couple of things.
Anytime I think of like a just a sharp, pointy something, okay,
cry out okay. And then anytime I see like a
hearth made of stone or brick, I always imagine some
poor kid just stumbling and cracking their head open on
that car. Also anything with a really sharp corner too,
(05:23):
I don't like that at all.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, but you don't have like a compulsion like if
you have a pointy thing, you're not like, don't do it.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Josh, No, no, I don't. I don't feel the call
of the void forshing my head into the edge of
a coffee table.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
It's opposite. You're cautious.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah. Have you ever seen those those bumper pads that
people put on the corner of coffee tables when they
have kids.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I had a kid, so yeah, we had plenty of those.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Okay, that's the reason why, because it's possible. It's not
just me being crazy, like that's possible.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think that's an unusual fear.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
All right, Well that's where my paper clip thing comes from.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Okay, gotcha. So back to the gym paper clip Capital
J I'm sorry, I just did it. Capital Gem. It's
named that because they were made on the behalf of
the gym manufacturing company that was in the UK, and
this was an eighteen ninety nine and a Connecticut man
named William Middlebrook came up with this was it? With
(06:18):
the design or the machine?
Speaker 1 (06:19):
The machine to make them?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, because the long and short of it is, no
one like Middlebrook didn't and the gym company didn't pat
in the actual paper clip. They patented the machine that
made him. So anybody that's making a GEM style paper
clip from that point on could just do it if
they had the resources.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Right, which is one reason why when we think of
paper clips today, we think of Gem paper clips 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
(06:54):
because I'm sure people would be confused and think that
you were talking about the truly, truly, truly outrageous rocker
girl Jim her paper clip. I think people would be
very misled had you not set them straight.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Oh gooy, Since you mentioned that, I think we need
to shout out Britta Phillips.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Oh yeah, how so what?
Speaker 2 (07:16):
I'm pretty sure that Britta Phillips, who is 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.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
J E M. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
The cartoon Jim and the Holograms.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Who did she play? She played Jim.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
She played Jim.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
She voiced Jim oh oh on the actual cartoon. Yes,
that was a good cartoon. I actually watched that when
I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I really struggle with that. But anyway, shout out to Dean,
Britta and Anthony.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Nice. I think we should take a break, man, we
haven't yet.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
No, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Okay, here we go.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
All right, So back to the gym paper clip you know,
the sort of regular size one, not the tiny one
and not the giant ones, is about an inch can
hold supposedly about twenty sheets of regular paper, pretty well,
about twenty billion or made every year, and Americans apparently
use eleven billion of those. And you pointed out very
(08:40):
astutely that paper clips are used obviously to bind paper,
but 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 sco cool. I don't know
if you did this, but you could unfold it and
(09:03):
make it into something that when you drop it pops
up in the air.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Oh I was never able to do that, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, you would bend it in such a way that
it's 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
their pop the highest.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Nice. You could also shoot them pretty far with a
rubber band and particularly take someone's eye out.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
That's, oh man, your biggest fear.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Right, So one of the things about the gem paper
clip is it's been around for one hundred and twenty
five years. At least, it's been virtually the same for
one hundred and twenty five years. So there's probably a
lot of people walking around thinking like, well, it's a
perfect thing. It is a perfect design, can't be improved on,
and that is just so wrong. Shouldn't even say that
(09:52):
out loud?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, I mean, if you've ever had a tangle boot
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.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
No what else? We 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 poky. And then also like eventually,
if you stuck 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.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yeah, and all of this has culminated, and this is
very funny to me that companies that make these, they
say they get like, you know, up to ten letters
a week still where people are like, you know how
you could fix these things?
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Right? I'm sure. I mean imagine being a person who's like,
I got it. I just figured out how to keep
people from poking themselves in the eye with a gem
paper clip. Of course, you're going to 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've just created
with your stupid design. That was the standard letter that
(11:04):
you would get back from Jim paper Clip company.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I love it. Shout out a couple of other kinds
of paper clips that for me, I don't want to
yuck someone' jump, 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
(11:28):
that are they're rectangles and then dangling down in the center,
which is the binder is it looks like a couple
of pool cube balls on a string. Okay, that's the
non crude way to describe it. Oh, I see, you
know what I'm talking about. But I'll text you a
(11:50):
picture of the regal paper clip and you'd be like, oh, yeah, those.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
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.
(12:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, you want to tie classy ribbon through that thing.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
They'd be like, you just carved a hole in the
Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
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 gothic hair
clips and things like that. But was it the one
that kind of is shaped like a coffin or with
those just.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, okay, no, it has like inverted angles, yes, yeah, okay,
the gothic clip. I don't know. Maybe that's why they
call it that, I mean, I assume. So well, let's
talk a little bit more about Johann Vuhler in Norway,
because we should say, if you're a Norwegian listener, you're
probably kind of mad at us right now for saying
(13:10):
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
paper clip.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah, didn't know paper clips were such a big deal there,
but apparently, and this is super kind of fun fact,
during the Nazi occupation there in World War Two, Norwegian
citizens wore paper clips as sort of a sign of
unity and resistance.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, one of the few fun facts that involved Nazis.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
There's also a twenty three foot statue seven meters for
our friends outside of the US and Liberia of a
paper clip in honor of Alor. It's at the BI
Business School in Oslo. The thing is, it's not a
Volor paper clip. It's a gem clip with a squared
off bottom.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
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 nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, so I guess everybody just kind of dusted the
original version under their rug and they're like, it's a
Voler clip.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Yeah. 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.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
At Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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