Indispensable... The humble paperclip.
When I asked for your favourite everyday designs a fortnight ago, someone nominated the paperclip. First patented in Germany by Johan Vaaler (1866-1910), a Norwegian inventor, in 1899, the paperclip remains indispensable. It has yet to be superceded by some modish, bleeping computer-controlled digital device demanding a Phd (or four-year-old computer whizz) to operate, while gobbling up equally fashionable "sustainable" green energy generated by rooftop windmills to keep it going.
What digital computer technology has done, in fact, is to create ever more demand for the paperclip as flattened forests of hot paper are rolled out from hard-pressed office printers to satisfy our insatiable demand for individual copies of unnecessary memos, endless re-hashings of work we've just done but aren't sure of, and fast-flowing streams of incomprehensible management reports.
In its utter simplicity lies the genius of the paperclip. Ubiquituous, it's so banal that the very word paperclip is somehow funny. Private Eye's parodies of New Year's Honours lists usually feature some worthy government apparatchik working in a remote Department of Paperclips. Yet, this little bit of minimalist springy folded metal does its job well enough and, besides, can be used as an all-purpose miniature tool, for shaping desk-top animals, cleaning finger nails, making miniature buildings, or simply as something to fiddle with in times of bureaucratic stress. According to an enjoyably time-wasting survey conducted by Lloyds Bank some while ago, of every 100,000 paperclips made in the United States, 19,143 were used as poker chips, 17,200 held clothing together, 15,556 were dropped and lost, 14,163 were absent-mindedly destroyed during telephone calls, 8,504 cleaned pipes and nails, while 5,434 served as stand-in toothpicks.
There are several different types of paperclip, but the one most British readers will have in mind, and in drawers of desks at home and at work, is the familiar double U-shaped design known as the "Gem" clip originally made by Gem Manufacturing Ltd. This English company had probably been making paperclips for several years before Johan Vaaler enjoyed his "eureka!" moment, but it hadn't thought of taking out a patent as the Norwegian did; not that Vaaler made any money out of what he believed to have been his singular invention.
Even so, in recent years a giant paperclip (I promise this is true) has been erected outside Oslo in Vaaler's memory. There is, though, a perfectly serious reason for this seemingly mad moment in the world of public art. During the Second World War, when Norwegians were forbidden by their German conquerors from displaying national symbols, they began to wear paperclips in their clothes. Not only was it, in their minds, a Norwegian invention, but it symbolised the idea of holding on together. Soon enough it became a crime to be seen sporting a paperclip.
From a simple tool to a national symbol of resistance, the paperclip is a small triumph of everyday design. An example of the Gem clip is even held, somewhere between Gaudier-Brzeska sculpture and a Gershen-Newark shrimp cleaner (don't ask) in the collections of New York's Museum of Modern Art. Put that in your pipe and clean it.
