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The paperclip was invented in Norway in 1899, and since then, paperclips have proliferated tremendously. They are ubiquitous, which does not mean they are literally everywhere, like air or incompetence, but only that they are not hard to find when you need one. On a scale of ubiquity from 1 to 10, paperclips might be a 6. Some things are more ubiquitous than others.

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You might think there would be no need to manufacture more paperclips, since there are already plenty, but there are actual factories churning them out in a variety of colors and sizes. One such company is ACCO, which stands for the American Clip Company. Before the paperclip, separate sheets of paper were bound together by ribbons or straight pins—or staples. The staple was invented twenty years before the paperclip, and is less temporary than the paperclip. Generally, a group of papers requires one or the other, depending on the temporariness of the collection, but not both. Staples and paperclips are staples of the workplace, and also staples of the store known as Staples. There is no store called Paperclips.

 

May 29th is official National Paperclip Day. There is no National Staple Day--yet, but, thankfully, there is a National Fill Our Staplers Day.  March 9th. Still time to plan a party!

 

A single paperclip can be purchased for almost nothing. But some are quite large and some are even golden. Others have a special significance, such as the paperclip that (supposedly) once held together the individual pages of Elvis Presley’s first contract, which can be yours for only $25 on ebay. 

 

E-mails use the humble paperclip as the universal symbol for a digital attachment, showing up sometime in the late 1990s on Microsoft Outlook and other formats more or less simultaneously. The lovable Clippy, the Microsoft assistant paperclip with eyes and eyebrows, made his appearance in 1997, but a decade later was found dead, presumably killed off by the same organization that created him.

 

Operation Paperclip might sound like a sophomore prank centered on filling someone’s locker with thousands of paperclips, but actually was a secret, years long post-World War II effort to secure German scientists to bolster the United States in areas of rocketry, aviation, and medicine.

 

The Paper Clips Project, in contrast, was one middle school’s effort to secure 6 million paperclips to help students grasp the  number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. What do you do with 6 million paperclips, besides hold together 60 million sheets of paper? The students in Whitwell, TN put the over 6 million paperclips they collected into an imported railcar from Germany repurposed as The Children's Holocaust Memorial.