"The wire clip for holding office papers together has entirely superseded the use of the pin."
Business, March 1900
Steel wire was still a relatively new concept in the mid- nineteenth century when an American, Samuel Fay, patented a wire ticket fastener that he used to attach labels to garments in 1867. When Fay mentioned as an aside in his patent application that his fastener was also useful for. holding together sheets of paper, his simple triangular-design wire fastener had unwittingly become the world's first bent-wire paper clip. Prior to this, the straight pin was the preferred method of attaching labels to garments. The paper clip, a single length of wire bent at either end to create a simple cross, speeded up the fastening of labels and resulted in less damage to the item being tagged.
The destiny of the paper clip, however, was not to be found in the tagging of garments. Over the next thirty years, more than fifty paper clip designs were patented in the search for the best method of clipping together sheets of paper. Fay's original design proved awkward with its two exposed ends tending to damage and scratch documents. A plethora of designs soon appeared, including paper clips designed for specific purposes, such as Eriman Wright's newspaper clip from 1877. In the 1890s paper clips began to be widely used in offices. Apart from the paucity of steel wire, the other reason for the paper clip's relatively late emergence was that there'd been no machines available previously that could bend the wire into the right shape..
The first paper clips approaching the modern design were described in a patent issued to William Middlebrook of Connecticut in 1899, who also built and patented a machine to mass-produce them.
