Day 14 - Paperclips

Image by David Masters via Flickr                

One thing I have learned from Toastmasters is that even the most commonplace items can provide topics for interesting speeches. One of the earliest Table Topics questions I observed involved volunteers being handed a variety of common office items with instructions to describe how and why they came to invent the items.  The responses were inventive and creative, but they provided just a taste of the surprising, even fascinating facts, and some myths, that make up the story of the common paperclip.

The paperclip's history begins with the first patent being awarded to Samuel B. Fay in the United States in 1867.  That design was intended to attach labels to garments and fabric.  Just 10 years later, in 1877, Erlman J. Wright patented the first version explicitly intended to clip sheets of paper together.  But neither of these patents were for the design we know of as the Gem paperclip.  That design was never patented, which contributes to a long-standing myth that the first paperclip was invented and produced in Norway.  Norwegian Johan Vaaler patented his design in both Germany and the United States in 1901.  

Vaaler paperclip design from Wikipedia

The myth of the Norwegian origin of the paperclip really gained ground after World War II.   When the Germans prohibited wearing pins including the Norwegian flag or insignias or portraits of the king, the Norwegians began to wear paperclips on their lapels as a symbol of their solidarity against the Nazis.

Sandvika Norway paper clip via
Wikipedia

Never mind that Johan Vaaler’s design wasn’t very practical – it consisted of only one loop, not the double loop that we know.  The coincidence of the myth of the Norwegian origin and the fact of the Norwegians wearing paperclips during the war led to the Norwegians erecting a large model of the Gem clip in Sandvika, Norway several years after the end of World War II.

In 1998, the myth of the Norwegian origin of the paperclip was still prevalent, along with the embellishment which transformed the tale of the lapel paperclip from a symbol of resistance against the Nazis to a symbol of solidarity with the Jews.  When students at Whitwell Middle School in Whitwell, TN, asked their teacher if they could collect something as part of their unit on the Holocaust to get a concrete idea of just how big the number six million is, they discovered the paperclip’s myths and set the goal of collecting six million.

By 2001, the eighth graders had collected not six, but 30 million paper clips.  They had received and cataloged 30,000 letters about their project.  And they had received a donation of a box car that had been used to transport Jews, gypsies, and others considered undesirable by the Nazis, to concentration camps.  Transporting the box car included crossing the Atlantic on the chartered Norwegian freighter “MS Blue Sky,” continuing the myth of the Norwegian connection.  The box car now forms the centerpiece of the Children’s Holocaust Memorial.  The documentary “Paper Clips” retells the whole story.

A footnote, related to World War II but not included in the Whitwell Middle School Paper Clip Project, is that another post-World War II effort, code-named “Project Paperclip,” resulted in the immigration of more than 700 German scientists into the United States, including Werner von Braun and 125 rocket scientists who contributed significantly to the development of the NASA space program in the 1950s and 1960s.

Image by kylemac via Flickr

The final example of the fascination that can come with paperclips began in 2005 when Canadian Kyle MacDonald posted an offer on Craig’s list to trade a red paper clip for anything of greater value that he could continue to trade, with the goal of bartering his way to home ownership.  One year and one day later, after 14 trades, he had his house – in a small town in Saskatchewan.

The trade that propelled the bartering to a higher level for Kyle was the opportunity to spend half a day with Alice Cooper.  And the trivia highlight for me in all of this is that before moving to his next trade, Kyle was asked to join Cooper on tour in – of all places – Fargo, ND.

As I think back to that Table Topics exercise, I can’t recall a more imaginative response than the actual story I discovered through research about the humble paperclip.  I hope that I have provided you with some entertainment, along with the lesson that there is no subject is too humble to be considered as a topic of a Toastmasters speech.