The Staple

From Eyelets to Wire

The modern staple did not arrive in one stroke. It came together over several decades, through patents that didn't quite work and a long line of clerks who would rather have done anything else. The alternative was threading a length of ribbon through a punched hole and tying it off.

Eighteenth-century France produced what may be the earliest known stapler, a small handheld press said to have belonged to Louis XV and stamped with his royal coat of arms. The artifact has never been firmly authenticated, and the king is unavailable for comment. Whatever its provenance, it did not catch on. For the next hundred years, "fastening a document" meant a punch and a length of thread tied off in a knot.

The real beginning is 1866. George W. McGill, a prolific inventor working out of Washington and later New York, was granted US Patent 56,587 for a small bendable brass fastener, the recognizable ancestor of the modern staple. The next year, in August 1867, he received patent 67,665 for the press to drive it. He had now patented both the consumable and the device that consumed it, which is the structural foundation of every office-supply business since.

He was not alone. Albert Kletzker of St. Louis patented a competing fastener in 1868. C. H. Gould obtained an English patent the same year. The 1870s saw a small patent rush around paper fastening that produced more inventors than products. It also produced the central engineering insight. In 1877, Henry R. Heyl of Philadelphia filed US Patent 195,603 for a machine that did not merely insert a staple but drove and clinched it in a single stroke. Before Heyl, a stapler could punch legs through a stack of paper and simply stop; the legs jutted out the back, holding nothing in particular. Heyl folded them flat against an anvil on the underside. This is the entire trick. Nothing essential has been added since.

McGill, undeterred by the competition, kept iterating. He showed his fasteners at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and walked off with a first-prize medal. In February 1879 he was granted patent 212,316 for the McGill Single-Stroke Staple Press. The machine weighed two and a half pounds and loaded one half-inch staple at a time. It is generally considered the first commercially successful stapler.

Commercially successful, though, is not the same as commercially viable. A contemporary account notes that a single McGill press was thought sufficient for an office of five hundred employees. Each staple still had to be hand-loaded. Progress was measured in minutes per document. The office was waiting for its workhorse, and it would arrive from Norwalk, Connecticut.

The Hotchkiss Era

In 1893 a small office-supply concern called the Jones Manufacturing Company was incorporated in Norwalk, Connecticut. Among its principal organizers was a Waterbury stationer named Eli Hubbell Hotchkiss. By 1897 Hotchkiss owned the company outright and had renamed it after himself. By every available measure this was the dullest possible corporate origin story, and within a decade it had given Japan its word for stapler.

The breakthrough was the Hotchkiss No. 1 Paper Fastener, introduced in 1895. The innovation was not in driving the staple, which had been solved by Heyl, nor in clinching it, also solved by Heyl. The innovation was in the supply. The No. 1 fed staples from a long strip of pre-formed wires held together with a thin adhesive. The clerk pressed once; one staple separated, drove, clinched. On the next press, the strip advanced and the following staple slid into position. For the first time, a stapler could be operated continuously, without thought, the way a typewriter is operated.

In practice, the early Hotchkiss machines still asked something of the user. Separating a staple from the strip took such a firm strike that clerks frequently kept a small mallet on the desk for the more stubborn fasteners. For roughly forty years, the office stapler shipped, in spirit, with a hammer. Swingline finally retired the mallet in 1939 with a top that flipped open for loading. Then, having reached the obvious endpoint, the company largely stopped improving it.

Eli Hotchkiss exported aggressively. A shipment of No. 1 fasteners arrived in Japan in the early twentieth century, where no equivalent device existed and no word existed for one either. The product and the brand walked through the door together, and only the brand stayed. A stapler in Japanese is, to this day, a hotchikisu, locked into the language like a fly in amber. The same word made its way into Korean as 호치키스, apparently carried over during the Japanese occupation.

There is a wrinkle worth knowing. Some Japanese reference works credit the stapler not to Eli of Norwalk but to one Benjamin B. Hotchkiss. He was an American arms maker who emigrated to France and founded a famous Paris-based artillery and machine-gun concern. He had nothing whatever to do with staplers, but he was almost certainly a cousin of Eli's. The Japanese, receiving the brand at one remove from the man, appear to have quietly merged the two. The Hotchkiss family thus enjoys the distinction of having lent its name to two unrelated mechanical devices, exactly one of which is permitted in a school.

An Improbable Cultural Footnote

For most of the twentieth century the stapler was a piece of office furniture. It sat on the desk and did its job. No one wrote about it.

Then, in 1999, the comedy Office Space needed a stapler, and the script wanted a real brand. The director, Mike Judge, approached Bostitch first. Bostitch declined. He approached Boston, the second-largest brand at the time. Boston declined. Swingline said yes, asked for nothing, and changed company history for the trouble.

The script called for the stapler to be a vivid red, bright enough to read across a wide shot and a small visual jolt against the muted grays of an Initech cubicle. Swingline, at the time, made staplers in gray and black. They did not make a red one. The film's prop master, Stan Gilbert, bought a fleet of standard Swingline 747s and got to work. He applied auto-body filler to the top to give the hump a more pronounced bulb, painted them red, and added vinyl Swingline logos to the sides because the original logo sat on top and would no longer photograph. He made roughly ten of these and handed them to the camera.

Fig. 1 — A red stapler. Repainted with a slightly larger hump.

The film opened on February 19, 1999, and lost money. It earned $10.8 million against a $10 million budget. Technically a profit, mathematically a wash, culturally a flop. Then it began to circulate on VHS. Then on Comedy Central. Then it conquered the IT departments. Within two years Office Space had quietly become the most quoted film in the American white-collar workforce, and fans started writing to Swingline asking where they could buy a red stapler. Swingline, which still did not make one, started a development project. In April 2002 the company shipped a red 747. That was three years after a comedy about loathing your office made it the most famous stapler in the world.

Today every new Swingline employee in the United States is given a red stapler on the first day. The red 747 is the company's second best-selling product, after the standard black one.

The staple is a closed problem. Its cultural life apparently is not.

One Hundred Twenty Years, Abridged

The staple arrived gradually, through roughly two decades of patents and a fair number of lawsuits over who, exactly, had invented it. The essential beats:

A century and change of refinement, and the job description never changed: hold the pages together, and ask for nothing in return.

Anatomy of a Solved Problem

A staple has four parts. It has had four parts for well over a century, and no fifth is in development. No working group is considering one. The design is closed, in the good sense of the word.

Fig. 2 — The staple, and the three states of a clinch.

The staple's last genuinely new idea is Heyl's clinch, from 1877. Everything since (strip-loaded magazines, top-loading bodies, electric motors, full-strip jam clearance) is delivery, not design. The four-part shape and the three-step motion are the product. They have been the product for a hundred and fifty years.

The staple has no settings. In a century and a half, no one has filed that as a limitation.

The Specification Sheet

The staple and the library were designed roughly a hundred and thirty years apart, by people who never met, to solve one problem in the same way. Set side by side, the resemblance is not subtle.

There is no row in this table where the two genuinely disagree. One is folded steel and one is a line of markup; past the material, they are the same product, built on the same refusal to make a simple job complicated. Which brings us, at last, to the point.

The Logical Conclusion

We have perfected the physical staple. The dimensions are fixed and the mechanism is reliable. The function, joining discrete sheets into a coherent document, is accomplished with a single downward stroke and no further thought required.

The digital document, by contrast, remains unsolved. CSS @media print rules produce different results on different browsers. PDF generators require server-side runtimes. "Print-friendly" stylesheets are maintained as afterthoughts, updated only after a client reports that their quarterly report prints with the navigation bar across page three.

Stapler is the binary staple. It applies the same logic that made the Hotchkiss No. 1 successful: fixed dimensions, explicit layout, zero ambiguity. A page is a page. Content either fits or it doesn't. The library does not guess.

The stapler does not concern itself with the contents of the document. It holds things together. That is its entire mandate, and it executes that mandate without complaint, without configuration, without a 2 GB installation footprint.

We have built the digital equivalent. We offer it to you without ceremony.

One script tag. Drop it in. Write pages.