Staple history

At the end of July 1904, a large black cloud from Moscow was coming from the south-east, from which a huge trunk hung. One of the fire brigades took him by the smoke and rushed to put out the fire. But people and horses were scattered, and fire trucks were broken. A cow wandering in the air shot up into the air, then a policeman "ascended into the sky", but soon, stripped and beaten by hail, fell to the ground with a swing. A railway booth was raised in the air, which was thrown aside by 40 meters. The crawler who was in the box remained alive. The culprit of all these "tricks" is a tornado. He is capable of much, and the objects picked up by him often fall to the ground far from the place of his passage and sometimes with a clear sky."Fly" people, animals, inanimate objects.

Once the quirks of a strong vortex far into the sea, a whole house was moved to the sand bank. And there, where the house stood before, there was a mountain of two-folded shell mollusks, thrown from this very shoal. Once the inhabitants of one of the towns in Africa were very surprised when, together with a tropical rainstorm, buttons and paper clips sprang from above. It turned out that a powerful hurricane tore the roof off the stationery store in the capital, and a gust of wind picked up the cardboard boxes and carried them to the coast, scattering the contents along the way. Of course, the losses are small - just clips and buttons, the most unpretentious accessories of any institution. But they are the result of more than one year of creative searches for a person. Let's think about these things together with inventors from different countries. Let's start with a paper clip.

The invention appears when there is an urgent need for it. When did you need the clip? After all treated before without it. Yes, but with the development of industry, the number of business papers also increased. And it was necessary to fasten them. It's hard to say who guessed to adapt for this purpose a piece of bent wire. In any case, one of the first was the Norwegian Johann Waller, who applied in 1899 for a "paleoscratch".It is extremely similar to the modern, only had a couple more knees more. The design was successful, but what happened more than once happened in the history of inventions. The clip began to improve, but new developments in many ways not only inferior to the original, but also emphasized its advantages. In 1902 the German E. Libing proposed a whole collection of new clips, but only one - with playful curls - the firm began to produce. So, for fun.

Why did Waller's clip need to be improved? What are its disadvantages? There are two. First, she crumpled the sheets. The wire pressed on paper on too small a plot. Then came up with various openwork patterns to distribute the load over a larger area. Secondly, the clip quickly broke. Then special ends were welded to its ends, to solder the ends with a wire. But a new operation has been added, and with mass production this leads to a rise in the cost of production. So the inventors did not stay idle. And their imagination did not fail. There appeared clip in the form of a ring on which we carry keys, clips made of plastic. When there are a lot of papers on the table, a clip with a tongue helps, on which it is possible to put any designation, and if you provide a clip for a paper clip, then you can not put paper on the table, but hang it on a carnation.

Now let's talk about the button. Its purpose is to attach paper to the board. It's like a carnation for a paper. Indeed, one of the first buttons( proposed by the Germans H. Eichmann and A. Kirsten in 1879) looked just like a nail for furniture upholstery. It was an edge with a hat made of thin sheet, under which a washer was put on, crimped with a hat. Two years passed and a familiar construction appeared: a circle of tin with a cut in the center and bent perpendicularly to the point. It was developed by V. Matz, a resident of Berlin. At first the buttons were done by hand - they were cut with a chisel, they were also offered to make them from a metal bar on a lathe. But such a proposal is unlikely anyone ever realized: too expensive would be a button. But the composite buttons were made - the point was inserted into the hole of the cap and then fixed.

But let's decide what are the requirements for the button. It should easily penetrate into the tree, sit firmly in the board and securely fix a sheet of paper, it is easy to get out of the board, and finally, the button itself should be reliable enough and long to serve. To meet all these requirements, dozens of interesting designs have been created. Here are just some of them. The button, in which the point is provided with notches, is better kept in the board. The button with an elongated spring-loaded( centrally curved) cap well presses the paper - in the center, where the point is, and at the edges of the cap. The button with the bent up edges is easily pulled out from the board. The same purpose is served by buttons with a hook and a second hat. There are also unexpected solutions. For example, a "non-protruding", a vacuum button, which is a rubber cap-sucker, from which a clamp plate protrudes.