Stapler history
Today's stapler is a must-have in the office, but at the beginning, it was not designed for the office, but in the printing industry. Before that, the method of binding books was mainly stitching, which was very complex, and even the speed of machines could not match that of manpower. A skilled worker can "sew" a book quickly, but it is difficult to automate the machine. Moreover, when some small and thin pamphlets or magazines need to be bound, the use of manpower and machines is too wasteful. So someone came up with a method of binding with iron wire.
If foreigners like to worship their ancestors in all industries like Chinese people, like carpenter byluban and thief byshiqian, then the ancestor of the stapler industry may be king Louis XV of France. He has hand-made exquisite stapling tools, which are specially used for binding documents.
During the 1940s and 1960s, some paper fastening tools appeared one after another, and patents were applied for one after another. In fact, this kind of tool with pins penetrating and fastening paper is already very similar to a stapler. At the Philadelphia exposition in 1867, a patented press in device was displayed.
The first person to apply for a stapler patent was Charles Gould, an Englishman. In 1868, he used iron wire as material, cut it into a certain length, and forced the tip of the wire through the paper and then bent it. Of course, he can't use staples yet.
The next year, in 1869, Thomas Briggs of Boston, Massachusetts, invented the stapler in the true sense and founded a "Boston wire binding machine company" for this purpose.
The process of this machine is quite complicated. First, the iron wire should be rolled into a section, then bent into a U shape, then nailed through the page, and finally the nail tips on both sides should be folded. Does this process look familiar? Yes, the process is basically the same as that of modern staplers, but the staples of modern staplers have been mass produced, and the binding process can be completed at one click.
Since it is so complicated, how can we do without improvement? In 1894, Thomas Briggs finally completed a critical step. He first broke and bent the iron wire with a machine to make mass-produced U-shaped nails, and then put these nails into another machine, which inserts the nails into the paper. In this way, the process is exactly the same as that of a modern stapler. However, whether it is the production of staples or the assembly and binding process, the efficiency is still relatively slow compared with now. The biggest difficulty is how to install the staples into the machine. For a long time, they can only be installed individually. By the 1920s, staplers had gradually become popular, and the biggest change was that staples could be bonded into a strip and put on the market, just like today.
The principle of stapler is quite simple, but it must thank modern civilization. It is the lever principle and the progress of mechanical technology that have created the stapler. If you have seen large staplers, you will feel this more clearly.
Generally speaking, the lower nail position of large staplers is about half the length from the handle to the shaft, which is the most labor-saving length. The small stapler is not obvious because of its short overall length, but the proportion of the force arm is the same.