Do you know the history of staplers?
Today's stapler is an office must-have, but originally it was not designed for the office, but for the printing industry. Before that, the method of binding books was mainly stitching, which was very complicated, and there were even situations where machines could not match the speed of human beings. A skilled hand can quickly "sew" a book, but it is difficult to automate a machine. Moreover, when some small and thin booklets 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.
From the 1840s to the 1860s, some paper tie-down tools appeared one after another, and patents were filed one after another. In fact, this tool that uses a pin to penetrate and fasten the paper is already very similar to a stapler. At the Philadelphia Exposition in 1867, a patented press was displayed.
The first person to patent the stapler was the Englishman Charles Gould. In 1868, he used iron wire as a material, cut it into a certain length, forced the tip of the wire through the paper and then bent it. Of course, he doesn't use staples yet.
The next year, in 1869, Thomas Briggs of Boston, Massachusetts, invented the stapler in the true sense and founded the "Boston Wire Binding Company" for this purpose.
The process of this machine is quite complicated. First, the wire is rolled into pieces, then bent into a U-shape, and then nailed through the pages of the book, and finally the nail tips on both sides are folded. Does this process look familiar? Yes, the process is basically the same as that of modern staplers, except that the staples of modern staplers have already been mass-produced, and the binding process can be completed with one click.
Since it is so complicated, how can we not improve it? In 1894, Thomas Briggs finally completed the crucial step. He used a machine to break and bend the wire into mass-produced staples, which he then loaded into another machine, which embedded the nails into the paper. In this way, the process is exactly the same as that of a modern stapler. But whether it is the production of staples or the assembly and binding process, the efficiency is still slower than it is now. The biggest difficulty is how to load the staples into the machine, and for a long time, they can only be loaded individually. By the 1920s, staplers had gradually become popular, and the biggest change was that staples could be glued into a long strip and put on the market, just like today.
The principle of the stapler is quite simple, but it must be thanked for modern civilization. It is the principle of leverage coupled with the advancement of mechanical technology that created the stapler. This is more evident if you've ever seen a large stapler.
Generally speaking, the lower nail position of a large stapler is about half of the length from the handle to the shaft, and this length is the most labor-saving. The small stapler does not look obvious because of its short overall length, but the ratio of the force arm is the same.
