Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

Who invented the paper clip?  Ask anyone from Norway and they will probably tell you it was Johan Vaaler. Vaaler was a Norwegian inventor with degrees in electronics, science, and mathematics, and in 1901 he was granted patents for a paper clip in both Germany and the United States.

     About twenty years after Vaaler’s patents, an engineer with the Norwegian national patent agency was in Germany to register Norwegian patents.  He came across Vaaler’s patent, and later, in a report of the first fifty years of the patent agency, he mentioned that Vaaler had invented the common paper clip.  Word gradually spread.

     During the Second World War, wearing pins or badges bearing national symbols or the initials of the exiled King was banned in Norway by the German occupiers.  In their place, Norwegians began to wear paper clips in their lapels as a symbol of their resistance.  They were meant to denote unity (“bound together”), but with the story of their origin the paper clips also served as a symbol of national pride.  Eventually, the paper clips themselves were also forbidden, but by that time the paper clip and national identity had been inseparably linked.  In 1989, a giant clip (23 feet high) was erected in front of a commercial college near Oslo in honor of Vaaler, and ten years later, in 1999, a postage stamp was issued featuring a paper clip.

     It is a wonderful story.  There is only one problem: it isn’t quite true.  Yes, Vaaler received patents in 1901, but what that engineer looking through the German archives failed to realize was that Vaaler’s design was not the same as the double oval-shaped standard that everyone thinks of as a “paper clip” today.  That clip was actually designed and mass-produced by Gem Manufacturing Ltd. of England towards the end of the nineteenth century.  In fact, while the clip itself was never patented, one William Middlebrook of Waterbury, Connecticut, did patent a machine for making paperclips of the Gem design in 1899 – two years before Vaaler’s invention.  That giant paperclip outside of Oslo and the one featured on the postage stamp?  Yup, they are both Gem clips, and not Vaaler’s.  Oh well.

     Still, I like the idea of people wearing paper clips in their lapels as a sign of unity during a national crisis.  Maybe we could do something similar as we struggle with the Coronavirus?  But the truth is we Christians have always had our own signs of unity.  First, there is the cross; the symbol of Jesus’ saving death.  And then there is “communion” itself – a word whose very meaning speaks of our connection with Christ and with each other.  With the bread and cup (visible signs of Jesus’ presence) we are joined with Christians through all of time around God’s great family table.  We are reminded that we are indeed members of Jesus’ mystical body, and heirs through hope of his everlasting Kingdom.  Paper clips might be good for a season, but in Jesus you and I are bound for all eternity.

“For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” (Rom. 12:4-5)