The ABCs of Office Inventions - From Staplers to Safety Tools

We use them all the time, but most of us don'tof technology is rife. (Television was originally
know the history of those useful objects thatintended as an educational device, for example.)
cover our desks. Did you know that the motherColorado designer Robert Propst, working for
of ex-Monkee Mickey Dolenz was the inventor ofHerman Miller, Inc, developed the cubicle as part
Liquid Paper? Read on to learn more about theof a 1965 "Action Office" prototype. It seems
fascinating history of some of your other favoritePropst was trying to liven up workplace design.
office supplies.The Mouse
The StaplerStanford designer Douglas Engelbart developed
The earliest known stapler was developed inthe first mouse in 1963. Engelbart's mouse was
eighteenth-century France, at the request of Kingnot the streamlined plastic device we know
Louis XV. The name of the genius who fabricatedtoday; it used two large gear-wheels, which could
this helpful device for making paper stick togetherbe turned (slowly) to move up or down. Today's
hasn't been recorded, but we do know that eachball mouse came a few years later - in 1972,
staple was handmade (from gold, according towhen Engelbart's colleague Bill English chucked out
some sources) and imprinted with royal insignia.those two gear-wheels and replaced them with a
The stapler is one of those humble but usefulsingle ball, able to move in any direction (not just
inventions that most of us take for granted. Itstraight up and down).
gained renewed respect when, in 2001, aThe Filing Cabinet
now-classic episode of "The Office"African-American inventor Henry Brown patented
featured-yes-spoilsport assistant manager Garetha fire-safe forged-metal "receptacle for storing
Keenan's stapler trapped in a gelatin dish. As ofand preserving papers" "the ancestor of today's
2007, "Jell-O Stapler" yielded 1310 Google hits.filing cabinet" in November 1886. The "vertical file"
The Paper Clipwe all know and love had to wait twelve years,
This handy - if sometimes easy-to-spill - deviceuntil Edwin Seibels, an insurance-office worker, hit
was invented by Samuel B. Fay, a US citizen, inon the space-saving idea of hanging files. (Before
1867. However, the wire paper clip, still in widethat, important business papers were often folded
use today, was patented around 1890 by theinto envelopes and stored in pigeon holes.)
British Gem Manufacturing. In a classic example ofThe Utility Knife
the "genericized trademark," the word "Gem" isThe original X-Acto knife - one ancestor of
now used in Swedish to denote "any paper clip."today's box cutter - was invented by Polish
A rival story claims that Herbert Spencer, theimmigrant Sundel Doniger, but we'd never have
Victorian polymath who coined the term "survivalknown it if his brother-in-law, one Daniel Gluck the
of the fittest," strongly influenced Darwin, andfather of US Poet Laureate Louise Gluck hadn't
almost got to be novelist George Eliot's husbandsuggested that hobbyists might find the thin metal
(he turned her down), also has the invention ofknife useful. (Doniger had hoped to market it to
the paper clip to his credit. However, there is littlesurgeons!)
evidence to support this story.We don't know precisely who invented the safety
The Officeknife, or box-cutter, however, it's modern day
Based on the Latin word "officium," which meantre-invention as the Klever Kutter has been
not only duty (an important concept for thosefeatured on "Good Morning America" and The
bureaucratic, no-fun Romans) but also a formalKlever Kutter is so safe that it's been approved
position such as a magistrature.for air transport by Homeland Security. It makes
The invention of the modern cubicle, meanwhile, isshort work of clamshell packaging, but it's no
one of those ironic stories with which the historythreat to the user.