On this day in 1792, Samuel Slocum, the American inventor of the stapler, was born.
The idea began in 1835, when Slocum invented a machine for making pins with solid heads. After opening his own pin-manufacturing company, Slocum’s attention focused on ways to get the pins to stick into paper, from which his invention evolved. A sliding hopper dropped a number of pins into grooves in a plate, from which a row of wires pushed them into the folded paper. While Slocum was interested in packaging the pins safely, his invention was the first of many which involved pushing sharp metal objects through paper.
For more, read Industrial Pioneers: Scranton, Pennsylvania and the Transformation of America.