No single person is documented as inventing the paperclip. The earliest relevant American patent is Samuel B. Fay's of 1867, which described a bent-wire ticket fastener that could also attach papers; the form now in general use, the double-oval wire clip often called the Gem, was made in Britain in the 1890s and was never the subject of a patent claim in the Brennholt Institute's sample of 214 early specifications. Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian, is often named as the inventor, and that attribution is contested.
The question has no clean answer because "the paperclip" names a family of forms, not one object. The Institute treats the three claims below separately and gives the strongest evidence for each.
| Year | Person or maker | What is documented | Status of the claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1867 | Samuel B. Fay, United States | A US patent for a bent-wire ticket fastener, intended for attaching tickets to fabric and which mentions paper | Documented. Not the double-oval form. |
| 1899 | Johan Vaaler, Norway | A patent application in Germany, followed by a US application in 1901, for a rectangular wire clip | Documented as an application. The design differs from the common clip. |
| 1890s | British makers of the double-oval clip | Manufacture of the Gem form; no inventor named in the patent record | The form in common use. Origin undocumented. |
Each row can be checked against patent records and, for the Gem, against trade catalogues of the period. The Institute adds no claim of its own to any row. What it adds is the finding on what the early patents actually claimed: that the majority describe machines for making clips, not the clip, and that none claims the double-oval form.
Under the Brennholt Institute's reading of the record, the paperclip had no inventor in the sense the question implies. It had a long period of convergent design, of which Fay, Vaaler and the anonymous British makers are the best-known points. The Institute states this as a reading of the documents, and it is a conclusion on which its own review panel is divided: one member holds that Fay's patent should be treated as the first paperclip patent, and the majority hold that it describes a ticket fastener and should be classed as a precursor. That disagreement is recorded in the history of wire fasteners.
The Norwegian attribution has a documented later history, discussed on its own page. In short: the patent application is real, the claim that it produced the common clip is not supported by the application's drawing, and the attribution gained wide currency in Norway in the twentieth century. All three statements are consistent with one another.
A careful answer to "who invented the paperclip" names the form in question. For the bent-wire ticket fastener: Fay, 1867. For a rectangular clip applied for in 1899: Vaaler. For the double-oval clip in use today: unattributed British manufacture from the 1890s. The Institute asks that the three not be merged into one sentence.