Staples
Today, Let’s talk about staples. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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First, a word about words: The sound “stā” was an ancient word in the old Indo-European language – that mother of many modern languages. There, “stā” meant to stand. (“stā” lingers in today’s English as a word telling us not to go.) But so many other words carry hints of that earlier meaning – stand, stay, state, stabilize ... Many such words come to us through the Latin word stabilis. It meant firmness, steadiness ... it meant stability.
One more English word of that family is staple. A staple once described something fixed in place, like a post. It lingers today for, say, a staple food – one that we eat regularly. So: why should flimsy little bent wires be called by that same name? Let’s look at some history here:
One George McGill held the first patent for a stapler back in 1866. But here’s the catch: His stapler drove a two legged pin through a stack of papers. Then we had to crimp the protruding legs of the pin. Also, he called his machine a Paper Fastener. The word staple wasn’t yet ready to attach to his device.
McGill staple device (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Similar devices – but ones which now crimped the protruding legs of the pin – soon followed McGill’s. And, that name staple? Turns out, it already applied to heavy U-shaped pins that secured fences, furniture, and such. There, the word implied the solidarity of such structures. These new devices were clearly kin to those carpentry staples. And, if an unpunched staple looks flimsy, just consider the grip that it achieves.
Conventional desk stapler (Photo by JHL)
The solidarity of staples is evident in the profusion of specialized staplers that’ve since emerged. We need only look at what the term, “industrial stapler devices” includes. So much equipment now reminds us of the strength and steadiness that the word ‘staples’ implies.
Take their use in surgery: Infected sutures disturbed an early Twentieth Century Hungarian surgeon: Hümér Hültl. He invented the first surgical stapler to replace sutures. It wasn’t very successful. But others saw its potential. Today, many surgeries get closed by staples instead of sutures.
Surgical skin stapler (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Medical staples dramatize another feature of staples. It is their very solidarity. We often need to un-staple pages that we once stapled together. Some desktop staplers have a metal tongue that helps us to do that. But it takes special tools for other kinds of staples. Removing surgical staples, for example.
Well, I began by looking at word origins. I did so because staples are deceptively strong, deceptively complex, deceptively ubiquitous. They are a vital technology that rides along – just under the radar of our everyday lives.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Some Wikipedia sources
This Episode first aired May 19, 2026.