Truth.
The Early Office Museum has collected a remarkable array of these. There was the simple and angular Fay clip which, at 1867, is probably the earliest patented paper clip. The slightly intestinal-looking Wright clip, patented in 1877. The Niagara clip—looking charmingly like two clips holding hands—patented in 1897. The more marketably named Common-Sense and Hold-Fast clips of the early 1900s. Some of these, like the bow-shaped Ideal paper clip and the two-eyed Owl clip, can still be found in supply cabinets today. Some of these clips were better for securing larger stacks of paper; some used less wire and were therefore cheaper; some are less likely to get tangled in the box. But the key to the success of the Gem clip can be found in the fact that it was patented first as a mechanism: the shape, which took only three gentle bends and a snip to produce, was easy to automate cheap to produce , and the resulting form, which tidily tucks the sharp ends of the wire away, was lightweight, easy to use, and unlikely to tear the paper it secured.
