Who Invented the Stapler? A Procurement Rabbit Hole
At 4:17 on a Tuesday, Maya popped up in our office chat: “Who invented the stapler?” We had the quarterly supply order open on my screen, a spreadsheet with binder spines and shredder bags, and a deadline from finance. I laughed. Then I realized I didn’t actually know.
I’ve been the office administrator for a 400-person company across three locations since 2020. I manage equipment and supply ordering—roughly $180,000 a year across eight vendors. I report to operations and finance. I didn’t expect a trivia question to lead me to a maintenance checklist, but here we are.
The short answer is George W. McGill. He patented a paper fastener in 1866 and a single-stroke staple press in 1879. The longer answer involves an 18th-century French precursor made for King Louis XV—a handcrafted royal prototype that no one had to use for filing. When I explained this to Maya, I first said “the French invented it,” then corrected myself: the French made a royal prototype, but McGill is the one who made it practical. (I also learned that the word “stapler” originally meant “wool merchant.” It’s not useful, but it’s a good elevator fact.)
The reason the stapler question stuck with me is not the patent date. It’s that an object we use every day became a problem only when the person who knew how to maintain it left. That thought led me to two Fellowes equipment stories.
The Shredder That Almost Cost Us $300
Three weeks earlier, the accounting shredder started making a sound I can only describe as an apologetic grind. I knew something was off. I didn’t read the manual. I told myself we would oil it next quarter.
Then a jumbo paper clip jammed the cutter head. The shredder stopped in the middle of a stack of old invoices. Accounting looked at me like I had personally let the paper clip in.
My first instinct was to order a new shredder. Then the finance team asked the question I should have asked first: “Does the warranty cover this? What does repair cost?”
I called Fellowes paper shredder repair—or rather, I opened a support ticket and the phone rang back in less than two minutes. The rep asked about the jam and then said, “When was the last time you oiled the cutter head?” I didn’t have an answer. The manual, which lived in a drawer, included a maintenance schedule. I just hadn’t read it. That is a rookie mistake, and it cost us almost two days of downtime.
I’m not a repair technician, so I can’t tell you how to take the cutter block apart. What I can tell you from the buyer’s side is that a $12 bottle of shredder oil and a five-minute routine would have prevented the whole thing. The service visit would have been around $300. The math isn’t complicated. I later pasted our repair invoices into a mean median mode calculator to see what “normal” looked like, and the jam was the obvious outlier.
I also joked to Maya that I needed a derivative calculator to show how fast the cost curve went up after skipping maintenance. She laughed, and then she said, “So we should probably know how to use the Fellowes binder before the person who knows it leaves.”
The Binder That Nobody Remembered
Maya had a point. Our previous office coordinator had handled all the comb binding. When she moved to a different department, she took the knowledge with her. The Fellowes binder sat under the counter with a stack of unbound client proposals.
Maya found the official PDF by searching “how to use a Fellowes binder.” The machine was easier than I expected. You match the comb size to the number of pages, set the punch selection, punch the paper, snap the comb on, and close the clamp. The tricky part was not the final step—it was the step I skipped. I punched a whole set of divider tabs upside down because I didn’t check the punch margin dial. The tabs were still usable, but they looked sloppy enough that we reprinted them.
“How long did that take?” Maya asked.
“Twenty minutes,” I said. “Actually, forty-five if you count walking back and forth from the printer.”
We now keep a one-page guide taped to the side of the binder. It doesn’t cover every setting. It just covers the three checks that prevent the dumb mistakes: paper size, punch margin, comb size. That’s the closest thing I have to a “how to use a Fellowes binder” masterpiece.
The proposal had to be mailed as well. According to USPS pricing effective January 2025, a First-Class Mail large envelope starts at $1.50 for the first ounce. That rate is on usps.com/stamps, and it was the reason I checked the package weight before printing the label, not after. We also kept it under USPS’s large envelope maximum of 12×15 inches and 0.75 inches thick, so it didn’t get bumped to parcel rate.
What I’d Do Differently
Back to the original question. Who invented the stapler? McGill, mostly—plus a French king’s toymaker and a lot of 19th-century inventors who realized there was a market for faster paper fastening. But the more useful question is: who maintains the stapler? Or the shredder, the binder, the laminator?
After the shredder incident and the binder incident, I created a 12-point office equipment checklist. It’s not fancy. It lives in a shared folder, and it includes the basics: oil shredders quarterly, clean cutter heads, confirm binder punch settings, read the manual before calling a repair company, and check the current USPS rates before promising a delivery date.
That checklist saved us an estimated $8,000 in potential rework last year. I calculated that by using our actual repair invoices and my own time spent reprinting, not by a fancy formula. I know that number sounds precise, but the point is not the number. The point is that most problems were preventable with a five-minute check.
5 minutes of verification beats 5 days of correction.
I say this as someone who learned it the hard way. I’m not saying every tool can be fixed with maintenance, and I’m not a technician. I’m saying that the cost of knowing how to use the tool—really knowing, not guessing—is a lot lower than the cost of replacing it or redoing the work. At least, that’s been my experience in an office that never scheduled a single equipment maintenance session before 2025.
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