If I had to pick an object to symbolise the 20th Century, a strong contender would be the staple. You know, that little piece of shaped wire that holds paper together.
Staples have been around since at least the 7th century BC.
But back then, they were an architectural device. Great pieces of folded metal used to hold temples and other large buildings together in the Greek world and across Asia Minor. When stonemasons wanted to fasten two two blocks of masonry closely together, they'd drill a hole in the top of each and carve a channel between them. Then they would drop a large iron or bronze staple in. It would be a loose fit, but that would be solved by pouring molten lead onto it, to make a precise and durable fit.
Those early architectural staples made a feature out of a limitation of the technology. But modern staples have no such limitation. They are a symbol of the Industrial Revolution. Before industrialisatrion, the staple as we know it today would literally have been impossible to make.
We've become blind to the precision with which they are manufactured. Each staple consists of precisely machined rectangular wire, with differences in the dimensions so small they are imperceptible to the human eye. They are then folded with incredible accuracy (or maybe folded and the ends are machined so each arm is exactly trhe same length - I'm unsure of the exact sequence).
Then the staples are glued into strips with exactly the same number of staples in each. I used to think the strips were manufactured as a whole and the gap from one staple to the next was machine-sawn, but it actually turns out to be glue. Think about it; the staples have to be assembled to exactly form a strip. The glue has to be technically predictable with a known breaking strain so that strips can be manually broken for shorter staplers, and the individual staples can be applied by a stapler. But the glue also has to be long-term stable, neither growing soft nor brittle so the strips hold together in long term storage, often for many years.
Then the whole thing has to work flawlessly when you want to staple two (or more) pieces of paper together. The engineering of both staples and stapler has to be so precise that one staple, never more nor less, is in position to be used each time.
The staple is a key symbol of the change which happened at the end of the Nineteenth and into the Twentieth Century. Vast numbers of people stopped working in agriculture and came to work in factories. Those factories needed paperwork; administrators, accounts departments, reports and data. All of which created armies of peole sitting at desks using staplers to organise the paper into choerent archives.
In turn, civil services (especially tax officers) expanded exponentially. We went from a Medieval system where the Civil Service was half a dozen advisers to the King plus a few hundred men with big sticks, to the modern world where up to 50% of the population works directly in the Public Sector shuffling paper around, acting as an enabler to those who actually generate products and services while themselves making nothing saleable.
Even in the 21st Century, with all our computerisation and digital surveillance, the "paperless office" we were promised hasn't happened. If you want to store something long term, you do it with paper. How many computer media can store data for longer than a couple of years ? Backups fail or get corrupted. How many of us have a computer which can read a cassette tape, a 5.25 or 3.5 inch floppy disk, or even a CD-ROM ? How many of those media only last a few years before the magnetic imprint fades ? How much data was created on software so old it's no lnger available (Word Perfect, Amstrad PCW anyone ?)
So all in all, the staple symbolises our transformation into an information society, and the precision modern industrial processes are capable of, and the drudgery of office life. Such a tiny thing, yet so important to modern life !
Posted using The BBH Project
