Ask Dr. Steel: “What are Stainless Collated Staples?”

I received an interesting question in my stainless steel inbox the other day. Someone wrote to ask me what stainless collated staples were and was it true that these are the same things that we use in our staplers at work every day? While the writer of that letter was right on the mark, stainless collated staples are what we put into our desktop stapler; I thought it might be interesting to walk you through a brief history about how collated stainless staples came about. There is a lot more behind those staples than you might realize.

In the movie Office Space (20 th Century Fox, 1999) one of the subplots of this classic movie about life working in an office has the character of Milton obsessing over his red Swingline stapler. Though we can't be sure if Milton was a stainless steel fan like the rest of us, we do know that he used collated staples in his Swingline. However, that wasn't always the case.

Before the days of collated staples the first handmade stapling machine was developed for King Louis XIV of France . Individual pieces of metal were bent to secure papers and other documents and had the insignia of the court engraved on each one. As you can imagine very few people had a stapler on their desk back then. Even more so the metals available back then rusted easily and as such really didn't hold much of anything together. I'm sure King Louis XIV would have appreciated stainless collated staples, if for nothing more than the fact it wouldn't take hours just to make, engrave and staple documents together!

Collated stainless staples still had a long time before they would ever see the light of day. In 1866 a patent was issued for a press to insert staples into fabric. This device became the precursor to the modern day stapler, but it was still a one-at-a-time process of getting staples into the fabrics and papers. In fact, the stapler was such a luxury item at this time that it was considered a sign of prosperity for your office to have access to one of these wonderful devices. I'm sure the poor guy who had to feed staples in one at a time didn't think it was so luxurious.

Stainless collated staples became a permanent fixture on desks and in modern staples around the late 1960's. As stainless steel technology improved and the price for such fasteners declined modern methods of manufacturing allowed for the collation, or sorts out, of staples into a strip form with a thin adhesive keeping them together. The collated staples could then be fed into a stapler for automatic fastening of papers with the shove of the stapler head. Office workers around the world were reported dancing in the streets upon the invention of the collated stapled. Ok, so we made that last line up.

Today, collated stainless staples are found not only on your desk at work, but also in your garage and at many construction sites. Staple guns work on the same principle as desktop staplers – feed a large collated batch of staples into the gun and let the pneumatic gun take over the rest.

So, dear reader, I hope I have answered your question about collated stainless staples. If nothing else you now know the history behind the modern stapler, which is sure to score you big points at the next office gathering.