The Museum of Modern Art holds object 150.2005: the GEM Paperclip, 1899, steel, gift of the manufacturer. It credits two designers. One is a British company with no company registration, no trade directory entry, and no surviving record of any kind beyond its own name. The other patented a machine.

This is how the most reproduced object in the history of industrial design ended up with no author because of the way the thing arrived. It needed a material that had only just become cheap, a machine cycle that could exploit it, a trade name someone could advertise, and an office economy hungry enough to buy the result by the ton. Four conditions, none of them a drawing.

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