Can Paperclips Talk?

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Most folk believe that only human beings and parrots can talk, but that’s just not true. Although paperclips are not very high on the intelligence scale (and while they don’t actually form and speak words), they nonetheless can “talk.” What then do they say?

  • Our form didn’t “just happen.” Men needed a means of temporarily holding pieces of paper together. Bill Middlebrook invented, designed, and patented us in 1899. He sought (and found) a specific gauge and temper of wire. He cut long pieces of wire into lengths of exactly 3-3/4 inches. He then bent this piece of wire in just the right places to form us—lowly and simple (but practical, if we may say so) paper clips. Multiplied billions of us have been formed since that first one.
  • Our wire didn’t “just happen.” Some ingenious person discovered long ago that by melting a solid material dug from the earth he could make a strong, hard metal. Someone then discovered he could process this metal into steel. A manufacturer then produced the steel wire that forms us and sold it to our designer and maker. As the expression goes, “The rest is history. 
  • The ore from which our wire was made was also made. Some men with very large brains say that the ore “just happened,” but even we of very little brain know that’s just silly. If even we humble paper clips didn’t “just happen,” how could the ore out of which our wire was made “just happen”? Others say the iron ore “created itself,” but that’s even sillier. If we didn’t make ourselves (but one far more intelligent and powerful than we ever hope to be designed and made us), how could iron ore make itself (its IQ and power are hardly better than ours)? Yet others claim that iron ore never had a beginning. Surely, they don’t expect us to believe that one. If we paperclips had a beginning (as we did back in 1899), then it doesn’t seem at all rational to claim that the raw material out of which we were made did not have a beginning (some of those human-types really have strange ideas, for all their acclaimed brilliance). While we don’t have the brains to figure out exactly when our ‘ancestor,’ iron ore, was made, but we know it didn’t create itself. Someone caused it to exist and to be where it was.

Yes, paperclips not only “talk,” but they make sense—far more sense than many reputed “experts.” Some very smart men acknowledge the truth “spoken” by simple paperclips, but they remain in foolish denial of the same facts regarding our complex universe and ourselves. If paperclips can figure these matters out, why can’t these “geniuses” do so?

[Note: I wrote this article for and it was published in the Denton Record-Chronicle, Denton, TX, October 30, 2015.]

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Author: Dub McClish

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