“How do you make paper clips? People wonder about that,” says Charles Frohman. “Most people guess that you pour molten metal into a mold or die. Here’s how we really do it.” Frohman is executive vice president of Labelon/Noesting Company, in Mount Vernon, New York, one of three manufacturers of paper clips in the United States. We’re standing amid a bank of six 50- or 60-year-old machines, each of which is taking galvanized steel wire from a spool, straightening it, folding it, and cutting it into a paper clip.

The foreman, Bill Hassell, who has been making paper clips for 28 years, turns off one of the machines, which has been spitting out 150 clips a minute, and takes off a small faceplate so I can see the works as he feeds wire through by hand. “This is the standard gem paper-clip design,” he says. As the wire pushes through, it passes three tiny wheels with almost microscopic dimples on their perimeters that catch the wire and turn it, so that first it bends back 180 degrees, then 180 degrees again, and then the other end bends 180 degrees, leaving you with the standard clip. “There’s nothing complicated about it,” Hassell admits.

The machine was made in Bridgeport, Connecticut. “Bridgeport was the metal-forming capital of America,” Frohman says. “Almost all the machines you see were made in Bridgeport sometime between 1913 and the 1940s.” The room is a large open space in a cinder-block building. As we walk amid the equipment, Frohman points out different chugging machines: “Over here we’re making ideal clamps. And there’s the Peerless, or owl, clip. See these paper clips with a rough edge to create friction? We patented that in 1917. Plus map pins. Paper fasteners. Petite fasteners. Nifty clips—”

“Nifty clips?”

“The little circular ones. People use them to hold thicker paper and index cards.”

“How many machines in America make those?”

“You’re looking at it. It was built for us in the 1930s. And I can’t let you photograph it. We have our trade secrets.

“Here’s our original product, the pin ticket.” It looks like a staple with a paper tag wrapped around it. “The Noesting Company started in 1913 on Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan, near Madison Square. We made these garment tags with the points folded back so they wouldn’t prick you. That’s where Noesting comes from.

“Soon after Noesting began, it moved to Mount Vernon. Later it moved to the Bronx, where it was in 1988, when I first learned about it. I was in the office supply business, and Fred Griffiths, the son of the founder, gave me a tour of the factory. I said, ‘This is pretty cool.’ He said to me, ‘If it’s pretty cool, why don’t you buy it?’ The next weekend I asked a friend to be my partner. We bought the company that December, and four years ago we moved it back to Mount Vernon. Now we’re a joint venture with Labelon, a Rochester company that makes fax paper.

“A month after we bought Noesting,” Frohman continues, “China started shipping paper clips. We were almost buried, but we sued them for dumping and won. Freight is a very big issue with paper clips—they’re very heavy for their value—so 90 percent of the paper clips in America are still American-made. That’s twenty million pounds a year.

“We don’t have enormous market share, but because we have the oldest machines, we make the highest-quality clips in the world. Other companies make the legs and loops shorter and use lighter, lower-quality steel.”

So who buys Noestings? “We sell mainly to companies that demand high quality, because they know our clips work better. The Noesting motto used to be ‘Millions daily.’ Now it’s ‘Millions yearly’—we want to make millions of dollars. We’ve been replacing some machines, like the eightyfive-year-old ones that make the boxes the paper clips go into, and we’ve attached automatic cutoffs, so that one man can run about twenty-five machines, which used to require three or four men. But we’re never giving up the old paperclip machines.”

He holds up a gem clip. “This clip is cheap and it works. It’s the most common icon that means business and the most popular office-related item sold, the most commonly occurring item on business-supply purchase orders.

“No reason it shouldn’t stay that way.”