The Paperclip
Norwegian inventor Johan Vaaler is often credited with the paperclip -- but his 1901 design never actually worked, and wasn't even the shape we use today.
For decades, encyclopedias and trivia nights alike have credited Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian patent clerk, with inventing the paperclip in 1899. His patent, filed in Germany in 1901 because Norway had no patent law at the time, is often pointed to as the origin of the object sitting in every desk drawer.
Vaaler's actual design was a simple oblong loop of wire with no ability to hold more than a couple of sheets, and it needed the paper to be pierced to work at all. The shape everyone actually uses -- the double-oval Gem clip -- had already been manufactured and sold by British and American companies years before Vaaler filed anything, without any individual inventor ever bothering to patent it.
Vaaler's name stuck anyway, partly through a strange twist: during WWII, Norwegians wore paperclips on their lapels as a quiet symbol of resistance, unaware the clip they were wearing wasn't the one their own countryman had designed.
Johan Vaaler did not invent the paperclip shape in common use today -- the double-oval 'Gem' clip predates his patent by decades and was never individually patented at all.