Samuel Slocum (March 4, 1792 - January 26, 1861), was an American inventor from

Poughkeepsie, New York Poughkeepsie ( ), officially the City of Poughkeepsie, separate from the Town of Poughkeepsie around it) is a city in the U.S. state of New York. It is the county seat of Dutchess County, with a 2020 census population of 31,577. Poughkeepsi ...

. He was born in Jamestown, RI, son of Peleg Slocum and Anne Dyer Slocum. He was raised in Usquepaugh, RI, a village in South Kingstown, RI, where a Mr. William Lockwood sometime after 1772, first invented the common pin with a head, to keep it from slipping through cloth.Article written by Mr. Thomas Gripey for the Providence Journal, received from F. Elizabeth (Barber) Church of New London, CT, 1976 Samuel was the 6th of 8 children. He worked as a carpenter before he decided to move to London and become a pin maker. He married Susan Stanton Slocum in 1817 at Richmond, RI, and had three children, Samuel Dyer Slocum, Mary Slocum, and John Stanton Slocum. Samuel Slocum traveled to England. While in England, he invented a machine for the production of pins. These pins later became flat head pins (similar to staples). A short time later he moved back to the United States, to Poughkeepsie, NY and formed a pin manufacturing company, Slocum and Jillion, which invented a "Machine for Sticking Pins into Paper", which is often believed to be the first

stapler A stapler is a mechanical device that joins pages of paper or similar material by driving a thin metal staple through the sheets and folding the ends. Staplers are widely used in government, business, offices, work places, homes and schools. ...

. In fact, this

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

from September 30, 1841, Patent #2275, is for a device used for packaging pins.

External links

United States Patent and Trademark Office drawing of Patent 2275

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Slocum, Samuel 1792 births 1861 deaths 19th-century American inventors People from Poughkeepsie, New York People from South Kingstown, Rhode Island