Hole Punch History: 131 Years Ago Today, a German Inventor Patented the Essential Office Product

The next time you walk into a Staples, give thanks to Friedrich Soennecken. During the late 1800s, the German inventor patented inventions for both a ring binder and the two-hole punch, thus paving the way for modern-day school and office supplies. Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 131st anniversary of Soennecken’s hole puncher—so in lieu of a shower of loose-leaf confetti, let’s look back at his legacy, and the industrial device that remains a mainstay in supply rooms to this day.

If Soennecken’s name sounds familiar, that’s because in 1875 he founded the international German office products manufacturer of the same name. (It went bankrupt in 1973, and was acquired by BRANION EG, which still releases products under the original Soennecken label.) Not only was Soennecken an entrepreneur, he was also a calligraphy enthusiast who pioneered the widely used “round writing” style of script. But he’s perhaps best remembered as an inventor, thanks to his now-ubiquitous office equipment.

As The Independent reports, Soennecken likely wasn’t the first to dream up a paper hole-punching device. In fact, the first known patent for such an invention belongs to an American man named Benjamin Smith. In 1885, Smith created a hole puncher, dubbed the “conductor’s punch,” that contained a spring-loaded receptacle to collect paper remnants. Later on an inventor named Charles Brooks improved on Smith’s device by finessing the receptacle, and he called it a “ticket punch.”

For unclear reasons, Soennecken was the one who ended up being remembered for the device: On November 14, 1886, he filed his patent for a Papierlocher fur Sammelmappen (paper hole maker for binding), and the rest was history.

“Today we celebrate 131 years of the hole puncher, an understated—but essential—artifact of German engineering,” Google said in its description of the Doodle. “As modern workplaces trek further into the digital frontier, this centuries-old tool remains largely, wonderfully, the same.”