Samuel Slocum

Samuel Slocum (March 4, 1792 – January 26, 1861) was an American inventor from Poughkeepsie, New York.

He was born in Jamestown, Rhode Island, son of Peleg Slocum and Anne Dyer Slocum, and raised in Usquepaugh, a village in South Kingstown, where a Mr. William Lockwood first invented the common pin with a head to keep it from slipping through cloth sometime after 1772. The sixth of eight children, he worked as a carpenter before he decided to move to London and become a pin maker. These pins later became flat head pins (similar to staples).

A short time later he moved back to the United States to Poughkeepsie 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. In fact, this patent from September 30, 1841, Patent #2275, is for a device used for packaging pins.

He married Susan Stanton Slocum in 1817 in Richmond, Rhode Island, and had three children, Samuel Dyer Slocum, Mary Slocum, and John Stanton Slocum.

External links

• United States Patent and Trademark Office drawing of Patent 2275
• "Machine for Sticking Pins into Papers" US2275A