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A nail clipper (also called a nail trimmer or nail cutter) is a hand tool used to trim fingernails, toenails and hangnails.
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Design
Nail clippers are usually made of stainless steel but can also be made of plastic and aluminium. Two common varieties are the plier type and the compound lever type. Most nail clippers usually come with another tool attached, which is used to clean dirt out from under nails. A nail clipper often has a miniature file fixed to it to allow rough edges of nails to be manicured. A nail file allows for removal of any excess nail that is jagged or has been missed. Nail clippers occasionally come with a pocket knife or a nail catcher. The nail clipper consists of a head which may be concave or convex. Specialized nail clippers which have convex clipping ends are intended for trimming toenails, while concave clipping ends are for fingernails. The cutting head may be manufactured to be parallel or perpendicular to the principal axis of the cutter. Cutting heads which are parallel to the principal axis are made to address accessibility issues involved with cutting toenails.
History
The inventor of the nail clipper is not exactly known, but the first United States patent for an improvement in a finger-nail clipper (implying such a device already existed) seems to be in 1875 by Valentine Fogerty. Other patents for an improvement in finger-nail clippers are in 1876, William C. Edge, and in 1878, John H. Hollman. Filings for complete finger-nail clippers (not merely improvements) include, in 1881, Eugene Heim and Celestin Matz, in 1885, George H. Coates (for a finger-nail cutter), and, in 1905, Chapel S. Carter (son of a Connecticut Baptist church deacon) patented a finger-nail clipper with a later patent in 1922. Around 1913, Carter was secretary of the H. C. Cook Company of Ansonia, Connecticut, which was incorporated in 1903 as the H. C. Cook Machine Company by Henry C. Cook, Lewis I. Cook, and Chapel S. Carter. Around 1928, Carter was president of the company when, he claimed, about 1896, the "Gem"-brand finger nail clipper made its first appearance.
Around 1906, the L. T. Snow company manufactured nail cutters. Around 1908 (or 1911), the King Klip Company of New York manufactured nail cutters.
In 1947, William E. Bassett (who started the W. E. Bassett Company in 1939) developed the "Trim"-brand nail clipper, the first made using modern (at the time) manufacturing methods using the superior jaw-style design that had been around since the 19th century, but adding two nibs near the base of the file to prevent lateral movement, replacing the pinned rivet with a notched rivet, and adding a thumb-swerve in the lever.