

Human: Nail clippers are pretty ubiquitous nowadays. When were they first invented?

Assistant: It’s actually a bit hard to pin down the first recorded appearance of a nail clipper, since as they’re just small, they don’t appear in most artwork. There are some depictions of women cutting their fingernails or toenails from antiquity, but they’re not with nail clippers. So, the first known patent for a “nail file” is probably US patent 12,338, which was issued in 1833. So the nail clipper is a relatively new invention, although nail files and other nail tools were likely used for quite some time before that.


Human: Nail clippers are pretty ubiquitous nowadays. When were they first invented?

Assistant: Nail clippers have been around since the mid-1940s.
Nail clippers are pretty ubiquitous nowadays. When were they first invented?
It’s actually a bit hard to pin down the first recorded appearance of a nail clipper, since as they’re just small, they don’t appear in most artwork. There are some depictions of women cutting their fingernails or toenails from antiquity, but they’re not with nail clippers. So, the first known patent for a “nail file” is probably US patent 12,338, which was issued in 1833. So the nail clipper is a relatively new invention, although nail files and other nail tools were likely used for quite some time before that.
Nail clippers have been around since the mid-1940s.