When I first went to America as an exchange student, I believed ホッチキス was an English word, so when I wanted to use ホッチキス, I asked for “hocchikisu” but nobody understood what I was asking for. Do you know what I was after?
I was after a “stapler”!
There seem to be a few different theories how we Japanese started to call staplers ホッチキス but one of them is that the first stapler sold in Japan in 1903 was made by an American company called “E.H. Hotchkiss” and its name was stumped on the machine. Thus people started to call it ホッチキス.
The word ホッチキス with a small ッ is still used a lot but newspapers call it ホチキス without a small ッ and Japanese Industrial Standards calls it ステープラ.
BTW, “staples” are usually called ホッチキスの針（はり）in Japanese.
