I remember Henry Petroski's The Evolution of Useful Things book from my design school days, and the paper clip on the cover being touted as a more or less perfect product design. The humble clip performed its job well, used a minimum of materials and manufacturing processes, and there was nothing that could be practically added to it to increase its functionality.
Until now, that is. Designer Arman Emami's Clip-it, designed for Verbatim, is a flash drive paper clip that holds two to four gigabytes of data. Meaning Petroski's entire book will now fit handily on a paper clip, at least if it's a Clip-it. Pretty meta.