Bolding and underlining mine. You seem to be contradicting yourself.
At any rate, the stapler has to exist first. The stapler can’t be created out of the act of time travel. The stapler needs to be manufactured, delivered to the store, put on a shelf, and then bought by Tom where he can then time travel with it. He can’t go to the past without the stapler to hand it to his younger self. And the stapler he gets has to be, at least originally, outside of the loop.
Once he gets a stapler all sorts of things can happen. But at the beginning he must get the stapler from someone other than himself.
Another example from The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers:
Past hero is startled by a message left in a book in his own handwriting that is over 2000 years old. After numerous time traveling adventures, he comes across the same book and in a fit of humor, decides to write the same message.
Back to Tom: Future Tom buys the stapler and gives it to Past Tom. Future Tom then goes back to the future and finds out that an even better stapler was just invented or perhaps the loss of that one particular stapler will cause WW4. Future Future Tom goes back in time and steals the older model stapler from himself to prevent it. In the linear theory, we have to consider that there might be multiple versions of the same time traveler acting at the same time.
No, that comment was referring to the original example as stated. I marked where my suppositions started with a transition comment.
I don’t see any paradoxes there
Again, as long as he first gets the stapler from some other source, then afterwords all sorts of things may be possible; Including paradoxes and loops.
Linear time travel theory eliminates all the cool stuff. 
Even a branching theory (e.g. Back to the Future) will eliminate paradoxes. Future Tom goes to the past and gives himself a stapler. Past Tom’s timeline now splits and a new timeline is created. Future Tom’s timeline now continues on by itself in a future where Past Tom never got it. Past Tom w/stapler now goes on a new timeline. He will become Future^2 Tom.
The only way this is possible is to create a paradox theory of time travel where paradoxes are possible, like the one where the Enterprise kept getting destroyed by itself, although in theory, it is still linear. In the show, past versions were able to be aware that they were in a loop and send a message to their past selves in the next loop. There was a bunch of science mumbo jumbo involved with exceptions and new science where this was possible.
What kind of pissed me off about the Back to the Future theory was that they didn’t really branch. They actually changed the future, altering a single timeline, but they explained it as a branch.
Hmm, interesting idea just occurred to me: all time travel theories so far are linear, but the only difference is whether the time traveler can change future events or cannot.
Let’s say Future Tom comes from Timeline A. By giving the stapler to his past self, he creates Timeline B. Does Timeline A still exist? Can Future Tom return to it? Logically, Timeline B has replaced Timeline A, and Timeline A no longer exists, even though Future Tom came from Timeline A. Does that eliminate him? No. The events of Timeline A still occurred, but they no longer exist, like an ancient river that carved out a canyon. Future Tom’s memories and experiences all reflect Timeline A.
Therefore, in Back to the Future, every time Marty returned to an alternate future, there should be 2 Marty’s there, Marty A and Marty B.
The TV show 7 Days (a great show, btw) addressed this by invoking the old “the same matter cannot exist in the same time/place” rule and the hero would simply vanish (along with the time machine) when his time traveling self arrived. But, he should be 7 days older each trip, and thus should age exponentially faster than everybody else.
Back to Tom: By this theory, Future Tom will be forced to become Past Tom, which would also eliminate paradoxes.
I just thought of a couple of things a little bit ago.
First thing, Tom, and only Tom, being involved in giving himself the stapler. If Tom were the one to manufacture the stapler, then sell it to himself, then go back in time and give it to himself, that could work. Kind of like how if person a, we’ll call him Jim, is a fan of author b’s work, we’ll call him John, then Jim goes back in time and finds out that he’s actually John and then writes the books from memory. Yeah, we have a causality problem, but I could see that happening, in a single time-line that is.
Second, thinking about that made me wonder if time travel isn’t possible. If it is, that could explain why we exist. Someone or something goes back in time and sparks the big bang. Yeah, I know, that idea was already explored in the 1983 Doctor Who episode Terminus. But think about it. Instead of the universe either coming from nothing or always existing, maybe our very existence was caused by a paradox.
Tom doesn’t need to buy the stapler or get it from outside the loop - because by the time he sets off from the future to deliver it to his past self, he has already received it in the past, delivered by his future self.
Going back to the OP, I thought of an interesting variation of this idea.
So the first question that arises is… what’s the motivation of the future people to send this information back into the past? If we go with a single-time-stream model, they are basically committing suicide. That is, if Bob sends a bunch of technical information 100 years into the past, that will change the flow of time so completely that whatever circumstances caused Bob’s parents to meet and fall in love will very likely change, and even if Bob (or a person with exactly Bob’s DNA) ends up being born, his life will be so different that the Bob who did the sending in the first place will basically cease to exist.
So here’s a scenario: people develop a way to send things into the past. But it’s very limited… only a fairly small physical size, and it can only be sent back a limited “distance”, and it takes massive amounts of preparation and energy. But because of the issue discussed above, no one really knows what to do with it that accomplishes anything without effectively killing onesself. Meanwhile, a race of evil planet-conquering aliens arrive in spaceships. Their technology is clearly too advanced for Earth to defeat them, but not infinitely so. They begin systematically killing all humans for incomprehensible alien reasons. Let’s say this is in 2050. It’s also clear that these aliens have been on their way to earth for a very long time.
So, the people of 2050, realizing that it’s hopeless, send a (very lengthy) message back to 1950. It contains a summary of this information, and detailed technical information about all relevant technology developed in those 100 years. So in this new timeline, starting in 1950, humanity will get a big headstart on coming up with ways to defeat the aliens, along with the foreknowledge that the aliens are in fact on their way (as the aliens have been travelling for far more than 100 years, so will definitely arrive on schedule). And best of all, when humanity gets to the new 2050, even if the technological boost isn’t enough to defeat the aliens, they can repeat, this time sending back not just a hastily assembled message, but a message they’ve spent decades crafting laying out not just technological advances, but very-well-thought-out instructions on how to most quickly get from 1950 technology up to 2050-version-2-technology and where to keep researching, etc. So humanity gets to try over and over again to defeat the aliens, until they finally succeed. But once they do, the motivation to keep this loop going is gone, because of course everyone who participates in the loop ends up ending their own existence.
Except the last message back in time, which says “we defeated the aliens because you received the following info and acted on it properly. Don’t muck it up!”
That sounds like a really good SF premise.
Who wants to write it?
MaxTheVool do you want to?
I think a short story could be based around it and published if written decently.
His point is that that doesn’t work. Your default state is to not have the stapler. Your default state cannot be having the stapler, or you would already have it, and thus have no reason to give it to yourself. But if you don’t have the stapler, you can’t give it to yourself.
You are completely destroying cause and effect, when all you can do is reverse them. You can’t create something ex nihilo–nothing can be its own cause.
This is actually the point I was trying to make. In a single timeline scenario, if you loop back and affect the starting circumstances, then that will already have happened before the first loop started - there is no sense in which there would be a ‘first time around’, then a ‘second time around’, and so on, because all of those would already have taken place, simultaneously.
In the linear theory, it already happened and failed.
Some problems may result in a large tech jump. Normally it takes some time for a new tech to work it’s way into society, and it may take several steps along the way. In the original time-line you have 100 years of technological progress in the span of 100 years, in the 1st alternate you have 100 in a day.
There is also a educational timeline that needs to be done. Some of this can been seen when primitive cultures come in contact with modern society, many times their old ways are lost and they become so dependent on the modern world because they can’t go back, but many times are struggling at the fringes of the new world.
A aside if you ever have played a game such as Sid Myres Civilization, if you use a cheat code to give you modern tech early on, you usually can’t take advantage of it, struggle to maintain it, and in the end it really doesn’t help without continuous support from other cheats.