Who invented VelcroSardonic talk show host David Letterman delighted millions across the
country when he attached himself to a wall of Velcro as part of his late
night antics, inspired by a quirky barroom pastime of tossing midgets onto
similarly constructed walls. Today, Velcro is everywhere, rivaling the
zipper in its ingenuity and the extent to which it has permeated our daily
lives. But it wasn't your Uncle Milton (or Frank, or Harold, or any number
of distant relatives that seek to lay claim to its origins) that invented
this unique little gadget. It was a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral.
Born in June 1907 in Lausanne, Switzerland to working class parents, as a
young boy de Mestral was fond of both the great outdoors and coming up with
new inventions. In fact, at the age of 12, he designed a toy airplane and
received his very first patent for it. By working odd jobs, he paid for his
studies at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, focusing on
engineering. After finishing school he took a job in the machine shop of a
Swiss engineering company, which still left him sufficient leisure time to
pursue his first love of inventing.
In 1948, de Mestral took a two week holiday from work to go game bird
hunting. While out with his Irish pointer in the Jura Mountains, he was
plagued by cockleburs, which stuck relentlessly both to his hunting pants,
and to his dog's fur. It was so difficult to disentangle the tenacious seed
pods that de Mestral was intrigued, and examined them under a microscope. He
noticed that the exterior of each burr was covered with hundreds of tiny
hooks that "grabbed" into loops of thread or fur. Inspired by Nature's
ingenuity, he conceived of a similar man-made fastener based on the design.
He conferred with numerous fabric and cloth experts in Lyon, France-then the
worldwide center for the weaving industry -but most were skeptical that the
idea would work. In his early attempts, the loops were too big for the
hooks, or vice versa. But one weaver shared de Mestral's love of invention
and, working on a small loom by hand, managed to weave two cotton tapes
that, when pressed together, fastened just as strongly as the burrs did.
Eventually de Mestral discovered that nylon, when sewn under infrared light,
formed nearly indestructible hooks, and this eventually replaced cotton as
the primary material.
De Mestral called his invention Velcro, from the French words VELours
(meaning "velvet") and CROchet (meaning "hook") and applied for a patent
with the Swiss government, which was granted in 1955; he received subsequent
patents in Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Italy, Holland, Belgium, France,
Canada and the US. The trademark name Velcro was officially registered on
May 13, 1958. By then, de Mestral had quit his job with the engineering firm
and obtained a $150,000 loan to perfect the concept. He established his own
company, Velcro S.A., in Switzerland to manufacture his new hook and loop
fasteners, which contained 300 hooks and loops per square inch.
Since mass production proved problematic with existing manufacturing
technology, de Mestral designed a special machine to duplicate the hooks and
loops. By the end of the 1950s, textile shuttle looms were able to mass
produce the product. Introduced in 1960, Velcro was not an immediate
success, but it was adopted by the aerospace industry as an aid to getting
in and out of bulky space suits. But then manufacturers of children's
clothing and sports apparel realized the possibilities, and soon the company
was selling over 60 million yards of Velcro per year, making de Mestral a
multimillionaire. He died on February 9,1990, and was inducted into the
National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 1999.
From a purely scientific standpoint, Velcro belongs to a class of materials
called polymers, which contain many chemically bonded units which are
themselves bonded together to form a solid. Traditionally made of out of
nylon, Velcro can be made out of other materials as well, such as plastic,
stainless steel and silver, which provide unique properties, such as flame
retardance and the ability to withstand higher temperatures. Today, Velcro
is used in sneakers, backpacks, jackets, wallets, watchbands, blood pressure
cuffs, and toys like child safe dart boards. It even helped hold a human
heart together during the first artificial heart surgery.
But Velcro is more than just a convenient fastener for consumer goods. It is
also an excellent example of the emerging field of biomimicry, which studies
models and concepts found in Nature, and uses them as inspiration for new
designs and processes to solve very human problems. Sonar is another
example: the technology was inspired by the way whales and dolphins navigate
in water, and how bats employ echolocation by emitting high pitched sounds
to navigate in the dark. Some scientists are studying spider silk, which is
ten times stronger than steel would be at that thickness, in hopes of
imitating those properties. The ultimate goal of biomimicry is to create
products, processes and policies that are well adapted to life on Earth in
the long term.
Who invented Velcro
