How it began
In 1941 the Swiss engineer George de Mestral came back from a hunting trip with burrs from a burdock plant stuck to his trousers and to his dog's coat. He examined them under a microscope and saw thousands of tiny hooks that latched onto the loops of the fabric and the fur. He set out to manufacture a fastener that worked the same way. He filed for a Swiss patent in 1951, which was issued on March 16, 1954, and a United States patent followed in 1955. He named his company Velcro, from the French words velours, velvet, and crochet, hook.
How it works
One strip carries tiny stiff hooks and the other simple loops of fabric. Pressed together, the hooks catch the loops; pulled, they release, and the cycle can be repeated. The hooks have to be firm enough to hold yet flexible enough to let go. De Mestral settled on nylon, which has the durability and shape memory needed. The hook side is woven as loops that are then cut at a precise angle.
How it spread
NASA, looking for a way to keep objects secured to walls in zero gravity, adopted the fastener and relied on it during the space race and the Apollo era, which changed its image. By the mid-1960s it was appearing in clothing, including high fashion, where the French designer Pierre Cardin took it up.
Who pushed back
Clothing makers were used to buttons, zippers and stitching, and many questioned why they should change. De Mestral visited fabric plants across Europe looking for a partner, and many were skeptical. He found the manufacturing expertise he needed in Lyon, France. Early hooks could only be made by hand. As money ran out he withdrew to a cabin in the village of Commugny and solved the cutting problem with a method inspired by barbers' clippers. Nearly twenty years passed between the idea and mass production, and even after reaching the market in the early 1960s the fastener was slow to catch on.
What lasted
De Mestral sold the rights to Velcro Companies and moved on to other ideas, including a successful asparagus peeler. He died in Commugny in 1990. Velcro remains a trademark; the general term for the technology is hook-and-loop fastener. The company says it still draws on the natural world for ideas, as de Mestral did with the burr.
