Mother Nature helps keep things together

Mother Nature is a great source for invention.  Velcro is one of those inventions stimulated by her and created by the bright Swiss engineer, George de Mestral.

It was Mother Nature who gave de Mestral a hard time, and he then converted that experience into a wonderful invention. In the summer of 1941, de Mestral and his dog went hunting in the Jura Mountains in Switzerland. When they returned home de Mestral discovered that his clothes and the dog’s body were coated with prickly burrs, called cockleburs, a result of walking through the underbrush.

De Mestral pulled off the pods from his pants and from the dog’s fur coat. The way they stuck amazed him. So, what he did was what no one else ever before him had done: He looked at them under a microscope in order to see what they really consisted of.

He was amazed to see that the prickly burrs were covered with many small hooks that functioned like hundreds and thousands of grasping hands. These hooks caught onto whatever they touched and they locked in the contact. De Mestral immediately began to think of other well-known ways of attaching onto things, such as zippers, buttons, laces and buckles.

The more he thought about it, the more excited he became, and he decided to create a name for his device. He thought about “velâ€� which came from the French word, velours, which means velvet, and “croâ€� from the French word crochet, which  means hook. These were the two words that resulted in de Mestral’s naming his device Velcro. And the name has stuck to this day. Generic technology names for these fasteners include “hook and loopâ€� and “burrâ€� and “touchâ€� fasteners.

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Velcro can be made of many things. The first version was made of cotton, which proved to be poor because the cotton deteriorated quickly with the clipping of the hooks. What is interesting to me is that Velcro, made of Teflon loops and polyester hooks with glass backing, has been used for a long time by NASA’s travelers in the space shuttles. Instead of using buttons or laces or zippers to tie their clothes together, Velcro does that for them, and does it much better than other methods and with much  less chance of accidentally opening up. NASA has helped promote the usefulness of Velcro for many years.

This wonderful product took about 10 years of de Mestral’s life to develop. When he started by using cotton, the responses from people who used it were greatly negative. He continued to try different materials for making the hooks and he spent eight years doing this, after which he quit his job as an engineer and set up his own company.

During these eight years, de Mestral finally mechanized the process of successfully weaving the hooks. Then it took another year to create the loop that trimmed the hooks after weaving them.

And thus it took 10 years for him to create a mechanized process that enabled him to construct the ingredients of Velcro. He submitted his first patent application in Switzerland in 1951, and his first patent was granted. That was the real start of the use of Velcro for many projects.

Soon after, he filed patent applications in other European countries and then in the United States. His U.S. patent was issued in 1955. Within a few years, he received patents in Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada. His most active patent was the one filed in the United States.

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Today, Velcro’s headquarters are located in Manchester, N.H., after branching out to the textile center there in 1957. Interestingly, columnist Sylvia Porter wrote about Velcro in her column, “Your Memory’s Worth,� in August 1958. This is what she wrote:

“It is with understandable enthusiasm that I give you today an exclusive report on this news: A ‘zipperless zipper’ has been invented, finally. The new fastening device, which is on my desk as I type this, and which I have been opening and closing for many days, is in many ways potentially  more revolutionary than was the zipper a quarter-century ago.â€�

As happens so often when a new product or new ideas are presented, Velcro was viewed as impractical. It then got its first break when NASA used it to help astronauts maneuver in and out of bulky space suits. Astronauts even used Velcro to store food pouches on walls. Then skiers, who saw a similarity between their costumes and those of the astronauts, began to make use of Velcro. It wasn’t long before makers of children’s clothing came into the picture. To this day, NASA is credited with the invention of Velcro and its multiple uses, even though it was George de Mestral who was the actual inventor.

About 20 years ago, I bought my first pair of shoes that used Velcro for sealing them instead of a cord, buttons or a zipper. They were so easy to put on and to seal, and they just felt wonderful. Since then I have bought a number of additional Velcro shoes and I have thrown out all of my other ones. Those Velcro shoes are what caused me to research the origin and the development of the Velcro process.

Do you want to be an inventor? You can find things that you don’t like or that irritate you, and you can start thinking about how to make changes that will make you feel more comfortable and happy. Try it. You may be surprised with the results.

Sidney X. Shore is a scientist, inventor and educator who lives in Sharon and holds more than 30 U.S. patents.