Velcro. History of invention and production

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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
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Velcro. History of invention and production

The history of technology, technology, objects around us

Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us

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Textile fastener (colloquially Velcro, original name Velcro) is a fastener that operates on the principle of burdock. A kind of fastener, it is a pair of textile tapes, one of which has micro-hooks, the other has micro-loops. When two tapes come into contact, the microhooks and microloops engage, and one tape "sticks" to the other, for which the fastener is called "Velcro". The fastener is widely used in the clothing and footwear industry, and for special products.

Velcro
Velcro

Tearing off the "sticky" burdocks from their clothes, many swear to themselves. And even the proverb "stuck like a burdock" is usually used in a very unflattering sense. Meanwhile, at least one person in the twentieth century, an ordinary burdock brought fame and fortune.

Swiss Georges de Mestral (1907-1990) was a passionate inventor and tourist. Suffice it to say that he received his first patent at the age of 12 - for the design of a toy aircraft. After graduating from college, he became an engineer in a Swiss company. The work left him enough free time for both invention and tourism.

On a clear summer day in 1948, Georges went hunting with his dog, an Irish pointer. After walking through the foothills of the Alps, he found a lot of burdocks "glued" to his pants and to the dog's fur. Habitually freeing the dog from prickly uninvited guests, Georges thought. Efforts to tear off the burdock from the wool led him to the idea of looking at the burdock through a microscope. He saw there a lot of hooks, which, clinging to the loops of threads of clothing and dog hair, firmly fixed the seeds on the "living transport".

Velcro
Burdock seeds on clothes

Intrigued, de Mestral decided to make a clasp based on the same principle. He consulted textile experts in Lyon, the world center of the weaving industry. Most of them were skeptical about his proposal. However, one of the weavers liked the idea, and he manually wove two cotton strips on a small loom (one with hooks, the other with loops), which became the prototype of the modern Velcro fastener. Georges soon discovered that when nylon fabric was stitched with heat, small but strong hooks were formed. Since then, nylon has become the main component of the fastener. It took seven years to bring the invention to perfection, and in 1955 Georges de Mestral received a Swiss patent number 2 717 437 ("Velvet fabric and method of its production").

De Mestral called his invention Velcro (French velour - velvet; crochet - hook). It was also the name of the Swiss company he founded in 1952 and the trademark registered on May 13, 1958. And although in English-speaking countries the fastener is officially called "hook and loops" (hooks and loops) or even just "touch fastener" (fastener "from touch"), and we have "Velcro", the word Velcro has long become a household word.

Author: S.Apresov

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